Why Middle-Grade Fantasy Still Matters to Me / 8 Dec 2025

There’s something special about writing fantasy for middle-grade readers.

It’s not that the stories have to be simpler. In some ways they have to be clearer, braver, and more honest. Middle-grade readers have excellent instincts for falseness. They will happily follow you into strange worlds, bizarre rules, impossible quests, and life-threatening nonsense — but only if the feelings underneath it all ring true.

That’s what I love about it.

You can have wonder and danger side by side. You can be funny and serious in the same chapter. You can write about fear, loneliness, courage, friendship, and choosing who you want to be, all while someone is running from a monster or opening a door that should absolutely have been left alone.

That balance has mattered to me more than ever this past year.

Working on this book through chemotherapy and inpatient treatment has not magically transformed difficulty into wisdom every single day. Sometimes difficulty is just difficult. Sometimes you are tired, fed up, bored, worried, and not at all in the mood to extract life lessons from the situation.

But stories do help. Writing certainly has.

Returning to this project gave me something constructive to do with uncertainty. It reminded me that progress does not need to be dramatic to be real. Sometimes progress is a finished chapter. Sometimes it is solving a plot problem. Sometimes it is simply deciding not to give up on something you once cared about deeply.

So this book, which began as a story for younger family members and has taken the scenic route into existence, is finally getting close.

A bit late, perhaps. A bit battle-tested. But close.

And honestly, that makes me rather fond of it.