This Q&A dives deeper into the creative process, emotional framework, and storytelling philosophy behind R. Morello’s work. These are the questions readers most often ask, along with answers that reveal the heart of the writer behind Upside Down, Fractured Echoes, Simulation 1988–1990, and the rest of the Cathedral Rocks catalog.
I’ve always been fascinated by the invisible worlds people carry inside them: grief, identity, trauma, memory, and the emotional architecture we rarely let others see. Science fiction gives me space to turn those hidden human experiences into places, rules, physics, and consequences.
I’ve always tried to be truthful about the things I assume we all share, and most of the time, others resonate with it or confess they’ve felt the same secret truths in their own humanity. I also believe I have a unique voice, and when I come up with an idea I’ve never seen or heard before, I use it as an opportunity to explore those universal, unspoken emotional experiences.
When I write psychological sci-fi, the internal becomes the external. Upside Down is grief as a mirrored dimension. Fractured Echoes is trauma colliding with time. Simulation 1988–1990 turns instability into a literal looping world.
It lets me explore the human condition in ways realism doesn’t always allow.
They’re all part of the same universe, and there are threads of specific characters who cross over, sometimes as younger or older versions of themselves, sometimes as side characters in someone else’s story. The main characters all examine the parts of ourselves we hide, repress, or don’t fully understand.
Because people are rarely whole. Life is hard, and even though some don’t want to admit they’ve been shaped by trauma, thinking someone else had it worse, the truth is that everyone carries their own version of it.
Everyone has a version of themselves beneath the surface: the emotional self that’s scared, angry, ashamed, grieving, or quietly hopeful in ways they never express. I try to give that internal version a body, a voice, and a world.
It becomes something you can interact with.
Pieces of real people, absolutely.
Some characters come from emotional truths, others from specific memories, conversations, or people I’ve known. But the story always shapes them into something new.
Caleb from Upside Down isn’t one person, he’s the emotional reality of anyone who has ever lost someone.
Balancing metaphor and story.
With Upside Down, some arcs that moved the characters from one place to another brought unexpected metaphors that fit perfectly. The way everything flowed felt like parts of the tapestry revealed themselves at the right moment, almost by luck, how those endings connected so naturally to the next moments.
A single thought that feels unique, followed by the question of who the character is and how they would get there.
The emotion or ending comes first. The world forms around it.
