Jacinda A. Scarborough

Take a Journey with me

Category: Root Cellar

  • The Four Stones

    The Four Stones

    One of the central ideas in Mirror Me revolves around four stones.

    In The Four Stones

    In Mirror Me, Sam discovers a sketch of a necklace. Around it are four circles, The Four Stones

    In Mirror Me, Sam discovers a sketch of a necklace. Around it are four circles, each representing a stone. Beside them, Birdie has written four words:

    Heart. Flame. Shadow. Wisdom.

    At first, the stones seem symbolic, but Birdie’s journals reveal something deeper.

    Flame — the posture that burns to hold everything together.

    Shadow — the posture that disappears to stay intact.

    Heart — the one who gives until she is emptied.

    Wisdom — the one who waits, who studies, who remembers when urgency tries to scatter her.

    Then comes a sentence that becomes one of the guiding ideas of the novel:

    The land responds to posture, not intention.

    That distinction matters.

    Most of us believe we’re defined by our intentions. We want to do the right thing, love well, protect our families, and stand up for what matters.

    But Mirror Me asks a different question.

    How do you stand when life becomes difficult?

    Not what you hope to do or the kind of person you want to be.

    How do you actually respond when you’re carrying too much?

    For some, the answer is Heart.

    They love deeply and care for everyone around them. They give and give until they forget that even the vessel doing the pouring needs to be filled.

    Others lead with Flame.

    Flame is courage, but it is also control. It refuses to back down, determined to hold everything together through sheer strength. Yet fire left unchecked can leave ashes behind, even when its purpose was good.

    Others retreat into Shadow.

    Shadow shrinks to preserve peace. It stays quiet and avoids conflict. Sometimes that’s wisdom. Sometimes it’s survival. But when disappearing becomes the only way we know how to protect ourselves, we slowly lose sight of who we are.

    Then there is Wisdom.

    Wisdom watches before it speaks. It remembers, studies, and considers the long view. But even wisdom can become unbalanced when knowledge turns into certainty and certainty becomes arrogance.

    None of these postures are inherently good or bad.

    They’re all necessary.

    The problem comes when we begin living from only one of them.

    Throughout Mirror Me, the four stones remind us that strength isn’t found in Heart alone, or Flame, Shadow, or Wisdom.

    Strength comes from balance.

    As I continued writing, another question became increasingly important to me.

    Why do you naturally lead with the posture you do?

    Is it simply your personality?

    Or is it something you learned?

    Did your mother teach you to disappear to keep the peace?

    Did your grandmother teach you to carry everyone else’s burdens before your own?

    Did someone before them learn those same lessons because the world required it?

    That’s what Mirror Me explores.

    The story isn’t asking readers to identify which stone they are.

    It’s asking them to wonder where that posture began—and whether it’s something they want to continue passing on.

    Mirror Me Launches February 2027

  • What I Refused to Compromise On 

    What I Refused to Compromise On 

    What I Refused to Compromise On

    What I Refused to Compromise On

    If there’s one thing I refused to compromise on while writing Mirror Me, it was this:

    This is a story about a Black family.

    The racial tension they experience is real, and it was important to me to write about it honestly. But it was equally important that this family not become another stereotype.

    When I was growing up, I lived in two very different worlds.

    On one side was Roosevelt, where we spoke with more slang, carried ourselves differently, and blended into the neighborhood around us.

    On the other side was Westbury, where my grandmother expected us to speak proper English, value education, and know how to carry ourselves in predominantly white spaces. She wasn’t trying to make us less Black. She was preparing us to survive in a world that often judged us before we ever opened our mouths.

    My sisters and I learned to code-switch very early.

    But that also meant we stood out.

    We were called names because we didn’t speak the way some of our classmates did. We didn’t always fit neatly into what people expected Black children to sound like or act like.

    That experience stayed with me.

    When I started writing Mirror Me, I thought about how many people like me rarely see themselves represented accurately in books, movies, or television.

    People who are fully Black, who understand Black culture, but who also learned to navigate predominantly white spaces.

    People whose experiences don’t fit neatly into the versions of Black life we’ve seen portrayed for decades.

    I wanted the Gaines family to feel like real people.

    Each member has a distinct personality. They don’t all speak the same way, react the same way, or see the world through the same lens. They’re proud of who they are, but I wasn’t interested in making them perform Blackness according to someone else’s expectations.

    For a long time, media treated Black characters as though they belonged in the same mold. The Black woman was the nanny. The Black man was the butler. Later, different stereotypes replaced those, but they were still stereotypes.

    Blackness is not a monolith.

    I didn’t attend an HBCU. I wasn’t part of a sorority. My husband wasn’t in a fraternity. Those experiences are part of Black culture, but they aren’t mine, and I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

    I wrote the family I know.

    The people I grew up with.

    The people who raised me.

    It was also important to me that the family be whole.

    At one point, I considered making Sam’s mother a single parent. Then I stopped myself.

    Why?

    Why couldn’t her parents still be married? Why couldn’t they simply be an older couple who had built a life together?

    There are enough stories that reinforce the stereotype of absent Black fathers. I didn’t want to contribute to that simply because it was familiar.

    I wanted to show a complete family.

    Not a perfect family.

    A complete one.

    And underneath all of this was another decision I’d made about the story.

    I refused to center whiteness.

    It exists in Mirror Me because it exists in life. Sam navigates racial tension, microaggressions, and assumptions people make about her. Those experiences are part of her world, and I wasn’t going to ignore them.

    But Mirror Me isn’t about white people.

    It isn’t about explaining racism.

    It isn’t about making white readers comfortable.

    It’s about a woman who happens to be Black, her family, her history, and the things she discovers about herself.

    I wanted readers to know the Gaines family as people first. To recognize their personalities, their relationships, their disagreements, and the love they have for one another.

    At the end of the day, that’s what I refused to compromise on.

    I wanted this family to be real.

    Human.

    Not a trope.

    Not a stereotype.

    Just people…

    …who happen to be Black.

    Mirror Me Launches February 2026

  • When Mirror Me Became More Than a Story 

    When Mirror Me Became More Than a Story 

    It Started as a Story

    I can’t point to one specific moment when Mirror Me stopped being just a story and became something more.

    It began with an idea I wanted to explore. I thought it would make a good story.

    But as I dug into the emotional layers of the book, particularly what it means to live with the different postures, I began examining myself and the people around me.

    I recognized those postures in myself, my sisters, and my mother. Then I started noticing them in other women.

    The more I listened to women tell their stories, the more familiar those patterns became.

    Women’s Voices

    We live in a patriarchal society, and throughout history, women’s voices have often been quieted. Not completely silenced, but certainly not celebrated or amplified the way they should have been. We’ve been taught to carry our pain quietly, to endure, and to keep moving.

    And I began to see how those expectations shaped the women around me.

    Some women shrink themselves to keep the peace.

    Others are taught that their value comes from how much they give. They pour into their families, their children, and their communities, often leaving very little for themselves.

    Some lead with fire. They’ve learned that to be successful, they must be tough enough to fight for everything. Somewhere along the way, they were taught that strength and softness couldn’t exist together.

    And then there are women who have gained wisdom through years of living, learning, and surviving, only to find that their voices still aren’t heard until much later, if they’re heard at all.

    These weren’t just fictional postures anymore. I was seeing them everywhere.

    More Than Sam’s Story

    As I continued writing, I realized Mirror Me wasn’t just telling Sam’s story.

    I wanted women to recognize something of themselves in it.

    To ask questions like:

    Why do I respond this way?

    Why do I handle conflict like this?

    Where did I learn that?

    Is this really who I am, or is it something that was handed to me?

    I hadn’t expected to be asking myself those questions when I started writing.

    Another Layer

    And then there’s race.

    Black women carry another layer of history and expectation that shapes how we move through the world. That matters in Mirror Me, and I wasn’t interested in pretending otherwise.

    But I also believe that, regardless of race, every woman has inherited something she didn’t choose.

    Sometimes it’s a belief. Sometimes it’s a fear. Sometimes it’s a way of protecting herself that she learned long before she understood why she needed it.

    And sometimes she passes it on without realizing it.

    Looking in the Mirror

    That’s why this story became important to me.

    It began as a story about one woman and her family. Somewhere in the writing, I began to see the women who raised me, the women I grew up alongside, and the women I’ve become acquainted with over the years.

    And I began to recognize myself.

    Mirror Me became an invitation to look in the mirror and ask why we stand in the posture that we do.

    I think that’s a question worth asking.

    Mirror Me launches February 2027

  • Why Birdie Became an Archaeologist 

    Why Birdie Became an Archaeologist 

    One of the questions I’ve been asked is why I made Birdie an archaeologist. 

    The simple answer is that Birdie needed to unlock the lore of the story. 

    Mirror Me has a long history behind it, and I didn’t want to spend hundreds of pages telling that history from beginning to end. Birdie became the vehicle that allowed both Sam and the reader to understand what came before without stopping the story to explain everything. 

    An archaeologist asks a simple question: 

    Who was here before us? 

    That’s exactly the question Birdie spends her life trying to answer. 

    She travels the world researching Indigenous peoples, ancient cultures, and places where the earth itself seems to hold memory. Through that research, she begins connecting what exists on Sam’s land with similar places around the world. Most people would never make those connections. They come through years of research, travel, documentation, and curiosity. 

    Birdie needed to be someone who was naturally curious. But curiosity wasn’t enough. She also needed the means to travel, the resources to spend years researching, and the freedom to dedicate her life to those questions. Because she never married and never had children, she was able to devote herself completely to that work. 

    In many ways, I think of Birdie as a female Indiana Jones. Not because she’s swinging from ropes or outrunning boulders, but because she’s driven by the same desire to understand the people who came before us and what they left behind. 

    More than anything, though, Birdie is a steward of memory. 

    She remembers her family. 

    She remembers the land. 

    She remembers the history that would otherwise be lost. 

    Her journals become the bridge between what was and what is. 

    They give Sam the information she needs without simply handing her the answers. Birdie is careful about what she records and careful about what she leaves for Sam to discover on her own. 

    From a storytelling standpoint, making Birdie an archaeologist also gave her credibility. When she writes about the vibration sites and the history behind them, the reader believes she has earned that knowledge. Her research makes the larger world of Mirror Me feel believable because it doesn’t begin with Sam. It has always existed. Birdie simply spent her life uncovering it. 

    One of the things I love most about Birdie is that, even though she never appears on the page in the present day, many readers tell me she’s one of their favorite characters. 

    I understand why. 

    She’s wise without being mysterious. 

    She’s plain-spoken without talking down to people. 

    She never pushes Sam toward the answer. She simply leaves the path lit and trusts her to keep walking. 

    In the end, Birdie isn’t just the catalyst for Sam’s journey. 

    She’s the steward of a story that has always belonged to the land. 

    Mirror Me Launches February 2027

  • How Mirror Me Was Born

    How Mirror Me Was Born

    This book started with a phone call, not an outline.

    It was November 2025, and my daughter, my second oldest, called to confirm Thanksgiving plans at her grandmother’s house. Partway through the conversation, she paused and said, “Mommy, I want to ask you something. I’m hoping you’ll be okay with it.” She’s been with her boyfriend for years now, a genuinely wonderful young man. She asked if she could spend Christmas with him and his family instead of with us.

    It’s a small thing to type out.

    It didn’t feel small.

    What stayed with me wasn’t the request itself, I always knew this day would come. It was the care she took asking it. She knows how family-oriented I am, how much togetherness matters to me. She thought about my feelings before she made her plans. And this is my fire daughter. The one who calls things what they are, who doesn’t usually pause to soften an edge. In that moment, she set the fire down and led with heart instead.

    I told her yes, of course, he’s her person now, and there will be more Christmases like this one. But after we hung up, I sat with it. I started thinking about how something in me had clearly imprinted itself on her, in a moment she didn’t even realize was doing it. And then I started thinking about my other daughters, and how each of them carries a different piece of me the same way, leaning into a different posture, reflecting a different side of who I am, out into their own lives.

    That’s the whole book, really, before it had a plot. A piece of you goes out into the world in your children, whether you meant to put it there or not. Mirror Me.

    Mirror Me launches February 2027

  • The Version of Mirror Me That Almost Was 

    The Version of Mirror Me That Almost Was 

    One of the things people may not realize is that Mirror Me wasn’t always the story it is today. 

    The original version was much more of a science fiction story. It wasn’t really about Charlotte. It wasn’t about the Whittaker family. It wasn’t even about history. At its core, it was simply about a mother trying to understand the different parts of herself that she saw reflected in her children. 

    That idea has never changed. 

    I’ve always said that my four daughters are different sides of me. They each carry different parts of my personality, and I wanted to tell a story about what it means to send those pieces of yourself out into the world. 

    Originally, the house was simply a metaphor for that idea. 

    Inside the house were different rooms, and each room represented one of the children’s postures. The mother would enter a room and complete a trial before she could retrieve something connected to that child. 

    I actually wrote some of those scenes. 

    One room represented Heart. The mother walked into what had become a lagoon. In the middle sat her daughter on a stone, crying. Her tears flowed into the water below, feeding every plant growing around her. The entire room was alive because of her sorrow. The trial wasn’t defeating anything. It was convincing her daughter to step off the stone and come home. 

    Another room represented Fire. It was a burned-out city where her daughter wandered through the streets setting fires, almost enjoying the destruction around her. 

    The shrinking room eventually became Shadow, and that idea actually survived into the final version of Mirror Me. 

    The whole story was strange. It leaned heavily into science fiction and symbolism, and the more I built it, the stranger it became. 

    Eventually I had to stop and ask myself a simple question. 

    What story am I actually trying to tell? 

    That question changed everything. 

    I realized I wasn’t trying to write about supernatural rooms or elaborate trials. I was trying to write about mothers, daughters, inheritance, and the different emotional postures we pass from one generation to the next. 

    The message became more important than the mechanics. 

    That’s when I stopped building scenes and started building lore. 

    Instead of asking what happened inside the rooms, I started asking bigger questions. 

    Who are these people? 

    Why are they here? 

    How did this family get here? 

    Where did the stones come from? 

    Why this house? 

    Why this land? 

    Once I started answering those questions, the story transformed. 

    The objects the mother originally retrieved became the stones of the necklace. The rooms gave way to history. The house stopped being just a metaphor and became a place with generations of memory. The supernatural remained, but now it had a purpose instead of simply existing because it looked interesting. 

    Looking back, Mirror Me could have stayed on the shelf for a very long time if I hadn’t stopped to rethink what I was really trying to say. 

    Sometimes the best thing you can do as a storyteller isn’t write the next chapter. 

    Sometimes it’s stop long enough to ask yourself what story you’re actually trying to tell. 

    Mirror Me launches February 2027

  • Storyteller, Not a Writer

    Storyteller, Not a Writer

    I write. I have for most of my life. But I’m careful about which word I use for what I actually do, because I don’t think they’re the same thing.

    Writing keeps you enclosed in the words on the page. It doesn’t fully embody the story in and of itself. Storytelling is something else entirely — the voice, the pause before the reveal, the expression on your face while you’re telling it and on theirs while they’re receiving it. Honestly, I believe I tell a better story out loud than I write one down.

    The emotional experience

    There’s something about inviting someone into your emotional experience of a thing, in real time, that a page on its own can’t quite manage.

    I think that’s part of why certain kinds of content do so well now — people letting their reactions show alongside the story itself, not just reporting the words of it. Everyone responds to stimuli differently, and to me, storytelling is the act of pulling someone into your particular experience of a thing, not just the facts of it.

    So when people ask what I do, I don’t reach for “writer” first. Writing has rules, guardrails, requirements, and I follow them when the page calls for it. But storytelling is the thing that actually moves me — bringing someone along on the journey, not just describing where it went afterward. I put things down on paper. But I put myself in the category of storyteller, not writer.

    Mirror Me launces February 2027

  • What Is Mirror Me About?

    What Is Mirror Me About?

    A Woman Living an Ordinary Life

    At its heart, Mirror Me is about a woman living a very ordinary life.

    Sam is a mother, a wife, and a full-time employee. She’s trying to balance everything that so many women balance every single day. She’s busy. She’s carrying a lot. She’s doing the best she can with the life she’s built.

    Then everything changes.

    An Unexpected Inheritance

    When her great-aunt Birdie passes away, Sam inherits a house.

    But she doesn’t just inherit a house.

    She inherits wealth. She inherits financial freedom. She inherits a life she never expected to have.

    Birdie’s passing wasn’t sudden, but the inheritance certainly was a surprise.

    When Sam moves her family into the house, she begins to realize that what she’s inherited is much bigger than the property itself.

    A House With Secrets

    As Sam settles into her new home, she begins to uncover the mysteries of the house and the land it sits on.

    She discovers that this place carries more than timber, brick, and trees.

    It carries memory.

    The land remembers.

    Remembering What Came Before

    Throughout the story, we follow Sam as she learns that the land remembers a time when she, her ancestors, and women all over the world didn’t carry so much.

    The land remembers a time when women lived in balance and in rhythm with the world around them.

    As Sam uncovers the history of the house, she also uncovers the history of herself.

    She witnesses the women who came before her, learns from them, and begins to understand how their lives continue to echo through her own.

    Learning to Stand

    As the story unfolds, Sam comes face to face with the postures that shape the way she moves through the world.

    She begins to understand how those postures influence the choices she makes, the relationships she builds, and ultimately what she will pass on to her own daughters.

    The journey isn’t about becoming someone else.

    It’s about learning how to live in balance.

    It’s about understanding yourself deeply enough that what you pass on isn’t just generational survival…

    …it’s generational healing.

    At Its Heart

    Mirror Me is about a woman who learns how to stand.

    Mirror Me Launches February 2027

  • She Has a Real Vivid Imagination

    She Has a Real Vivid Imagination

    My earliest memory of storytelling goes back to before I started school.

    I was at home on Pennywood with my mom, playing on top of the hi-fi with my Weebles. If you know anything about Weebles, you know the slogan: Weebles wobble, but they don’t fall down. I had Weebles, Little People, and a handful of other tiny characters, and I was taking them on an adventure across the top of that hi-fi.

    My mother was talking with someone in the background. I remember realizing they were watching me—that feeling when you know someone is looking over your shoulder. She stopped the conversation for just a moment and said, “She has a real vivid imagination.”

    I never forgot those words.

    At the time, I didn’t even know what they meant. I was probably three or four years old. But I never forgot the way she said them. Years later, when I understood what a vivid imagination was, I realized that what I’d been doing with those toys wasn’t simply playing.

    I was telling stories.

    Building Worlds

    Those little characters all had adventures. They came from somewhere. They were going somewhere. They had histories, personalities, and reasons for everything they did. Long before I knew what world-building was, I was already doing it.

    I was building worlds when I was knee-high to a grasshopper.

    Then I fell in love with reading.

    I carried around a thick anthology of Sherlock Holmes that contained nearly every story Arthur Conan Doyle wrote. It rarely left my side. I devoured The Count of Monte Cristo, The Call of the Wild, The Three Musketeers, and The Man in the Iron Mask. I loved stories filled with adventure and mystery—the kind that carried you somewhere and refused to let go until the final page.

    That’s when I realized there was something about living inside a story that spoke to me.

    Behind the Scenes

    Later, I joined theater, but I never wanted to be on stage. I wanted to work backstage. I wanted to build the sets. I didn’t need to stand in front of an audience—I wanted to help create the world they stepped into.

    In college, I studied media technology and filmmaking. Along the way, I wrote short stories and poetry. Writing was never an escape for me. It was simply another way my imagination explored the world.

    It Was Always There

    I still think about that moment when my mother paused her conversation just to watch me play.

    Not because she praised me.

    Because she recognized something before I ever could.

    She saw a little girl making up stories with a handful of toys and called it exactly what it was.

    A vivid imagination.

    It would take me another twenty years to understand she was right.

    Storytelling has always been in me.

    Mirror Me launches February 2027

  • Westbury

    Westbury

    The other neighborhood I grew up in on Long Island was Westbury.

    My grandmother lived there, about eight miles from Roosevelt, and the school system was significantly better than what Roosevelt offered at the time. Like any parent, my mother and father wanted the best for us. So when my sisters started school—and I followed behind—we all attended the Westbury school district.

    Before I was old enough for school, we’d make the commute every morning. We’d pile into the red Omega at four or five o’clock, still half asleep in the back seat. My dad would sing the Superman theme to wake us up and get us laughing. He’d drive all the way to Bethpage, where we’d drop him off at Grumman Aerospace, and then Mom would take us to Westbury so my sisters could get ready for school.

    Two Homes

    Eventually, my parents made the difficult decision for my sisters and me to live in Westbury during the week and return home to Roosevelt on the weekends. Looking back, I can’t imagine how hard that must have been for my mother. But she knew her daughters were safe, cared for, and receiving the education she wanted for us.

    There was one rule: we weren’t allowed to tell anyone we lived in Roosevelt. Our place in the school district depended on Westbury being the only address that existed.

    The first address I ever memorized was 923 Broadway—my grandmother’s house. The first phone number I ever learned was hers. Westbury became our family’s home base, and in many ways, it remained that way until just a couple of years ago.

    Grandma’s House

    Living at my grandmother’s house felt completely different from Roosevelt.

    Grandma was proper. Orderly. She expected us to speak proper English, dress appropriately, and carry ourselves well in front of company. We understood the difference, and without realizing it, we learned to move comfortably between two different worlds. Looking back, it was probably my first lesson in code-switching. Not as something negative, but simply as understanding how to present yourself in different spaces.

    Creativity, however, was never discouraged. It simply took a different shape. It was quieter. More contained. My grandmother dedicated the basement to our play space—a place where we could explore, imagine, and create.

    Before I started school, I’d stand at the second-floor window and watch the nursery children playing in the yard below. I couldn’t understand why I wasn’t down there with them. So I built my own world instead. I’d string yarn across my room, create acrobats to balance on it, and invent entire worlds for my toys to explore. I played that way—building stories and narrating adventures—until I was thirteen.

    Home Base

    The thing I remember most about my grandmother’s house is that we never came home to an empty one. She was always there. There was always a meal waiting. There was always someone to greet us at the door.

    If you’ve never had a home base, it’s difficult to explain what it means to lose one.

    Growing up between Pennywood on the weekends and Westbury during the week meant living in two different worlds. I had two sets of friends, learned two different ways of moving through life, and carried two versions of myself.

    Yet beneath both of them was someone else entirely.

    The real me loved being alone. It took me until adulthood to understand that. At the time, I only knew that the hours spent by myself—riding my bike, standing at a window, or building entire worlds out of yarn—were the moments when I didn’t have to perform either version of myself.

    I could simply be the one underneath.

    Mirror Me launches February 2027