J.H. Moncrieff is a dark fiction writer who has over ten books published, multiple short stories, and is most recently a featured expert on Cruise Ship Killers, a new true crime series now airing in the UK. We launch the conversation by talking about the one big thing she did to help catapult her career in genre fiction and how having unchangeable pillars in a creative work can breed ingenuity. Then we dive in. She reads us a new original story, a tantalizing short piece written specially for this podcast. We talk about her tendency to write about characters from other cultures and how teaching writing to international students has influenced not only her creative mind, but her heart. We get into her process as a 'pantser', the muses, and we extract some important lessons for aspiring authors to absorb from her story.