Most comfortable: dark contemporary drama with a thriller/horror edge. Think teenlit with real stakes, plus psychological suspense. My recent work leans toward Halloween killers, a man-eating tree, a girl trapped where no one hears her, a pickpocket on the run, and a split-personality sibling. All of it is set in modern, recognizable places like clubs, apartments, Ikea, and churches. That setting lets me put the focus on characters and their messy inner lives, and the genre gives you built-in tension to push them against.
Most avoided: probably high fantasy or hard sci-fi. Those genres lean on heavy worldbuilding, rules, and systems, and my method is character-first, with plot coming out of psychology. Even my royal is grounded in real-world lineage and modern settings. Another possible one is pure fluffy romance, since my characters tend to carry something darker underneath. The “why” is that I seem to write best when people are the engine of the story, not the world or the plot machinery.

My approach prioritizes psychological complexity and relational dynamics over plot-driven structure. Characters are built around internal and external tensions, such as status versus vulnerability, duty versus desire, and unified identity versus dissociation. These tensions function as the primary engine of narrative. Events are secondary: they serve as stimuli that reveal how a character behaves under conflicting pressures.

Interpersonal dynamics, especially family hierarchies, sibling roles, and power asymmetries, are treated as structural elements rather than background. Characterization is also supported by concrete sensory and behavioral details (setting, gestures, small objects), which ground the more dramatic or psychological content in believable, lived-in realism.