LaRae Pynas
Writer · FL · United States
Writer of mysteries, dark tales, poetry, and strange little worlds, forever chasing the sentence that makes a story breathe.
English
My writing journey
I have always been drawn to the places where stories become a little darker, stranger, quieter, or more human.
I write across genres because I have never been interested in staying inside one creative box. Mystery, psychological suspense, gothic fiction, fantasy, historical stories, poetry, and short fiction all give me something different to explore. Sometimes I want to build a puzzle and hide the answer in plain sight. Sometimes I want to create a world with its own rules and history. Sometimes I want to follow one unsettling idea until it becomes a story. And sometimes a few lines of poetry can say what an entire chapter cannot.
What connects all of my writing is atmosphere, character, and curiosity. I love stories with secrets beneath the surface, complicated people making difficult choices, settings that feel alive, and details that reward a reader for paying attention. I am fascinated by the moment when an ordinary place, object, memory, or decision suddenly becomes the doorway to something larger.
I am still building my life as a writer, and I take that seriously. I study craft, experiment, revise, research, outline, abandon things, return to them, and occasionally discover that a character has completely ignored the plan I made for them. I am learning to value all of those stages instead of treating only a finished manuscript as proof that I am writing.
Some days I can disappear into a project for hours. Other days the victory is a paragraph, a repaired scene, a new idea scribbled down before it disappears, or simply reopening a document I have avoided. I have learned that a writing life is made from both kinds of days.
I am especially interested in creating work that feels original rather than familiar for familiarity's sake. I want my stories to have their own fingerprints. That means asking more questions, researching deeper, challenging the first idea, and being willing to rebuild something when the easy answer is not the most interesting one.
Community matters to me for the same reason. Writing may happen alone, but writers do not have to build their entire creative lives alone. I created Inkbound Writer's Club as a place where writers at different stages can share progress, ask questions, brainstorm, workshop their work, celebrate victories, and have somewhere to go when the page stops cooperating.
I do not believe there is one correct way to be a writer. Some people outline every beat. Some discover the story sentence by sentence. Some want traditional publication, some want to publish independently, and some simply want to create something that did not exist before they sat down to write it. All of those paths are real.
My own path is still being written.
There are manuscripts to finish, stories I have not discovered yet, poems waiting somewhere in the noise, and probably more research rabbit holes than any reasonable person needs.
That is the part I love.
There is always another page.
Published writing
Coda in Firelight
We watch the piano burn
in a field that used to be
a place for summer things—
picnics, bad kisses,
half-finished songs.
Now the night is a black stage,
and the flames do all the playing.
They climb the cracked varnish,
lick the yellowed keys,
turn every chord we never learned
into smoke.
Hammers fall one by one,
small collapses in the heart of it,
like apologies we meant to make
and never did.
The strings snap, bright and bitter,
a last ragged music
only the fire can read.
I think of the way
your hands used to move here—
hesitant, hopeful,
searching for a melody
big enough to hold us both.
We never found it.
Instead we found endings:
first in your eyes,
then in your voice,
and finally in this idea
to set the whole instrument alight,
as if we could burn
our unfinished song.
Embers drop like spent notes
into the dark grass.
The heat on our faces fades
to a thin, remembering warmth.
Soon there will be only a carcass
of warped metal and ash,
a hollow where the sound once lived.
When the last flame gutters out,
the night does not applaud.
It simply takes the silence back,
tucks it around what’s left of us,
and waits to see
what we will do now
with these empty, cooling hands.
Small Doors in Cassadaga
The forest is quiet the way a room becomes quiet
when someone says, Tell me the truth
and the air decides whether to behave.
On a fallen log, the world shrinks itself politely,
turns bark into boulevard,
turns moss into an address you can kneel beside.
Two houses sit like thoughts you almost remember,
one with a steep green cap and a round window
that could be an eye
or a coin slot for prayers.
The other wears a roof the color of old lichen and gold,
a scalloped rim of white stones,
flowers placed near the door
as if beauty is a password.
And there, to the left,
a small face grinning from the undergrowth,
holding up a sign that reads WELCOME
like the woods are hosting something.
Cassadaga does that.
It makes hospitality out of mystery,
a place founded on the idea
that love doesn’t end
just because bodies do.
Not far from here the Camp learned to build permanence,
a community drafted in paperwork and belief,
a town where a temple keeps its calendar
like a lantern keeps its flame.
People come carrying grief like a closed umbrella.
People come carrying curiosity
like a flashlight with fresh batteries.
Some arrive with faith.
Some arrive with a practiced squint.
Some arrive with both,
and that is the most human luggage of all.
In Cassadaga, even skepticism is allowed a chair.
It can sit in the back row, arms folded,
and still hear the hymns.
The messages, when they come,
are never delivered with thunder.
They arrive the way this moss arrives,
slow and soft,
a green insistence on what can grow over what fell.
Still, the ground remembers the heavy parts.
Not every story here is candlelit comfort.
Some are written in police ink,
names kept in files,
a house that went quiet too suddenly,
a year that won’t stop echoing.
Some are written in absence,
a mother-shaped gap in the timeline,
a child found where the woods
pretend not to know anything.
Cassadaga holds those truths, too,
not as spectacle,
but as weight.
And because people are people,
there are those who sell the ache back to you,
who lean into your sorrow like a cash register,
who say your fear has a price tag
and your relief costs extra.
So the town learns boundaries the hard way.
Ethics become more than a word on a brochure.
Belief becomes something you practice
with your eyes open.
That’s what these tiny houses feel like,
not just fairy charm,
but a lesson in scale.
A reminder that the unseen should not be worshiped blindly,
only listened to carefully,
the way you listen at a door
before you decide to knock.
Because sometimes the miracle is simple:
A stranger hands you a tissue.
A room full of quiet people breathes together.
A sentence lands in your chest
and loosens a knot you’ve carried for years.
And sometimes the miracle is smaller still:
Someone built a miniature welcome
and tucked it into a mossy crease of the world
as if to say,
There are places for tenderness, even here.
I think that’s Cassadaga’s true haunting.
Not ghosts in the wallpaper,
not footsteps on a hotel stair,
not a legend perched on a cemetery chair,
but the way the air keeps asking
the same gentle question
over and over,
soft as leaves falling onto green,
What do you want to do with the part of you
that still reaches?
The little doors do not answer.
They simply stay.
Waiting.
Welcoming.
And the moss, patient librarian of fallen things,
keeps the minutes
without ever insisting it can predict the ending.