writing
I write cozy mysteries under the pen name Ella Reid. MURDER AND MUGWORT, the first novel in the Moon & Mugwort Apothecary Mystery series, was self-published in October 2025.
The charming coastal town of Baluster Bay, Oregon, is the perfect place for a cozy fall vacation, and the last place you’d be murdered in cold blood.
When intuitive herbalist Kat Callaghan finds a dead body on the floor of Moon & Mugwort Apothecary, she’s determined to protect her new life and business by not getting too involved.
But when a friend is wrongly accused of the murder, she can’t sit idly by while the sheriff and his surfer dude deputy miss the mark. And when a former flame walks out of her past and onto the case, dredging up the life she left behind, she has to work even harder to separate fact from fiction.
Relying on her gut as much as the clues, Kat’s quick-paced investigation is aided by her two closest girlfriends (journalist-turned-chef Nyomi Miller, and artistic sailor Jo Larsen) and her intrepid calico cat, Mr. Wentworth. But with fake identities, family secrets, and financial ruin amongst their neighbors, whom can they actually trust?
short fiction
A horror-leaning speculative fiction piece published on Reedsy.
Two portal guardians are on the run from the creature who may (or may not be) hunting them in a dystopian desert outpost.
A YA speculative fiction piece, written in an accessible Hi-Lo (high intensity, low-readability) format.
Hardscrabble muckers Jade and Jory find themselves inside the walls of Morian, pretending to be AI-implanted Halflings.
Chapter 1
There are a million ways to go about it, but I choose the simplest. The cleanest. I pull in a steady breath, like I’m the most confident eighteen-year-old on the planet. Like I’m not actually sixteen-and-a-half. Like I’ve done this a thousand times and not zero times. The air feels stale and smells like the others are sweating just as much as I am. Jory looks over as I get to work. The instructor watches us from the front of the giant warehouse. There are hundreds of us, standing behind our identical cooking stations. Lined up across the room like an army of soldiers.
Grasping the hilt of the knife, I slice off the stem end, then the blossom end. I set the huge melon upright and start peeling away the tough outer skin with the sharp blade. The sweet, grassy smell hits me like a punch to the face. My mouth waters. I’ve never seen fruit in real life before, let alone a giant watermelon. Fruit doesn’t grow in our neck of the woods, mine and Jory’s. We come from beyond the wall – a landscape of concrete and rust. Where pygmy bots patrol the neighborhoods at night, looking for those out past curfew.
Our being here, in trade school, is a damn miracle. We sneaked over the wall – well, we paid some guy code-named “Benefactor” to sneak us over the wall. Took us three months to save up enough coin to pull it off. Benefactor also gave us fake birth certificates that say we were born within the walls of Morian. Here we now stand, in a giant room alongside actual Morian-born, trying to learn skills that will set us up for life. A better life.
There are no prospects where we’re from. The only “career” options are being a mucker or a pygmy bot mechanic, and both those options suck. And for non-boys? Forget about it. Most of us end up begging on the streets, or praying that some rich Morianian will pluck us off the sidewalk and marry us. No thanks. The second we turned sixteen, Jory and I spent a whole summer mucking – sifting through rubble at the junkyard and hawking whatever decent pieces we could find. Morianians are allowed to pass through the wall whenever they want. They were our most lucrative customers, mainly because they were the most gullible.
“Psst.” It’s Jory. He looks at me with wide eyes, then looks at my station. He’s probably wondering how I’m already done. I wonder, too. But there it is: an entire melon peeled, chopped, and displayed in a crystal bowl on my station. “Damn,” Jory says under his breath.
“Silence,” barks the instructor, who suddenly appears in hologram form at Jory’s side. The hologram is transparent, but it glows with blues and purples, like most holograms do. The real instructor is at the front of the room. There are way too many students for one teacher to watch, so Mr. Sork sends out his holographic self to scold anyone getting off task. It’s a special skill, just one of many skills most Halflings have.
Thirty years ago, someone figured out how to graft AI onto human brain stems, and it worked. “Co-habitation” they called it. At first, it was just supposed to be temporary. It was just supposed to boost production in factories. Labor shortages were everywhere, and one tech-implanted Halfling could do the work of three humans. Then, the technology evolved on its own. Now, it rules the world.
Most Morian-born become Halflings in childhood, implanted at the request of their parents. And most of them end up in trade schools like this. The rich Halfings? They’re programmed for whatever the hell it is rich people do. CEOs, lawyers, politicians who keep the rich richer and the poor poorer. Those who are fully human, like us, don’t last long. We’re either exiled beyond the wall, or worse. So, Jory and I pretend we’re Halflings (which, by the way, isn’t easy.) We have to match the stamina and output of the others, but we have no techy magic tricks up our sleeves. Plus, AI needs feeding, and no one has ever seen us interface with an update or a program.
I side-eye Jory as Mr. Sork’s hologram disappears. My friend is nervous, but he’s already halfway done with his melon. He chose a different method. A messier way. Two minutes later, a high-pitch bell shrieks across the room, signaling lunchtime. A chorus of schwings erupt across the space as we all sheath our knives. Jory finishes his task just in time. His light gray chef’s coat is a pink and red massacre of watermelon juice. He’s having trouble keeping up. It worries me.
Lunch is the two usual options: a bowl of lukewarm porridge or a program cleanse and reboot in the update lab. Since we aren’t actually Halflings, the second option is off the table. Jory and I join a handful of other students in the dimly lit mess hall and face our gloppy meal. Conversation isn’t encouraged.
“That was tough,” says a quiet voice across the table. I look up. It’s Lily, station number 29. She has bright hazel eyes and short-cropped black hair. I wish my hair could be that neat and tidy, but my rat’s nest of waves and curls will never be tamed.
“Sure was,” Jory says. He sounds tired, defeated.
I elbow him in the side. “You’re doing great,” I lie. He shrugs and eats another spoonful of gloop.
“I hear they’re sweeping the rooms tonight,” Lily whispers.
My stomach drops. “Oh?”
“Yeah,” Lily continues, dipping her head. “Hide any contraband.”
It’s the usual warning that comes ahead of room sweeps. Admin are usually looking for illegal programs – updates that give Halflings an unfair advantage over their peers. Or coding for illegal skills, like flame-throwing. Luckily, we don’t have to worry about that.
Though I halfway wish we did.