About Raelle

It's been a weird, circuitous path, but I always knew I was going to be a writer. Apparently I started dictating poems to my father, who was a playwright, when I was 3. And then it was something I just always did, and took strangely seriously. I spent my formative years growing up on the island of Ibiza, where I founded a theater company of stoned, rebellious hippie kids. I'd write and direct these wild, irreverent three-hour plays, and we'd perform them to sold-out audiences who didn't have TVs or movie theaters at the time, so we were their only source of entertainment. As a big, ambitious fish in a tiny, Mediterranean pond, I was convinced I was destined to conquer Hollywood. So at 17 I moved to Los Angeles. Cut to a decade of waitressing and working as a stripper, while I wrote a lot of bad screenplays and TV pilots and attempts at novels that eventually got better.

I didn't have one big break, but I had a lot of smaller ones, and just as many failures. Losing the second season of HBO's Project Greenlight helped get me agents, and they helped get me meetings that eventually led to my first staffing job on a short-lived ABC show called Eyes, that was sadly canceled. But that led to Supernatural, then to my dream job, working with Alan Ball on True Blood for five seasons. True Blood was definitely a highlight and a turning point for me. I left that show as a showrunner and started creating my own series. Most of those pilots never made it to the screen-which is just how TV works, unfortunately. But that motivated me to finally write my first novel, Obscura. And honestly, having that book published by Amy Einhorn feels like my biggest break yet.

I had the incredible privilege of working alongside some of the most successful and prolific storytellers on the planet-learning to break story, to build a character arc and a cliffhanger, structure a season, control pacing, and write to a deadline. All that experience shaped me. It's deep in the DNA of everything I write. I love film and TV. But they can also be a bit of a meat grinder artistically. Everything is filtered through notes, budget limitations, producers, actors, directors, and a million other opinions. Sometimes what comes out the other end is a beautiful collaboration. Sometimes it doesn't remotely resemble the thing you started with. Writing novels is a solitary, singular experience. I get to follow my imagination wherever it wants to go. Nobody gets to tell me a unicorn wouldn't do that, or a location is too expensive, or we can't afford to set someone on fire. I can build an entire world exactly as I see it. And that kind of creative freedom feels pretty fucking magical.

Mostly I want my novels to feel like a wild, adventurous vacation you can disappear into. I don't write to deliver lessons. But I hope readers walk away feeling a little less alone in whatever makes them feel like an outsider. Obscura is full of characters hiding parts of themselves-their powers, their pasts, their desires, their fears. Because they've been taught that's the price of belonging somewhere. But that's not the world I want to live in. I want to help build a world where it's safe for everyone to live authentically, to celebrate what's different about us, and share our unique magic with each other. That's my idea of utopia.