Blog No. 001: On Inspiration

I published my debut novel Sasha the Witch in October 2024 after working on it in one form or another for 13 years. A lot of things changed and a lot of things stayed the same over that time. In this essay I’d like to share the inspiration that went into shaping the novel.

Let’s start with witches.

I always loved witches. I was born in 1989 and grew up in a strong time of witches. The good news for me (as both a writer and reader) is that witches never really go out of style, but they have their high tides and low tides. And the 1990s was a high tide time. Hocus Pocus, Sabrina the Teenage Witch, The Craft, Practical Magic. Maleficent and Ursula too, who were as compelling as their princesses.  

It’s interesting to look back at yourself as a child and think about what you grafted onto. My father was born in the mid 1950s and growing up in the 1960s was an avid Dark Shadows fan. He grew up into an avid Anne Rice fan, an avid Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, an avid True Blood fan, and even saw the Twilight movies in theaters. Vampires are another evergreen magical creature. But more on them another time.

One witch became very important to me.

My sister is two years older than me, and a life-long fantasy reader. She must have first come across Terry Pratchett at the library. Maybe his cacophonous covers caught her eye. However she found the droll British high fantasy writer, she began collecting his books, sharing key lines and favorite insults from his Discworld series. The first Discworld book I read was Equal Rites. I was around ten and struggled through it. I had to stop and start it again several times. But it finally hooked me, and by the end I had a new favorite witch: Esme Weatherwax.

Esme Weatherwax, known as Granny Weatherwax, was a curmudgeonous, deeply talented and intelligent witch. I ate up the stories about her and her fellow witches, primarily Nanny Ogg, but also Magrat and Agnes Nitt (whenever I read a character who has taken on a new name in a desire to take on a new persona, I think of “Young Agnes who calls herself Perdita.”).

I saw in Granny Weatherwax someone who I wanted to be. Talented and intelligent. I also saw parts of myself in her. The grumpiness. Seeking out being alone. I didn’t live by myself at the edge of a village, but I carved out my own spaces growing up. I would slip between the Christmas tree and the corner it stood in with my favorite ornaments and create my own spot to sit throughout December (my mother sent me back to retrieve some of the ornaments I’d secreted away, because the best ornaments couldn’t all be in the back).

I read a lot of fantasy when I was young in addition to Pratchett. But I got away from fantasy reading by middle school and high school. I never fully abandoned it, but it wasn’t taking up the same shelf space.

As a teenager and young adult I came to love literary fiction. I loved the emphasis on character-driven plots and language. How contemplative a story could be. But of course genre is a slippery, nebulous thing.

When I was a senior in college I took a screenwriting course. My initial scripts were more in a literary fiction vein. One night I watched Sofia Coppola’s early short film Lick the Star. I was a fan of Coppola’s movies and found the short film on YouTube. It’s a black-and-white movie about a group of middle school girls. They are fanatically devoted to one another, and the 14 minute story tracks the quick turn of being in or out of the group while the leader of the group plans that they poison boys in their grade, inspired by their obsession with the novel Flowers in the Attic. What really gripped me was the way it captured the fierce closeness of girlhood friendship, and how suddenly it can change. I also found its feel for suburban gothic delicious, as someone who grew up in the suburbs. I had it in mind while I brainstormed ideas.

What exactly shifted me back into the fantasy frame of mind? Let’s bring back the ‘90s witches again. That year I also watched The Craft for the first time, another story about a tight-knit group of female friends, their dedication to one another and how quickly someone can be cast out. This time, that group is a coven of high school witches. I also watched the original Twin Peaks series that year (at the time, it was the only Twin Peaks series), which I found simply transcendent. A dreamy and dark story about a teenage girl that a whole town moved around, wanting to love her, understand her, be her, possess her.

For my script I came up with a story about two best friends, high schoolers in the suburbs named Juliet and Sasha. Juliet was the main character, the eyes of the viewer as her best friend Sasha realized she was a witch. In my short script, Juliet tried to convince her best friend to use her magic to harm another girl at their high school. Sasha resented the idea, and Juliet wanting to use her, and their relationship crumples.

I had fun writing the script, but put it to the side after the screenwriting class was done.  

Two years later, I returned to the characters. But this time it was the witch Sasha that I wanted to make my main character. I started with a couple paragraphs. She was older, in her mid-twenties, and spent a lot of time alone and drunk. It was at a time in my life when I was spending a lot of time alone and drunk. I had moved to a new city for graduate school and hadn’t made friends yet. I thrived when I had friends—it’s no coincidence I was drawn over and over to stories about friendships: the covens in Discworld and The Craft, the group in Lick the Star.

The screenplay took place in a generic suburb, but now I placed it in my hometown in Westchester County, New York. A beautiful wealthy area where someone could rot away in plain sight if they had the money.

I wrote these first paragraphs on a loose leaf paper, and it sat in my binder for months. I occasionally added sentences, but didn’t focus on it as a main project. At the time, I was mainly a short story writer. I signed up for a class on novel writing. My initial project was some sort of romantic dramedy. Every now and then I come up with an idea for a romance, but they don’t usually take root for me. I quickly realized it was not a novel I had enough ideas for to write. The only other idea I had was my lonely drunk witch. I took that beginning and grew it.

I knew Sasha had a new best friend, and she would be a witch too. Courtney. I also knew her mother was a witch, and had been going through a divorce when Sasha and Courtney were first coming into their powers. And Juliet would be there also. That was all the backstory. For the present story, I wanted a new witch. And the witch would be reluctant to be part of a coven.

I made another change that would stick. I always knew the story would take place in our world. In my early versions of Sasha the Witch the world was one where witches were hidden from existence. A Secret World, as the trope goes, and the type of world so many of the ‘90s witch stories I grew up on used. Several years before I read The Witches of Eastwick by John Updike. I was drawn into the New England world of the witches, one where their town knew that witches existed. With this in mind, I shifted my world to an alternate version of our world where witches exist and are known about by the population, an Open World. As I was writing later drafts, I sent Sasha to New England as a nod to the Updike-ian influence (Boston, opposed to Eastwick’s Rhode Island).

I also wanted to expand on Sasha’s drinking. To me that was one of the cores of the story.

Two works shaped how I wanted to handle her drinking. The first was Charming Billy by Alice McDermott. The novel tells the story of the recently deceased Billy and his struggles with alcoholism. The story is about friendship, and family, and the different layers of storytelling that can make up the truth. It was about Billy’s drinking and how his friends felt and reacted to it. Reading it, I had one of those special moments when you’re reading where the truth shines off of a page. I thought to myself, “If I could get Sasha’s drinking, and the way her friends bounce off of it, half as right as this, I’ll be golden.”

The other work was the 2000s television show Battlestar Galactica, a science fiction story of a military spaceship searching for a new world after the majority of humanity is wiped out. It is a highly engaging show and part of the reason why is that we follow the characters not just in their battle scenes but through their personal blunders and situations. I immediately was enamored with the character of Kara Thrace, a brash pilot with a traumatic past who makes messy decisions and struggles with her drinking. It was difficult to watch Kara’s over consumption, she often pushed away her closest friends with the ways she acted when intoxicated, to pull them back in with her charm when she was sober, or slightly less drunk. But the further the journey goes, the more Kara drinks, and the less she charms. There was nothing fun or glamorous about her drinking and I had another moment thinking, “This is it.”  

There are parts of that draft of Sasha the Witch that remain remarkably similar to the present, final version. The main characters, the setting, and parts of the plot.

I put the project to the side again. It had been a very short novel, and the ending and many scenes were roughly drawn.
Several years later, and in another new city where again I struggled to make friends, I returned to my drunk lonely witch. There was so much in that draft that wasn’t working, so I did what I knew how to do, I cut it down to a short story. I cut it down to the bare bones, what I thought was necessary to the story. I thought it was a solid short story and with some editing would be polished and finished.

Then I sent it off to my friend and fellow writer Scott. He read it and told me that there was a lot more to the story, and in fact, that there could be enough to make it into a novel. He also gave me the feedback that he thought the characters were getting what they wanted too quickly. They want a coven, and then they get a coven a few scenes later, he wrote. I saw he was right, but I didn’t think the story would be in getting the new witch to join them, but after, because maybe becoming a coven wouldn’t end up being everything Sasha thought it would be. Maybe the thing that was the most important to her—her friendship with Courtney—would fracture under the weight of the changes. That was where the dramatics were in those stories I loved: when the group ruptured. I had thought I was done with this story and these characters that haunted me. I was of course furious at Scott for several weeks because he said I wasn’t, and I knew he was right. So I set out to build the new story.

I had the witches, I had a coven and the close female friendships. I had the suburban setting. I had the drinking. Then the real work started. I had a novel to write.