A Hearth in the Hollow: Finding Rest in Cozy Fantasy
For years, my heart belonged to dark fantasy: haunted kingdoms, wounded heroes, stories stitched with shadows and memory. I wrote from the ache, from the places that hurt, searching for meaning—or at least, a kind of beauty in the darkness. But even the most devoted wanderer in dusk needs, eventually, a place to rest. The Hollow and the Hearth was born from that longing. I wrote it when the weight of the world became too much to bear, when grief and exhaustion pressed in from all sides. I didn’t need another tragedy—I needed a cottage at the edge of the woods, a place where magic moved slowly, where the warmth of a fire and the kindness of strangers could be healing in themselves. Cozy fantasy became my emotional refuge. In this story, and in the act of writing it, I found the gentle magic I’d been longing for: not the kind that burns, but the kind that heals. I learned that hope doesn’t always arrive with a shout—sometimes, it’s the quiet light that spills from a window on a ...