Where "The Interval" Came From

The story started as a single image: a woman standing in a hallway at 3am, certain she had heard her name. I didn't know who she was yet. I just knew she wasn't going to go back to sleep.

That image sat in a notebook for almost a year before I touched it. I had other things I was supposed to be working on. But she kept appearing — not in dreams, exactly, but in that half-state before sleep where the mind does its loosest, most honest thinking. Standing in the hallway. Listening.

Eventually I wrote toward her to find out what she was listening for.

The question the story is actually asking

"The Interval" is not really about what's in the hallway. It's about the moment between hearing something and deciding what to do about it — that suspended second where you are still safe because you haven't confirmed anything yet. The interval. The gap.

I'm interested in the psychology of that moment. Most of us, when we hear something in the night, run through a rapid internal negotiation: it was the house settling, it was the cat, it was a dream. We talk ourselves back to safety. We choose the explanation that lets us go back to sleep.

My character can't do that. She has lost the ability to choose the comfortable explanation. And once you lose that — once you can no longer talk yourself down — the interval stretches. It becomes the whole night. Then the whole week.

"She wasn't afraid of what was in the hallway. She was afraid of what it meant that she had stopped being afraid."

The story is available exclusively to subscribers — if you're on the list, you already have it. If you're not, you can subscribe below and it will come to you immediately. No delay, no waiting list. Just the story.

I hope it keeps you up. That's the only metric I care about.