Novel Update: December 28, 2025 — POV and Psychological Ambiguity

Dear Reader,

Lately, I’ve been working on Chapter 1. Again. For some reason, it’s the chapter I feel compelled to return to—micro-tweaking here and there until it makes sense enough. I’m writing a book that has revealed itself to be more complicated than I originally imagined.

I want the reader to question the characters and their reality throughout the novel, but to experience that uncertainty in a lyrical, magical, and haunting way. To do this, I rely on a very specific use of point of view, a deliberate instability in reality, and a restrained supernatural tone.

In the book, the supernatural is never confirmed as objectively happening. Instead, it is filtered entirely through Rosemary’s sensory and emotional experience. She encounters something uncanny—but whether it exists outside her perception is left unresolved.

One sentence that forecasts this approach is:

“The sound itself was only a mellow wheeze of glass, water, and wind, but what stirred in her was not. A cold thread of darkness snaked through Rosemary’s chest as she listened to the sounds, stirring lost memories and trauma.”

Excerpt from an unpublished novel. © Susannah Carver.

This is how I’m building the blueprint for a novel that lives somewhere between psychological gothic fiction and a literary ghost story—where what haunts the characters may be memory, place, or something less easily named.

Yours, Susannah