Miranda Levi

I don’t think I realized how badly I needed to leave until I was already gone.

There’s something strange about vacation as an adult. You plan it, pay for it, pack for it, worry about it, overthink it, and by the time you finally get yourself onto the ship, you’re almost too tired to remember that rest was the point. But somewhere between Seattle and Alaska, somewhere between the gray water and the wide sky, my body finally started to understand that no one needed me to do anything for a few days except look around.

And there was so much to look at.

I went on an eight-day MSC cruise to Alaska with my mom, my best friend, and my husband, which already sounds like the beginning of either a heartwarming memoir or a locked-room murder mystery. Fortunately, ours leaned more toward the heartwarming memoir, though admittedly I did my best to add dramatic tension by face-planting in Ketchikan.

Because apparently I cannot simply visit Alaska. I have to personally greet the sidewalk.

Ketchikan was beautiful, even after I introduced myself to the ground with my whole body. Rainy, green, coastal, wood-planked, and full of that particular Alaskan atmosphere that makes everything feel like it has been carved out of mist, salt, and old stories. I was bruised from head to toe afterward, which made the rest of the trip a little harder than planned, but not less beautiful. If anything, it made the beauty feel a little sharper. I was sore, slow, and moving carefully, but still there. Still watching. Still laughing. Still making memories.

That is probably the truest summary of the trip: bruised, but grateful.

The glacier was my favorite part.

I don’t know if there’s a way to explain what it feels like to stand on a ship deck and watch a glacier calve. It isn’t just that the ice breaks. It’s that the whole world seems to pause before it happens. There’s this impossible blue, this ancient cold, this wall of something older than your problems and bigger than your imagination. Then a piece gives way, and the sound moves through you before you can name it.

It feels like thunder. It feels like a door opening. It feels like the earth reminding you that it is alive and enormous and entirely uninterested in your inbox.

I loved the whales too. Of course I did. Orcas, gray whales, minke whales, sea lions, and all the other bright, strange creatures that surfaced and vanished as if the water had dreams of its own. There is nothing casual about seeing an orca in the wild. Nothing ordinary about watching a back rise from the water and disappear again. You can be standing with hundreds of people on a ship, cameras out, everyone whispering and pointing, and somehow the moment still feels private. Like the ocean has shown you something it did not have to share with you.

Sea days had their own quieter kind of magic.

We played cards. We read books. We sat near windows and let the water pass by. We ate. We talked. We drifted through the ship in that soft, unstructured way that only happens when time loosens its grip. No one was asking me about edits. No one was waiting for a chapter. No one needed a cover fixed, a launch planned, a problem solved, a schedule rearranged, or a decision made.

For a few days, the whole job was to be there.

I think we all needed it more than we realized.

My mom needed it. My best friend needed it. My husband needed it. I needed it. We needed the stupid card games and the endless water. We needed the cold air on deck and the meals we didn’t have to cook. We needed the kind of laughter that comes from exhaustion finally draining out of the body. We needed to remember that life is bigger than the work, even when the work is good work, beloved work, the kind of work you chose.

And naturally, because I am still me, I came home with at least three book ideas involving cruise ships.

There’s something inherently delicious about a cruise ship as a setting. It’s isolated but crowded. Glamorous but claustrophobic. Everyone is trapped together, but politely, with buffets. There are decks and corridors and locked doors and people pretending to be relaxed while carrying entire secret lives in their luggage. Add fog, ocean, a missing passenger, maybe a monster beneath the hull, and honestly, the books start writing themselves.

Maybe one day you’ll get to read the resulting novel.

For now, I came home to another book entirely.

After some much-needed time away from edits, I’m back to work on the draft of my new novel, The House of Wendys. I’ve always had a soft spot for Peter Pan, which is funny, because apparently my love language as an author is taking beloved childhood stories and asking, “But what if this was much, much worse?”

This one is a dark romantasy horror novel, set inside the larger world of The Fountain of Youth, but written to stand on its own. It’s my horror-soaked answer to a few questions that would not leave me alone: Where do vampires come from? What if Peter Pan was essentially Bluebeard? What if his charm was ancient, his hunger was monstrous, and his memory was full of holes? What happens when the boy who never grew up also never fully remembers what he has done?

It has body horror, forbidden magic, lost girls, rotting wings, a house full of secrets, and a version of Neverland that is less childhood dream and more beautiful nightmare. It’s romantic, but dark. Familiar, but wrong in the way fairy tales are always wrong when you look too closely. The kind of story where every locked door has teeth.

So, yes. Alaska gave me rest, bruises, whales, glacier thunder, and apparently more ghosts for the creative pile.

As for what I’ve been reading lately, the list has been a little unhinged in the best way.

I finally read Credence by Penelope Douglas, and yes, it is as good as the hype. I understand. I get it. I have joined the group chat.

I also read Praise by Sara Cate and, respectfully, fans self. So hot. So very, very hot.

I finally got around to reading Psycho by Robert Bloch, which is wild because it’s one of my favorite movies and somehow I had never read the source material. There’s something fascinating about going backward into a story you already know through film and finding the bones underneath it.

And did anyone else absolutely devour A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman as fast as I did? I never want this series to end. I’ve been reading Dungeon Crawler Carl for a few years now, on the recommendation of a mutual friend of Dinniman’s, and he was right. It was only a matter of time before this series popped off and pulled in a massive crowd of readers.

So flipping good.

That’s the strange gift of coming home from a trip like this. You return to the same life, but not quite the same self. The laundry is still there. The deadlines are still there. The bruises, in my case, are very much still there. But some part of me is still standing in front of that glacier, listening to the ice break open.

Some part of me is still watching whales move through dark water.

Some part of me remembered that I am allowed to rest, allowed to wonder, allowed to leave the desk and come back with new stories.

And that, maybe, is its own kind of magic.