Ep. 5. Toxic Friendships, Gothic Horror, and Writing about Mental Illness with B.K. Harbeke

In this Halloween special episode, I am in conversation with Bryanna Harbeke. Her debut modern Gothic thriller, Are You There, Sloane? is about two girls, one living, and one dead, working together to solve a mystery so they can move past their traumas and inhabit their own worlds.

One Halloween night, six friends decide to take a moonlit walk through the woods.

Only five come back.

BookTok influencer Keeks said of this novel that “I had to get up and take breaks because I was actually scared”, and “the twists and turns were absolutely unmatched”. One reviewer said that she “[couldn’t] wait to share it with her mystery book club”, and another reviewer said that she “wanted to cancel wine-nights with my friends to continue reading and figuring out the whole story and everyone’s little secrets”.

We talked about:
🏰 The appeal of dark academia and Gothic horror.
🦇 Processing trauma by writing genre fiction.
🎓 The complexity of higher education and dropping out of graduate programmes. 
🌈 What it means to be your own publicist when you're actually an introvert writer.

Bryanna's ceremonies for writing are:

📚 Having a towering TBR pile to commune with at all times. 
💤 Immersing in a project then taking deep rest. 
⚗️ Alchemizing autobiographical details.
⚰️ Learning about how death is understood in different occult and religious traditions.

B.K. Harbeke was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She has bachelor’s degree from UCLA in German studies, and a master’s in British/American literature from the University of Zurich. She loves Tarot, witchcraft and anything to do with the Occult. She currently lives in Zurich with her husband and ragdoll cat. And yes, she would spend the night in a haunted house.

Find her at https://www.instagram.com/bk.harbeke.writes/ and https://linktr.ee/bkharbeke.writes

Transcript:

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

B.K. Harbeke was born and raised in Los Angeles, CA. She has bachelor’s degree from UCLA in German Studies, and a Master’s in British and American Literature from the University of Zurich. She loves Tarot, witchcraft and anything to do with the Occult. She currently lives in Zurich with her husband and ragdoll cat. And yes, she would spend the night in a haunted house.

This is her first novel.

Laura Joyce:

The first thing that I’d love to ask you this morning is about how long it actually took you to write your first book, if you if you know, and, and a little bit about what that process was like overall.

B.K. Harbeke:

I'd have to think about it. My time frame for like, passing of time, is wonky, especially because I started during quarantine. And so, I think just my idea of time got a little warped during that period. I would, say all in all, from the beginning to finishing the manuscript, probably a year and a half, a couple years.

And it started off as a short story. And it was originally, I don’t know if you remember, called 'The Dinner Party’. Because the short story really centred around this one particular scene of a dinner party with six friends who meet for Halloween and decide to have, you know, a mini-party and then go out for a walk in the evening and something goes wrong.

I took that idea and kind of ran with it and just kept writing. And I actually was just coming out of dropping out of my PhD program and decided that this is what I wanted to focus on. So, I kind of got some clarity, actually, during that first year of quarantine. So, I would say I started writing it 2021. And yeah, just published it in April of this year. So yeah, a bit of a process.

Laura Joyce:

I asked that because I do speak to lots of writers, first-time novelists, first-time authors. And, you know, that time frame can vary so widely. And I think in your case, that's actually quite a short time frame. Some people spend a decade or more on their first book. And I think the thing that's always struck me about you and your writing, and your writing process is how intensively you work and how quickly you transform things. So that makes sense to me that you start with the short story, and then you just go deeper and deeper. And then you can’t stop. And here is a novel.

Of course, it's not as easy as that. Yeah, that makes so much sense to me. And there’s almost a kind of momentum within the process that seemed to emerge, I think, from the time that I’ve worked with you.

B.K. Harbeke:

Yeah, I think it varies from writer to writer. I read a lot about writers and their process and their kind of strategy. And I think, you know, there's the writers who write every day, you know, like Stephen King says he writes three to four pages at least a day. There's the writers who, you know, set aside a time. I read that Ursula Le Guin puts aside like an hour or two every morning, you know, things like that.

And I think for me, for a while, I thought, I’m not a real writer, because I kind of, I do it a bit differently, where I get really into the process. And I write, and I write, and I write, and I write, and I churn out 400 pages, you know, in a very short time span, but then I'll kind of lie dormant for like, a few months before I write anything else.

Because I just kind of, I think I put too much into it. And then there was so much that I just kind of was, I'm a bit empty at the end.

Laura Joyce:

Understandably so. I mean, I think, there’s something so powerful about that, to me, there’s, you know, this is not to say there’s a right or wrong way to do it. I mean, I think that, in some ways, writing advice doesn't actually work, because everyone is so individual.

But there's, you know, if we think about what Stephen King's life is like, versus someone that has multiple jobs, or care responsibilities, or you know, illnesses, or whatever it might be, we can't all be Stephen King. And I think, I think that's a good thing. But I love that, because the way you're describing your process feels very seasonal to me, it feels very cyclical, and kind of in tune with nature, and your body, and what you can do, and then knowing when to rest, and when to recover. So that seems like a really sort of gentle writing process, in some ways, compared to some of that advice.

B.K. Harbeke:

Yeah, I like that. It’s a gentle process. Yeah.

Laura Joyce:

Could you say a little bit more, if you’re happy to, or able to, about why you left the PhD program, and almost how that led into the focus on the novel writing?

B.K. Harbeke:

Um, there was a bunch of different reasons. I finished my master's. And then right away, I didn't really take a break between the master's and the PhD, and just kind of jumped right into the PhD program. And I think that was my first mistake, just not taking any time – like it was literally from one semester to the next. And then I started, you know, working on my thesis, and my dissertation, and it was just, it was way too much.

Especially again, during this time of, you know, COVID, and all the stuff that was going on. I had some issues with my advisor. She is no longer actually at the department anymore, but we kind of, we didn't see eye to eye on my dissertation. She tried to change it to something that she wanted, and didn't really let me have free rein, which is what I thought was kind of the point. And, and then finally, it was just, it really came down to recognising that my mental health wasn't where I needed it to be or where I wanted it to be. I don’t know if it ever will be, but being in this academic environment really exacerbated my mental health issues.

It was getting to a point where I was having panic attacks, and I was just not really able to function anymore. And my husband was like, you need to think about why you’re doing this. You know, are you doing this because you really want this? And you want to go on to be a professor? Or are you doing this because it's expected of you?

I really had to sit down and have a conversation with myself about that. And it’s funny because it was really hard to leave. I've been in academia for a really long time. Both my parents have advanced degrees, so it was really, it was quite expected of me.

When I left, I felt like a huge disappointment and, you know, I was letting everyone down. And what was I doing with my life? And then I was like, you know, I've always wanted to write a book. Now is the time. Um, why not? I don’t really have anything else going on. I wasn't working really that much at the time. Um, and now I didn't have school as an excuse to kind of keep putting it off. And so, I just sat down and, and, and wrote the thing. I mean, it wasn't as easy as that. I'm making it sound like I just typed it out in a day. Obviously there were multiple steps to that.

I really enjoyed seeing that come out in the novel. It deals a bit with mental health and what it means to take care of yourself and the toxicity of academia, and, actually, for the next book, it is going to be set in an academic setting with a dark academia thing going on. I think that universities and the academic setting set a really good atmosphere for things to go wrong. Yeah, that’s the short version of that

Laura Joyce:

Thank you for sharing that I think it can be really difficult to acknowledge when something isn't going to work after you've spent a lot of time, perhaps in some ways your whole life, working towards a point and then to realise, to slowly realise, that these are ideas that other people have for us that maybe are not ideas that have come organically from ourselves I think that can be very painful and liberating at the same time. I too love dark academia stories and think could there be any other? Could there be light academia?

As a reader even if you haven’t been to university, everyone, most likely has been to some form of school or some sort of institutional setting, and in a way the university stands in for all those institutions and all those kinds of places where these things can, as you say, go wrong. So, I think there’s something quite universal about that feeling.

But at the same time, I love the idea of you bringing your specific story to bear on this setting and this genre and this context and working through the trauma in your writing. I mean, I think that's why so many people write is to work through, process, alchemise, these experiences and it’s really interesting to hear you say that you began that in book one and then you're going into it further in book two.

B.K. Harbeke:

As you said it's the catharsis of working through your trauma and I really did try to make this novel personal but also accessible. I think it is very specific to my life to my situation, but I don't think my situation is all that unique in the sense that I think people can relate, you know, to having depression, to having anxiety, to having um body dysmorphia – all those things that are kind of brought up throughout the thing. And of dealing with that or the pressure of school, the pressure of whatever your relationships are. So, as specific and personal as it is, I think it's very easy to identify with what some of the characters are going through in this one.

Laura Joyce:

I think that's really true and um you know maybe we could talk a little bit more about that in the first book, in the book that's out at the moment, and maybe you could say what the title is.

B.K. Harbeke:

The title is Are You There, Sloane? It’s a still trying to like pin down exactly how I’m describing it, it's a Gothic thriller, it's a murder mystery, it's a ghost story, it's a story of friendship, it's a story of working through trauma, um it’s got a little bit of everything, and it's got a touch of horror but I’ve been getting feedback from my friends that it’s not as scary as they thought it was so they're happy about that.

It's really interesting to hear especially the friends I have here in Switzerland where I'm living, um, when they read it they were like, I recognised myself in you know, one of the characters or, I recognised your friend group in all of these characters. I recognised your house, I recognised you, I recognised your parents; like, they could really read into the characters that I described because you write what you know.

So, all of my characters are more or less kind of a hodgepodge of friends of mine with different characteristics. And then Sloane, the titular character who is the one who goes missing on that Halloween night and the story goes from there, finding out what happened to her and where is she.

The other main character, Sadie, is the one who eventually finds out what happened to her, and where she is. Those two are very much versions of me, kind of two separate versions of me. And I really put a lot of myself, a lot of very personal experiences that happened to both of them, happened to me. So, it’s a bit, it's almost autobiographical, to a certain extent.

And writing that was, it was difficult at moments, and I think if you're reading it, you know, you might not realise how personal it is, but it was. I think it also it helped me kind of put a lot of stuff to paper; it helped me kind of work through a lot of things, so I really look at these two characters, Sloane and Sadie, as kind of friends of mine, and that’s kind of nice when you know when you create those characters for yourself.

I was on Instagram the other day and I saw a bookstagrammer posted like a question that said if you could meet any fictional character who would you meet, and I was thinking about it for a long time and then I realised like I’d like to meet my characters, like, I think that would be really interesting. That actually, there's characters out there that that I’ve created who now have like a life of their own, in a way. So, it’s been interesting getting this this feedback from people who know me, from people who know what I've been through and who know my life now. That’s probably been some of the best feedback

Laura Joyce:

That’s really interesting. I think some writers feel quite exposed about being too seen when they write something especially fictional, and you know often writers will I think go through something very autobiographical in fiction rather than memoir for that reason of trying to not be too exposed or not to have to say things too directly and then there can be a nervousness around oh will somebody pick up exactly what I mean here or who this is about.

But it sounds that you almost were the opposite that there's a kind of comfort in knowing that the writing hits where you wanted it to hit, almost, and that people could recognise these things because you described them so well that they were kind of available to your readers in that way. Not to all readers, I mean, to your close friends.

B.K. Harbeke:

Right.

Laura Joyce:

So um, there’s something quite special I think about having that feedback that the writing has worked so well that they actually can see – see what's in there.

B.K. Harbeke:

I was just thinking because as I was talking about earlier how you know I tried to make it also accessible, so as much as my friends were able to kind of read themselves into the story, I would like to think that I also wrote these characters in a way that even if you don't know me or you know nothing about me or my friends or my life, you still see aspects maybe of your friend group in these six characters. Right, these are friends anyone could have.

They're flawed, they’re not always nice; they argue, you know; they get too drunk; they get too weird; they, you know, there’s tension, things like that, But then they also have a really good time; they go traveling together and they, you know, they go to parties together and so I think if you're reading this just a completely random person somewhere who happens to pick up my book you could think oh I've had these friends I've had this friend group.

Laura Joyce:

I think yeah I yeah I think that’s right and I think there’s something there’s a universality to intense friendships, especially when you're younger, you know when you're sort of in that post-adolescence, uh sort of early twenties, or throughout the twenties really, even into early thirties, when there’s still time for people to spend time together when life doesn't kind of get in the way so much that it can actually create very intense friendships. And you describe in your book some of those very intense situations, you know, um, extreme, I would say, in some ways because of the nature of the genre, right?

B.K. Harbeke:

I have not experienced all of these things with my friend group; that would be horrible.

Laura Joyce:

But there is still so much in there that I think is recognisable to many people and I think that's a really good point. I think there is a perennial interest that readers have in friendships, you know, bad friendships, toxic friendships, intense friendships, friendships that cross the line into something else. We're perennially interested in these because we all want to know how to navigate these situations that come up in our own lives, and there’s just a bit of just pure fascination and curiosity there too as well.

So, the things that I've really taken from reading your novel is this thing about the intensity of friendship and the darkness that that can lead to but also the kind of magic and supernatural aspects of the book – which were what drew me to your book right at the beginning. I wondered if you might say a little bit more about those aspects of the novel.

B.K. Harbeke:

I've always been kind of drawn to the more kind of darker side of things, the macabre. I love horror movies, I love horror books, I love ghost stories, things like that, even when I was a kid.

I always wanted to write a thriller or a murder mystery, not really in the sense of a traditional murder mystery, but in the sense that you know there's a crime, something happens, it needs to be solved, and I wanted to mix that in with aspects of the paranormal, aspects of the occult. Just because in my daily life they are a really big theme for me.

I practice tarot. I do readings for friends. I do readings for strangers. I've been really getting into tarot within the last well I don’t know three four years and all sorts of divination so – palm reading tea, leaf reading, things like that. I'm just wildly fascinated with. Witchcraft, things like that and I will read anything about any of that.

It was just really important for me, I think. And you read this in the in the story as well. I started to really get interested in it at a time in my life when I think I needed it the most. I was feeling a bit unmoored, a bit untethered, um, I was feeling a bit homesick even though I had been living in Switzerland for a while. I was going through a lot of different things. My mother got diagnosed with breast cancer, my grandma died, all within like months of each other, so it just kind of like it was just this like bombarding right – like when it rains, it pours.

And I started to kind of turn to the supernatural, to the occult, to things like that as a way of coping with it and just really any sort of spirituality; Buddhism, Daoism, and I don't practice these things necessarily, it was more of reading about death, reading about things like that, that were a bit more comforting than maybe other things. So, when I was writing this novel, I already knew that I wanted to bring in the haunting aspect. I think for me it was Sloane’s character; I don’t want to give too much away as spoilers, she was my favourite character to write just because of the nature of the role that she played throughout the, throughout the narrative, and she was a very comforting character for me, maybe not at all points but overall, for me she was quite a comforting character.

Again, it's a very personal novel, it’s a very personal story, and so bringing in aspects that I am passionate about just included automatically the occult and things like that, and there’s already quite a few thrillers out there that deal with this, you know – Daisy Darker and um a lot of stuff by Catriona Ward, thrillers and things like that but with very heavy supernatural occult themes

I just I had a lot of fun writing it. Also, the next one I'm working on is going to have similar concepts of hauntings and is going to get really into the occult I'm going to actually do like research and like get very technical with it which I’m very excited about. I have a stack next to my bed about this tall full of like things on witchcraft and tarot, and the history of tarot, and all this stuff, and I'm really excited about it.

I think it also lends the book just a kind of a different twist on the whole friend group thing gone wrong trope.

I think it's always fun to read, it never really gets old, but I just wanted a slightly different twist on it and make it a little bit different, and I think by putting in the haunting and the connection with the tarot and divination that's how they find a way to communicate.

It was almost reflecting on how I kind of found it as a way to communicate with myself. I found it as a way of really being able to reflect on things going on in my life and it was a kind of a coping mechanism, I would say.

Laura Joyce:

Thank you so much for sharing that and for sharing how the occult and those forms of spirituality kind of both supported you through those personal difficulties but also became quite integral plot elements of Are You There Sloane?

The idea that the characters are kind of communicating through the tarot, a character who is haunting and a character who is haunted, and it does add a kind of intentionality to that haunting.

So less like a ghost story where everyone is terrified of the ghost or wants to get away from the ghost. That’s not what this story is about. This is a very different kind of haunting

You mentioned thrillers and crime novels that have used these kinds of occult elements recently, and I think that there is a real appetite for that. I think that reflects the general appetite there is, culturally, for alternative forms of spirituality at the moment, as we live through these very difficult and complicated and somewhat dark times. How people are reaching for meaning and understanding, in the chaos, so I think that is something that could be very interesting to many readers.

B.K. Harbeke:

I'd like to ask you a little bit about the process of publication.

So, you've published this book independently, you've gone through that entire process, which is almost a job in itself. And you came to a decision to do that, and I wondered if you could just say a little bit about first of all, the editorial process, and then the publishing process, and what that was like, for anyone who might be thinking about doing something similar themselves.

B.K. Harbeke:

We talked a lot about self-publishing versus traditional publishing and I ultimately decided to go with self-publishing just because I think the market these days are so inundated with new authors and, um, there's just so many books, there's so many authors.

I was reading all these horror stories from people about how it took you years to hear back from a from an agent and then even more time to for the agent to get in touch with a publisher and you know even if they heard back from anyone at all and just how it was this excruciating process and I just ultimately didn't really want to go through with that you know I feel like life's too short to wait for someone to give you permission and so I just thought you know what I'll just do this on my own and for anyone out there who's listening, who's thinking of doing this it's not easy.

I don't regret my decision I still am also with my second book probably going to self-publish. I think this first novel was a really good kind of lesson in not only the writing process itself – because I've changed that for the second novel – but just also for the publishing process. It’s teaching me so much about how much goes into actually doing this, you know, from getting an editor to getting to that final manuscript to then you know designing a cover and doing all this stuff and blah blah blah and I was really lucky I have a very good support system.

My husband's a graphic designer so he designed my cover for me. I know a lot of people don’t have these resources but at the same time I think you know I have so much more autonomy and agency with my book if I want to change something or if I notice something, I can just change it and then re-upload it to the KDP on Amazon and it's done. I don’t have to go through the whole rigmarole of, you know, having a new edition and things like that, so that’s really nice. But, as you said, it’s a job in and of itself and so you are your marketer, like you're your agent, you are your everything um.

I've been kind of, as you said, I think my process is very cyclical and so I've kind of been in like I guess you could call it a winter period, even though it's summer um, but I've been in a winter period where I've been kind of just um, you know – I promote it here and there. I work in a bookstore, so I'm selling it there which helps. I found another very small independent used bookshop and the girl who owns it agreed to also sell my book I'll be doing a reading there. I've done a reading at the shop where I work um so again coincidences of just having these little outlets that really help um but that in itself is not enough and so now I'm getting more into my spring period where I'm like – okay I'm gonna start getting on TikTok I've started making notes about what kinds of videos I want to put out there – you know, getting into the BookTok community and things like that. Trying to post more regularly on Instagram. I've been reaching out to blogs and things like that. I'm going to start sending it to some bookstagrammers that I’m in contact with.

It's a lot of just kind of selling yourself out to people, and I've been in contact with a lot of people who are like I'm really bad at and it can be so cringy to just be like ‘hi, I wrote a book, you want to read it? ‘Like it’s just...

It’s so hard for some people to do, and I'm just not that kind of person. I'm an introvert. I'm a bookworm. I don’t talk to people. So having to really put yourself out there – I think for me – is actually the hardest part.

And also, social media drains me, and I noticed that I just have to be careful with my social media because it does have a very direct effect on my mental health, so I just need to edit how much time and effort I put into that.

So, finding that fine line between not doing anything and doing way too much – having that healthy middle – and so far that's been the most difficult part.

I've been trying to like reach out to other writers – like smaller writers not like big writers – but kind of see what their process was of how you get your stuff out there and some advice that I've gotten that's really good is to send your manuscript to published authors, you know, get that blurb on the cover or get a review or something and get exposure that way.

So, I have ideas. I’ve kind of taken a break after writing it and getting it out there and really pushing it very heavily. In the beginning I kind of exhausted myself a bit so kind of had to take a step back and um rest and now I'm ready again to be like okay you know what let's get it back out there let's get the ball rolling um and it is that momentum right.

It's also the same thing with the writing process, I think once you start getting into that kind of momentum of okay pushing on Instagram, pushing it on TikTok, pushing it on this, sending it to people and just sending it to everyone. And the thing I have to tell myself over and over and over again is the worst thing someone can say is no, right they don't want to read it, they don’t have time, that’s not what they're looking for blah blah blah.

I mean I guess ultimately the worst thing would be if someone said that they hated it, and it was the worst thing they've ever read but I have enough faith in my book that I don't think that’s going to happen.

But you know, you will get rejected. I think just kind of building yourself up for that, because you have to have quite a thick skin as a writer, which is ironic because writers, I think by nature are very emotional and maybe we have to build up the thick skin over time. Very sensitive people, writers.

Overall, I think the hardest part of the process has just honestly been having to be present on social media and push it consistently. yeah,

Laura Joyce:

thank you for giving us that insight into the process. I think it’s so good for people to know beforehand what is involved.

You named so many different creative ideas there and it's going to be different for different people, but what I noticed about what you were saying is maybe they won't all work and you're really prepared for that but some of them will, you know, the more you try the more things are going to work.

And what I really like is your kind of local connections and community connections where you're doing readings in local bookshops. You’re talking to actual people that you know in your community. I think in this age of social media we can forget to do that sometimes. We can forget that community is people around us not just the people online and you know building those deeper relationships is just as important as building the wider network or the wider web that can only be done at scale and online I think.

It sounds like you've worked really hard already and then you've got plans to do even more so I'm really excited to see how this works out for Are You There Sloane?

I just wanted to say thank you so much for this whole conversation, you know, we've gone into so many deep areas – spirituality, mental health, vehicle and leaving academia, what it means to be your own publicist when you’re actually an introvert writer, and there's so much valuable and useful information, and rich material there for other writers who are either working on their first book or thinking about it or in the process of, you know, making decisions like the ones that you've had to make.

Is there any kind of final advice that you would offer to anyone who is in in that position or anything that you’d like to leave people with?

B.K. Harbeke:

If you’re in the process of writing your first one and you’re kind of finishing up, um, really, you know, if you're trying to decide between self-publishing and traditional publishing, really weigh your options.

Ultimately, you could start off self-publishing and if you find it doesn't work then you try to go you know, you can always change it, um, nothing's set in stone. And I think also what’s really important to me is kind of what we talked about at the beginning; to not compare yourself to other writers and I know that’s really easy to say and very difficult to do and I still do it myself but what works for someone might not work for you.

If you find that you’re the writer who needs to sit down and write every single day then by all means do that, but if you also find that you're the writer where there could be months or even a year where you don't write a single page, that's also fine.

But not to push yourself to write just for writing's sake and not to think that if you're doing that then you’re not a real writer, which is what I thought, which is a really heartbreaking thing to think. If you sit down and you write, you're a writer. And um, also, to take your time, don’t rush anything.

Really make sure that it's where you want it to be and find someone, like I did, an editor who can work with you to make it what you want and not try to change it too much or deviate from your you know ultimate goal or your ultimate perception of what you want your work to be.

Laura Joyce:

Oh, thank you. That's really beautiful advice and I think, yeah, just the reminder always that there are no rules to being a writer if you're a writer, you are a writer.

And just to say from my side as well, working as an editor on your project, how much fun I had, how enjoyable it was to work with someone who had a really strong vision and then worked tirelessly towards that, so it's been a real pleasurable experience.