Nicole Jalonen started making stories when she was young. Back then, she did not know yet how closely her make-believe world would blend with real life.
She was born with hydrocephalus. Teachers noticed her gift and pushed her to keep writing. Later, she had a short period when her sight was gone.
From those hard moments, she built fantasy tales. In her books, characters face fear and doubt. They learn that staying alive does not mean feeling nothing. It means finding a way to go on, even when you are still dealing with vulnerability.
For Nicole Jalonen, telling stories started long before contracts, book listings, or any plan to become an author. She was in elementary school. She was still in second grade. She wrote stories anyway. Her teacher noticed. The teacher typed the pages and put them together like a real book.
After that, she did not fully stop.
As the years passed, her stories grew. The worlds she made grew too. The danger in them rose as well. Her fantasy work turned into books with witches, ghosts, monsters, secret names, and families split apart by things kept quiet. Still, under all the spooky parts, there is something you can feel right away. People in her books keep asking who they are when the place they trusted shifts out from under them.
That same pull drives Inner Demons. It is Jalonen’s dark fantasy story about Britney Summers, her daughter Samyria, and an orphanage that looks normal at first. Then it becomes clear that nothing is as simple as it seems.
Jalonen also lives with that kind of pressure in her own way.
She was born with hydrocephalus. From the start, she dealt with medical issues. In 2010, she lost her sight for a while. A device meant to drain extra fluid did not work as it should. Pressure rose, and her vision went away. Later, her sight came back once the pressure eased. But the whole episode did not just vanish.
In time, it found a way into her stories.
The Girl Who Was Already Writing
Jalonen says she was writing stories as far back as Grade 2. Her teacher kept those early pages. That choice felt like the first real sign that her ideas mattered. It also meant her imagination had been treated as more than a phase.
When she was 13, at Humphrey Public School, she wrote a first story for the fantasy world she would keep building. Still, the bigger shift came later, during high school.
A guidance counsellor asked her what she planned to do with her life. Jalonen answered the way she felt it already lived in her. She wanted to publish her stories.
Within a week, she met author Terry Boyle. Boyle asked to read one of her stories. He also told her he would let her know if he thought her work could be ready for publishing. For her, those seven days felt stretched out. In the end, he pulled her out of an English class and gave his view. He said her writing could become publishable with the right teaching and more growth.
That push did not fade.
After Boyle died, Jalonen kept talking about how he shaped her as a writer. It is a point that can be missed when people read an author’s life story. Not every path starts with a printed book. Sometimes a career begins because one person sees raw pages and tells the writer to carry on.
When Real Life Entered the Fantasy
Jalonen writes with the kind of impossibilities that feel like they belong in a dream. Still, the feelings underneath come from moments that really happened.
In 2010, Jalonen went blind for a time.
That experience did not stay in the past. She later used it when she shaped Britney Summers, the main character in her Dreams and Danger series.
Britney starts as a young girl who keeps waking from nightmares. The visions bring ghosts and monsters. Then she learns the truth. Those images point to something bigger. She is a witch who can see what is coming.
When the series moves forward, Jalonen adds another layer. Britney is not only gifted. She is also at risk in a very physical way.
Once Britney gets hurt and loses her sight, the whole focus shifts. The fight is no longer just about having magic. She has to figure out how to keep going when her body cannot do the same things as before.
Jalonen chose that on purpose, and you can feel it. She has lived through what it means to lose vision.
Fantasy lets her reshape the experience instead of copying it. The medical crisis becomes story fuel. Fear turns into real conflict. Learning to adjust becomes part of who Britney is.
This is one of the clearest things about Jalonen’s work. Even if magic sets the laws of the world, human weakness is what makes those laws matter.
The Secrets Inside Inner Demons
In Inner Demons, time is no longer standing still.
Ten years have passed since Britney Summers had triplets. Two of her children were taken, and she lost them. She did what she could to build a calmer life in Samyria’s world, the one child who stayed close. Their days are quiet on purpose. They feel safe. They also lack the wild magic that used to swarm around Britney.
Still, peace that depends on hiding things does not last.
Devolin Voltron, Britney’s father, is said to be gone. Dead. But Britney cannot shake the thought that he might be at work in the distance. She thinks he could be steering events from beyond what she can see.
Then Demyn Rylan shows up.
Demyn is an orphan, and he asks Britney and Samyria to help at an orphanage in the mortal world. Britney feels a warning in the air right away. She thinks the offer might be a trap. If she says no, Samyria will notice her hesitation. Then Samyria may understand that her mother knows more than she lets on.
So, the two of them go in together. Mother and daughter, side by side, into the orphanage.
After that, nothing stays narrow.
Samyria connects with Demyn, Destiny, and Tobias. The place has a chill that feels like ghosts. The children start finding clues. Those clues shake the story Samyria was given about herself. She learns her mother kept quiet about two kidnapped siblings. Worse, her mother has been looking for them in secret.
Soon the truth turns even harsher.
Samyria and Britney are witches.
That discovery does more than light up Samyria’s magic. It sparks anger at the mother who hid it. In Jalonen’s world, anger mixed with magic can do damage that spreads past one household.
And the end of everything starts to seem closer, not because of a grand event, but because a child finally realizes the person she trusted most did not tell her the full truth.
Creating in More Than One Medium
Jalonen’s work is not limited to writing.
When she was younger, she started drawing too. She made pictures of family members and friends. That habit of seeing stories in images stayed with her as she moved into fiction.
Over the years, she leaned more into books for younger kids as well. Her picture books grew from that same playful side.
Her children’s books include Baby’s Magical Night, Magical Animal Army Adventures, The Baby Fairy and the Forever Night. More recent titles feature The Firefly Fairy Princess and The Death Unicorns.
A few of the picture books come from her own home life. Jalonen has said she wrote stories that connect to relatives and their children. In her words, it was a continuation of the same imagination she used in childhood drawings and early school stories.
Her creative world feels wide. Dark fantasy can sit next to fairy tales. Ghosts and witches can be alongside magical creatures and kid friendly adventures.
The common link is imagination. It is also her choice to keep creating.
Fantasy Built Around Family
That fight is not just heroes versus spooky villains.
It is also about a parent trying to keep a kid safe by holding back the truth, then facing the day when the same choice starts to look like betrayal.
Britney has her own reasons. She sees the magical world in a way Samyria cannot. She knows what was lost from their family. She spots threats before her daughter can name them.
Samyria feels it another way.
To her, life has been built on gaps. Her brothers and sisters are real, yet she was left out of that part. Her mother has been looking, but Samyria was kept out of the search. Magic is who she is, but it was treated like something to hide.
Jalonen turns a common feeling into fantasy. A child realizes that parents are not simple figures. They carry pasts. They worry. They keep secrets.
The ghosts and witches make everything sharper and more dangerous. Still, the real hurt is trust.
Dreams, Nightmares and the Stories Between Them
Jalonen has said that her dreams help feed her fiction.
That idea matches the way she writes. In dreams, the line between normal life and impossible events gets blurry. A room that should feel safe can turn scary. A person who seemed lost may show up again. Who someone is can flip, fast and without warning.
Inner Demons uses that same wobble.
In the book, an orphanage is more than an orphanage. Someone who is dead might not stay dead. A girl who looks plain may actually be a witch. Ghosts can carry information about family. Even a mother who tries to shield her child can end up fueling the daughter’s resentment.
Jalonen has also named writers she likes, including Stephen King, J. K. Rowling, and Nora Roberts. That mix feels right next to her own pull toward fantasy, supernatural threat, personal bonds, and scenes that hit hard.
Still, her strongest raw material might be something closer to home.
Her novels grew while she faced physical hardships that would not go away. Rather than hide that side, she often puts it right into the plot. It becomes part of what her characters have to handle.
Britney’s blindness stands out most.
She is not impressive just because she is untouchable. She matters because she has already been hurt by something, and now she has to figure out what happens next.
The Meaning of Continuing
Jalonen’s early life and her later work line up in a neat way, at least on the surface.
When she was in childhood, a Grade 2 teacher treated her stories like they mattered. The teacher typed them up and saved them.
Much later, a guidance counsellor took a teenager’s words seriously. The teenager said she wanted to publish, and the counsellor listened.
Still later, Terry Boyle read what she had written. He told her that, with support, the work could grow into something bigger.
No single moment wrote the novels for Jalonen. Still, those moments did their own kind of work. They made it easier for her to keep going.
Today she writes across fantasy and children’s books. The characters she first imagined as a child did not disappear. They kept changing as she did.
That thread may sit at the core of Inner Demons.
On the outside, the book deals with witches, missing children, ghosts, an orphanage, hard secrets, and the risk of a supernatural disaster.
Under that, there is a question Jalonen has met more than once. It shows up in her own path again and again.
What do you do when life shifts fast and your idea of the future no longer fits?
For Britney, the answer is about learning to live and to fight after disability.
For Samyria, it is about realizing the identity she was given does not tell the full story.
For Jalonen, it has meant staying with the page and writing anyway.
The stories she started when she was young lasted through the years that followed. They went past school age and into medical trouble and into the unsure stretch that comes with any creative career.
The details did not freeze in time. The stories moved. They shifted as she grew.
What could have stayed only as pain became raw material for characters who face their own strange and heavy situations.
Hardship is not turned into magic here.
Instead, the telling changes things.
Nicole Jalonen’s imagined world is crowded with people who learn something hard and real. What scares them and what helps them can come from the same source.
Yes, the threats can be supernatural. But the pressure underneath is common: you adjust when life breaks your plan, you uncover what was hidden, and you move on even when the next part of the story looks nothing like what you expected.
For someone who started writing down stories at a young age, that final twist feels right.
She kept writing long enough to become the author she once wanted to be.
Explore Nicole Jalonen and Her Books
Featured Book — Inner Demons
https://a.co/d/0dR2GClq
Nicole Jalonen’s Author Journey and Temporary Blindness
Read the Parry Sound article
More Books by Nicole Jalonen
https://www.fictiondb.com/author/nicole-jalonen~81346.htm
https://www.worldofbooks.com/en-gb/products/mindsweepers-book-nicole-jalonen-9781469175409
