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I’ve been putting off writing this first post for a while now, which is funny, because I write every day. I just apparently find it easier to write fictional people’s feelings than my own.

So. Hello. I’m Maren.

I live in Tacoma, Washington, with my husband and our dog Penny Lane, who is currently asleep on my feet and completely unbothered by the fact that I’m trying to launch an author website. I’ve been writing for as long as I can remember, but this is the first time I’ve done something like this, put myself out here, said out loud that I’m a writer working on a book I want people to read.

The book is called Opera Alley.

It’s set right here in Tacoma, in the Theatre District, a neighborhood of old brick buildings and narrow side streets and independent coffee shops where the barista knows your order before you open your mouth. I’ve spent a lot of time in this part of the city and I wanted to write something that felt true to it, not a postcard version of the Pacific Northwest but the real thing, gray January light and wet pavement and the specific quiet of a city that doesn’t need to perform for anyone.

The story follows two people: Evie, a scenic artist who arrived in Tacoma fourteen months ago with a new name and almost nothing else, and Declan, who moves into the apartment below hers on the same afternoon a letter arrives that tells her the careful invisible life she’s built is about to come apart. They’re both people who’ve learned, for different reasons, that the safest thing to do is keep their distance from everyone. The book is about what happens when that stops working.

It’s a slow-burn romance with a suspense backbone, and it’s the book I most needed to write.

I’m currently working on getting it published, which is its own long and humbling process, and I’ll write about that here too, the submissions, the waiting, the whole of it. I figure if I’m going to do this in public I might as well do it honestly.

If you want to follow along, you can subscribe via the contact page, or just check back here. I’ll be posting about the writing process, about Tacoma, about the book, and about whatever else feels worth saying.

Thanks for being here at the beginning.

Maren

Or at least, this is how I imagine it at night, after the Lyric has gone dark and the last of the audience has filtered out onto Broadway and the alley has gone quiet again. Grounds for Coffee still glowing on the corner. The wet pavement catching the light from the string lights overhead. The kind of street that feels like it’s keeping a secret.

I used an AI image generator to bring this to life, because Opera Alley as it exists in the novel is a composite, a feeling as much as a place, built from the Theatre District I know and the story I needed to tell. This image came closer than I expected to what lives in my head when I write Evie standing at her window, or Declan coming in from his morning run, or the two of them walking back along the alley in the April light.

This is the street they live on. I hope you can feel why I keep going back to it.

Every book starts somewhere. For Opera Alley, it starts with a sound.

A mail slot opening. An envelope on the floor. A name that belongs to someone the woman upstairs has been trying very hard to stop being.

I wrote the opening of this book probably forty times before it became what it is now. I knew from the beginning that I wanted to drop the reader directly into Evie’s world without preamble, no backstory, no setup, just the specific texture of a Monday afternoon in January in Tacoma and the moment everything she’s built starts to come undone. Getting that balance right, present and immediate without being confusing, took a long time.

What I kept coming back to was this: Evie is someone who has learned to read her environment the way other people read faces. Every sound in her building is catalogued. Every person she passes gets a quiet threat assessment. She has been living this way for fourteen months and she has almost convinced herself it’s normal. The opening needed to put the reader inside that hypervigilance before they understood why it existed.

Here’s where the book begins:

The mail slot flicked open at the foot of the stairs, the dull click of metal, the faint friction of envelope against wood as it landed. Evie heard it the way she heard everything in this building, every sound indexed and memorized before the first rent check cleared.

She went down the stairs barefoot, one hand trailing the rail.

The envelope sat on the entryway floor. Standard issue, white, cheap, a little battered at the corner. The kind you bought in a pack of fifty, not the kind you used for things that mattered. She bent to pick it up and saw her name on the front, block letters ruled carefully, each one standing alone:

EMILY NASH

Her breath stuttered. She had not been Emily Nash in fourteen months.

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The rest of chapter one is available to read free when you sign up on the contact page. If Evie’s Monday afternoon sounds like somewhere you want to spend some time, I’d love to have you along for the rest of it.

Maren