Every holiday season reminds me that family gatherings exist for two reasons: food, and unintentionally gifting writers enough story material to last until next December (ha). But seriously, if you’re a writer attending a holiday gathering and you aren’t mentally filing material away for your next book, are you even doing the holidays right?  

​The holiday season has a way of heightening everything—joy, nostalgia, tension, longing, unresolved conflict, even the quiet griefs that typically stay tucked beneath the routines of daily life. Whether you’re writing fiction or memoir, December’s sparkle-and-shadow combination offers an irresistible creative entry point into family drama. People are gathering. Traditions return. Old wounds test their bandages. And amid the glow of twinkle lights, characters (including ourselves) often reveal who they are with startling clarity.

Magical realism has long held a shimmering corner of the literary world—a place where wonder slips quietly into the everyday, and where the impossible is treated not as spectacle but as truth. Writers who step into this space discover a genre that invites subtlety, metaphor, cultural resonance, and emotional depth. It’s a space where magic isn’t a disruption but a companion; where characters don’t gasp when miracles occur, because the world has always held more beneath its surface than logic can explain.

Supernatural fiction has always lived at the crossroads of what we know and what we feel. It’s the place where everyday life brushes against the impossible—where ghosts linger at the edges of our grief, where witches navigate both spellcraft and the PTA, where a mysterious stranger at the bar may literally be older than civilization.

It’s a genre packed with possibility, and it shares deep creative DNA with magical realism: both bend the rules of the natural world to illuminate something true about the human experience. Yet supernatural fiction brings a deliciously heightened sense of stakes, power, danger, and transformation—which is why so many readers flock to it when they want drama with emotional punch.

Like many 80s and 90s kids with a flashlight and an overactive imagination, I was obsessed with Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. Those eerie black-and-white illustrations by Stephen Gammell were nightmare fuel in the best way—and Alvin Schwartz’s simple, rhythmic prose made every story feel like something whispered at a slumber party you shouldn’t have attended. What struck me then, even before I understood it, was how those stories worked on both the mind and the body: the suspenseful pauses, the perfect pacing, the way dread coiled tighter with every page until you were both terrified and thrilled. That book taught me early on that fear, when crafted well, isn’t just about what happens—it’s about how it feels. It made me fall in love with horror as an art form, long before I ever thought about writing or editing it myself.