UNDERSTANDING THE NICHE

After playing ring-around-the-rosie with my writing for years—chasing niches, trying to follow the rules everyone swears you’re supposed to follow—I finally stopped spinning long enough to see something that had been right in front of me the whole time.

I’m a thriller and horror writer.

Not because someone told me to be.

Not because it’s trending.

Not because it sells.

But because it has always been there.

I started out writing poetry. The kind that bleeds honesty. The kind that people read and sit with for a moment before speaking. And when I look back now, I realize something that should have been obvious—every poem I wrote carried a shadow. They weren’t lighthearted. They weren’t simple love notes to life.

They were dark.

Then there was my painting. Same thing. When I put color on canvas, the images that come out of me aren’t soft landscapes or peaceful scenes. My paintings carry weight. They hold tension. They tell stories you feel before you even understand them.

Dark again.

Then there’s the music. Every lyric, every idea, every melody I write circles the same emotional gravity—hurt, pain, truth, survival.

So what was I confused about?

Nothing was wrong with me. I just hadn’t recognized my own voice yet.

For a long time, I thought I was doing something wrong because I write across genres. I have seven published books, and they don’t all sit on the same shelf in the bookstore. Some lean toward romance, some toward drama, some toward reflection.

And because of that, I thought I was scattered.

But what I didn’t understand back then was something every creator eventually has to learn: the niche isn’t always the genre. The niche is the soul behind the work.

My stories may travel through different lanes, but the emotional spine has always been the same—tension, mystery, psychological depth, the uncomfortable places where people confront themselves.

That’s thriller.

That’s horror.

Not just monsters and jump scares, but the darkness people carry inside themselves. The secrets. The obsession. The thin line between love and danger.

Once I understood that, everything clicked.

I’m not confused anymore.

I’m not scattered anymore.

I’m a storyteller who writes about the shadows.

And sometimes those shadows show up as poetry.

Sometimes they show up as music.

Sometimes they show up on canvas.

But when they show up in my stories…

they become thrillers.

They become horror.

And now that I see it clearly, I’m not running from it anymore.

I’m leaning all the way into it.