Today we’d like to introduce you to Halo Scot.

Hi Halo, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?

I was born just past midnight under a new moon as an Aries, and I blame all three for my love of darkness and depravity.

If my life were a Hollywood training montage set to dubstep, it would look like the following:

• Infant born almost a month late, not breathing, because she has a toxic relationship with change.

• Baby who holds breath when angry (a theme apparently) till she almost passes out from a destructive ambition that manifests early.

• Kid who feels too much and struggles to fit in, who escapes through story, who writes and reads and watches shows and plays music to process everything.

• Tween who falls in love with sci-fi and wants to become an astronaut.

• Teen who falls in love with the ancient world and wants to become an archaeologist.

• College student who’s supposed to know what she wants when she wants everything and is ravenous for learning.

• Grad student who trips and stumbles into web development because bills refuse to pay themselves (how rude).

• Twenty-something who makes two humans and loses two humans, whose grief and depression push her into writing as therapy.

• Thirty-something who writes dark, horrific, fantastical, and romantic stories, who is still figuring herself out via rage-running, binge-reading, and stress-dancing that repels the neighbors.

I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?

I don’t think any road worth traveling is smooth—or maybe that’s what I tell myself to normalize face-planting over emotional potholes lol. That being said, I am extremely lucky and grateful to have friends and family who are there to peel me from the asphalt whenever I fall down.

Since I’ve been a kid, I’ve struggled with mental health, though I’m leagues better now than I was back then. In recent years, Mother Nature has thought it’d be a grand idea to play domino with trees around my house, also flooding my basement and cackling while the weather goes belly-up with snowfall or Arctic blasts. And finances always feel like juggling a thousand burning knives.

Life often seems like clinging tooth and nail to a sinking ship, getting your chin above water to gasp for air as another wave crashes over you, but I’ve worked really hard to have a more positive—or at least less apocalyptic—outlook lately. Unless it’s Monday. Mondays are made for moping, meme-scrolling, and judging house renovation shows with fervor (load-bearing walls, beware).

Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?

I’m a dark fiction author who hungers to torture characters. My bloodthirsty brain babies aim to emotionally obliterate and psychologically disembowel my readers. I want you to love to hate and hate to love my characters, to savor their pain like a fine hazelnut gelato. Let their agony and anguish melt on your tongue.

My goal as a writer is to make you throw my book across the room. I write to feel, to combat mental numbness and shutdowns, to remind myself what it is to live, and breathe, and be. In order to cope with this so-called “real world” and the perils of adulting, I need to defibrillate my mind, to shock it awake with gruesome possibilities and macabre thrills. So I try to make my audience feel something as well, to sob over character deaths and plot bombs and fictional teeth that take a bite out of their psyche.

As ironic as it sounds, hope is at the heart of all my books. Hope, and love, and found family. My stories are about losing yourself, then finding yourself again. About messing up terribly, and who stands by your side when you do. About beautiful imperfection and ugly truth. Live long enough, and something horrible will happen to you (unfortunately), so I build relatable characters—the broken, the damaged, those who have wandered so far they don’t remember who they are. Then my mind children climb out of the abyss, give rock bottom the finger, and serve their enemies existential fury on a silver platter.

What does success mean to you?

Success for me would be conquering impostor syndrome, burning all my doubts in a bonfire of self-belief, and savoring mental freedom without sabotaging my creativity. I’m not there yet, but I’m trying, one tiny step at a time. If I can write without a shrill inner voice screaming “you’re awful, you’re failing, you made another appalling choice” (my inner voice is a bog witch), then that’s a good day.

There is nothing like the rush of surrendering to creative adrenaline. Writing fulfills me in a way no other pursuit has, and when I get out of my own way, it is my career soul mate. But with creativity also comes uncertainty, anxiety, plus a whole host of neuroses that piggyback on a sensitive, empathetic, easily overstimulated personality—as many creators have. Imagination and insecurity go hand in hand. A mind that spins stories can also spin out of control.

So a steady, grounded, constant self-trust would be success for me. Something I’m working toward, something I’m trying to be gentle with myself about if I don’t achieve. Because success is also about repurposing failure, about persevering when life gets hard and turning weaknesses into strengths.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://haloscot.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/halo_scot/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/authorhaloscot/
• Twitter: https://x.com/halo_scot
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@halo_scot
• Other: https://queerindie.com

Image Credits

Halo Scot