Writing the Unwritable

Dark Fantasy Beyond the Boundaries

Nov 04, 2025

Most books are safe

Mine isn’t.

I didn’t write Hearts of Ice and Flame to comfort anyone—including myself.

I began thinking I was writing dark fantasy. Halfway through, I realized I was writing something else: a story that disturbed me. There was a scene I had to come back to again and again, not because I lacked words, but because the words I found made me recoil. I sat still for a long time, thinking, this crosses a line. Then another thought followed: whose line, and why is it there?

I kept writing.

The Problem with Safe Fantasy

Fantasy today often mistakes polish for daring. Everything dangerous is made digestible. “Dark romance” usually means a possessive love interest. “Morally grey” means the hero has attitude. Violence is theatrical, sex is polite, and anything truly unsettling is softened by disclaimers.

Comfort fiction has its place. But when even our supposed transgression arrives with guardrails, we stop testing what power, cruelty, or desire actually mean. Safe darkness is still safe.

What Transgression Demands

Transgression isn’t provocation. Anyone can write something grotesque and call it brave.
True transgression comes from curiosity that refuses to look away—from power that corrodes, from hunger that confuses pleasure and fear.

In Hearts of Ice and Flame, I wrote a steward whose body is both weapon and inheritance. Her tongue carries divinity, desire, and horror in the same gesture. The scene that disturbed me most isn’t explicit because of anatomy—it’s explicit because of consent. The human woman knows what waits for her and still steps forward. She commands what should consume her. It’s not safe, but it’s honest.

That honesty is the point. I rewrote until the scene no longer exploited pain but revealed agency inside it. Discomfort was the cost of truth.

Lines and Discipline

I gave myself rules: no minors, no incest, no pornography.
Not to protect readers, but to protect intent.

Each disturbing moment had to justify itself. If the reason was shock, I cut it. If it revealed power, survival, or hunger, I kept it.
The moment you start self-censoring for acceptability rather than truth, you’ve already lost. You’re writing for an imaginary moral arbiter instead of following the characters where they need to go.

The Cost of Refusing Safety

Beta readers told me to tone it down. Friends asked if I was okay. Publishers passed. They weren’t wrong—the book doesn’t fit anywhere. It’s too sexual for fantasy, too violent for romance, too psychological for erotica.

Writing it meant confronting what I feared in myself: the part that wants control and the part that wants surrender. That tension drives the book. It’s also what makes it dangerous.

Why Discomfort Matters

Fiction is where we test what can’t be tested in life.
Discomfort is evidence that something real is happening—that the story has reached past entertainment into recognition.

Hearts of Ice and Flame is about power, hunger, and the blurred line between survival and desire. It’s feminist and anti-feminist, tender and cruel, contradictory because people are.

Most books are safe. This one isn’t.
It was never meant to be.

Closing: What I’ve Built

I’ve written four hundred thousand words across two books — so far — that no traditional publisher would touch.
Because they refuse to take risks.

They are explicit, violent, and psychologically complex. They blur pleasure and horror, love and domination, hunger and survival. They ask readers to feel what they’d rather only observe.

That’s the point.
If art no longer risks disgust or desire, it stops being art.

Some readers will close the book. Others will keep reading.
Either way, the dark will have done its job.

Content Warning: Hearts of Ice and Flame contains explicit sexual content, graphic violence, body horror, complex power dynamics, and themes of systematic oppression. It is intended for mature readers (18+) who want dark fantasy that doesn’t pull its punches.