What the Wrongness Is Really About

There's a feeling I've never been able to fully name.

It lives somewhere in the chest. A low, constant hum — something missing, something not quite right, something that doesn't hurt exactly but never fully goes away either. It's not sadness. It's not anxiety, though it can look like that from the outside. It's more like… the sense that something is slightly out of place in the world. That things aren't the way they're supposed to be. That somewhere, something is broken, and you can feel it even if you can't see it.

I've felt it for as long as I can remember.

So I gave it to Nova.

In Echo's Song, I call it the wrongness. That's what Nova calls it — the only word she has for a feeling she's carried her whole life and never told anyone about. Not even her twin sister. Especially not her twin sister, who always seemed so certain, so whole, so untouched by the quiet hum that lived in Nova's chest like a splinter buried too deep to reach.

Nova believes the wrongness is hers alone. A private defect. Quiet proof that something in her doesn't work the way it's supposed to.

She doesn't know yet that it's trying to tell her something.

That's the thing about feelings we can't name. We assume they mean something is wrong with us — that we're broken, or too sensitive, or carrying something nobody else would understand. We keep them private. We learn to work around them. We get very good at giving nothing away.

What we don't consider is that the feeling might be pointing at something real. That it might be less like a defect and more like a compass. That it might have been trying to tell us something all along, and we just didn't have the language for it yet.

Nova spends years running from what the wrongness is pointing toward. Running from the truth of it, from the thing it keeps orienting toward no matter how hard she tries to look away.

I understood that completely.

I spent a long time feeling like the wrongness — my version of it — was proof of something shameful. That other people didn't feel it, and the fact that I did meant something was off about me. That I should fix it, or hide it, or at least not talk about it.

It took a long time to understand that carrying something unnamed doesn't mean you're broken.

Sometimes it means you're paying attention.

Sometimes it means you're feeling something real that the world just hasn't given you words for yet.

I wrote the wrongness because I wanted readers who recognized that feeling — who've carried their own version of something unnamed — to see it treated as real. As significant. As something worth paying attention to rather than pushing down.

Not a defect. Not a flaw.

A compass.

Whatever your wrongness is pointing toward — I hope you stop running from it.

I hope you find out what it's been trying to tell you.

Echo's Song: The Dragon Curse Saga Book One releases October 24th, 2026. Pre-order is available now.