Birth of The Styx

It all started with a single word: psychopomp.

About ten years ago, I was in a writing group talking about wanting to create something that held everything I was processing at the time—personal growth, grief work, the residue of ayahuasca medicine ceremonies, and that strange sense that the veil between our world and the otherworldly is thinner than we like to admit.

We drifted into myth, ancestors, death doulas, liminal space.

And then someone said it: psychopomp.

I’d never heard the word before.

When she explained it—a guide or liaison for the dead—something in me lit up. Immediately. Like a direct download.

There’s a passage in Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic where she describes ideas as living things that move through the world looking for someone willing to carry them. That’s what this felt like. Not like I invented something, but like something found me and decided I was the nearest available writer.

The moment I heard psychopomp, the image of Charon—planted years earlier in a high school mythology class—rose up fully formed. And I just knew I was going to write about his modern-day descendants.

Why Charon? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure.

I think I always remembered the ritual of the coin—the idea that the dead needed payment for passage, that someone had to carry them from one world to the next. I’d love to tell you I’ve always been deeply fascinated by death rites, but that isn’t quite true. What has always fascinated me is the threshold. The in-between place. The crossing.

What happens after we leave one version of ourselves behind, but before we become whatever comes next?

That liminal space has always felt like the perfect metaphor for life to me. We are constantly standing between who we were and who we’re becoming. My partner likes to joke that even when I’m physically present, some part of me is already on to the next thing.

Rude, but not wrong.

So maybe it makes sense that I would be drawn to the ferryman. To the one whose entire existence is built around transition. Charon doesn’t belong fully to the land of the living or the dead. He exists between worlds, carrying others across. He is, quite literally, in the business of transformation.

In the novel, I play with the idea that while most faiths and religions disagree about what happens after death, many share some version of the same belief: that we don’t cross alone. There is a guide, a passage, a bridge, a boat, a hand reaching out from the other side.

That universality appealed to me.

So did the darker question beneath it: what if that sacred role became a punishment? What if ferrying the dead wasn’t just a calling, but a sentence? What if one ancestor’s worst decision became the burden of every generation after him?

That became the foundation of The Styx: a family cursed to ferry the dead because of a mistake made thousands of years before they were born.

And because apparently I cannot leave a perfectly good myth alone, the curse became about more than boats and ghosts and gods behaving badly. It became about inheritance. Addiction. Avoidance. Martyrdom. The roles families hand down so quietly, everyone mistakes them for personality.

The idea arrived in an instant.

The details took years.

The characters and the world didn’t show up fully formed so much as they kept knocking, coming over for tea, and eventually becoming full-time squatters inside my head.

At first, I wrote The Styx as a television pilot, because that was the form I knew best. As an actor and screenwriter, I thought in scenes, dialogue, reversals, cliffhangers. I could see the Everglades at dusk, the boat cutting through black water, the dead sitting quietly in the back, still trying to understand what they’d left unfinished. Dreading whatever might lie ahead.

The pilot gave me a doorway into the world.

But pretty quickly, I realized the story needed the whole house.

The characters needed more room to breathe. They needed room to grieve. To lie to themselves. To make terrible choices for deeply understandable reasons. To inherit damage they didn’t ask for and then decide whether they were going to keep passing it down.

That was when I started to understand that The Styx wasn’t only about ferrying the dead.

It was about what the living refuse to let die.

So I came back to it as a novel.

And then, three months into that version, the pandemic hit.

Suddenly, death was everywhere. Not in an abstract, literary, “let’s explore the veil between worlds” kind of way. It was in the news, in our homes, in our nervous systems. Everyone was trapped inside, watching the world become both smaller and more terrifying by the day.

During that time, not writing the novel no longer felt like an option.

I started moving through the book one chapter at a time, with one foot in the deeply depressing present and the other in this dark, fantastical, otherworldly mythology. Looking back, I can see how strangely perfect the timing was. If the world hadn’t stopped, I probably would have continued prioritizing screenwriting work, client work, and the general treadmill of real life over the novel.

But during the pandemic, the treadmill stopped so quickly it felt like someone yanked the plug out of the wall and we all went flying forward.

Still, there was something about that forced surrender that made space for the book. Writing became my escape, my structure, and, honestly, part of my therapy. Along with Schitt’s Creek, sourdough-adjacent delusions, and several other pandemic-era coping mechanisms I am happy to discuss at length if cornered.

And because everything else felt wildly unmanageable, I gave myself one manageable rule.

Five hundred words a day.

That was it.

I didn’t sit down thinking, “Today I will write a novel,” because that sounds terrible and delusional. I made a contract with myself to write at least 500 words a day.

Some days, that felt like dragging a body through wet cement. Other days, once I got cooking, 500 became 1,000. Then 1,000 became a chapter. Then the chapters became a book.

Coming from acting and screenwriting, I saw the novel as a collection of scenes. That became the way in. I wasn’t trying to conquer the whole thing at once. I was just trying to find the next moment. The next image. The next emotional turn.

The biggest surprise was how much I loved the roominess of prose.

In screenwriting, you’re taught to show, not tell. Which is excellent advice. Also deeply unsatisfying when what you really want to do is crawl inside a character’s psyche and poke around with a flashlight.

In the novel, I could do both. I could still write visually. I could still build scenes the way I would for the screen. But I could also linger inside the characters. I could explore the emotional logic beneath their choices. I could let mythology expand beyond what could fit neatly into a production budget.

And I began to delight in the telling.

When fellow screenwriters confess that they’re nervous to write a novel, I always tell them they’re more prepared than they think. Screenwriters already know how to build scenes. They already understand momentum, conflict, dialogue, image, and reveal. The difference is that now the canvas is bigger.

Much bigger.

You’re not abandoning the visual language. You’re just giving yourself permission to go deeper.

For me, that depth became the heart of The Styx. I loved writing the mythology and the eerie visual world of the Everglades, but the real joy was discovering the psychology underneath it all and following each character into their own version of the inheritance.

Keller, the responsible one, carrying everyone else’s burden until sacrifice starts to look suspiciously like control.

Dax, the runaway, convinced escape and freedom are the same thing.

Delilah, trying to feel powerful by being wanted.

Graham and Marie, trapped in the roles they’ve mistaken for love.

And Charon’s original wound, echoing through all of them.

The fantasy gave me the world.

The family gave me the story.

What I’ve been genuinely surprised and delighted by is the feedback.

Early ARC readers keep describing the book as dark, eerie, and mysterious. And while I definitely intended those elements to be there, I think, in my head, I was writing something a little more quirky and fantastical.

But after years of drafts, edits, rewrites, and obsessive little sentence-level exorcisms, the story seems to have developed a personality of its own.

Which feels right, actually.

This book began with a word that felt like it found me. So maybe it makes sense that the final version became something slightly stranger, darker, and more haunted than the one I thought I was writing.

In the end, even though the book was written during a time when death was staring all of us in the face, I don’t think I was writing about death.

I think I was writing about inheritance—what we carry, what we repeat, and what we finally decide to break.

At its core, The Styx is about a family trying to survive what came before them. And eventually, it asks whether survival is enough, or whether something better is still possible.

While I don’t expect the characters to take up residence in your head the way they did in mine, I do hope you’ll enjoy their visit.

And if they linger a little longer than expected… well, they’ve already convinced me to write another book.