July 2, 2026
A welcome to everyone, whether you came for a bumpy pumpkin or a buried secret
This one is a letter, written to you, whoever you are and however you found me. Maybe you came for Scout the goat. Maybe a friend handed your child The Bumpy Pumpkin. Maybe you picked up Blackwater Parish in a single tense weekend and only later wondered who wrote it. However you arrived, I am glad you are here, and I want to welcome you properly. I do not get to do that often enough, so today is just for that.
If You Came for the Children's Books
If you know me through The Bumpy Pumpkin, the Goat on the Go series, or In the Wide, Wild World, then you know the gentle side of my work. You have read to a child about belonging, about resilience, about families of every shape held together by love. Thank you for letting my words be part of your bedtimes and your classrooms.
You may have noticed I also write much darker stories now, and I understand if that surprised you. I promise the person who wrote about a pumpkin learning it was perfectly itself is the same person writing about women reclaiming their voices. The care underneath has not changed.
If You Came for the Thriller
If you found me through Blackwater Parish, welcome from the other direction. You met me first in suffocating Louisiana heat, with a woman waking to a life that no longer made sense. You sat in the slow burn with Catherine and stayed with her through the dark.
You might be startled to learn I also write rhyming picture books for small children. I hope it makes a strange kind of sense once you know me a little. The same eye that watches a character be quietly controlled is the eye that wants every child to feel seen and safe. Different readers. Same heart.
Why I Write in More Than One World
I am a nurse. For years I have moved between tenderness and gravity in a single shift, comforting one person and sitting with another through something heavy. That range never felt like a contradiction. It felt like being fully present to whoever was in front of me.
My writing works the same way. Some truths arrive best as a soft story for a four year old. Others arrive best as a thriller that refuses to look away. I write across worlds because I contain more than one, and so, I suspect, do you.
What Connects Everything
If you read enough of my work, you will notice the same threads everywhere. Belonging. Resilience. The courage to be fully yourself when the world prefers you smaller. A goat learns it on a rainy day. A woman fights for it against people who would erase her. The stakes change. The longing underneath does not.
You do not have to love every kind of book I write. Most readers will prefer one world over the other, and that is completely fine. You are welcome here either way.
An Invitation, Not a Requirement
I will never ask you to follow me into a genre that is not for you. If picture books are your home, stay there happily. If southern gothic suspense is what you crave, I will keep writing it. But if you are ever curious about the other side of what I make, the door is open, with no pressure attached.
On the Books That Become Yours
Something happens when a story takes up residence in a person's life. A picture book becomes the one a child requests every single night. A thriller becomes the book a reader presses into a friend's hands, insisting they have to read it. The story stops belonging only to me and starts belonging to you too. That is the highest honor my work can receive.
Whether the book that became yours has a goat on the cover or a bayou, I am grateful it found a home with you. The form never mattered as much as the connection. That has been true from the very first thing I wrote.
Thank You for Being Here
Whatever brought you, you are part of this now. One reader at a time, across children's books and thrillers and whatever comes next, a community has formed that I never expected and deeply treasure.
Thank you for trusting me with your bedtimes or your late nights, your children or your own racing heart. Thank you for finding me, through whichever door you came. I am so glad you are here, and I am not going anywhere.
With gratitude,
Natalie.
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