CaitlinDBurnside

My Dearest Readers, I am writing to you today with a heart full of nervous excitement and a mind buzzing with the whispers of ancient oaks and bygone paths. You see, I’ve made a decision — one that feels both monumental and utterly necessary. I am rewriting The Oakwood Chronicles. It began as a simple reread, a nostalgic journey back to the story I first built from ink and imagination. Yet as I walked those familiar sites alongside Cassandra and Callen once more, I heard it: the quiet, persistent hum of a story not yet fully told. The foundations were strong, the heart was true, but the roots… the roots wanted to dig deeper. The canopy wanted to spread wider. Therefore, I have taken a step back into the grove. The series you know, those four volumes that held our adventures, will be lovingly unbound and rewoven. From four books, the chronicle will expand to eight. This is not merely a splitting of pages, but an expansion of soul. It is a chance to linger in the glens we raced past, to ...

My pen names are "Caitlin D Burnside" and "Aspen Winters". I am a Storyteller. That is the title I claim, the mantle I wear with more pride than any other. “Novelist” feels too formal, too bound by the rules of a craft that, in my view, has forgotten its first and most sacred purpose: to tell a good tale. My process is simple. A subject finds me — a whisper of a theme, a ghost of an idea. It might be the weight of a forgotten oath or the chill of a shadow in a stone corridor. Then, I decide for whom I shall spin this yarn. The audience shapes the voice, you see. A story for the weary soul requires a different cadence than one for the curious mind. My “Creative Writing” education was not found in modern manuals that dissect plot structure like a surgeon. It was learned in the telling itself. It was in the patient drawing of a character, in tracing the intricate web of how they love, betray, and endure one another. The style? It was the rhythm of the paragraph, the de...