***Please note, all the photos from this website, even the photos on the mock book covers, are the property of Maria Ceres Ria. 

Watch as We Cry

Not the actual cover, but Maria does love to play with photography and photoshop. The photos are from Maria's own photo collection.

---

Completed Work

When Mary returns to the house she fled years earlier, she is forced to confront more than the geography of her past. Beneath the familiar rooms and inherited silences lies a history shaped by emotional neglect, misread devotion, and a learned instinct to disappear when attention lingers.

Moving between memory and the present, Watch as We Cry traces Mary’s attempt to reconstruct a self that was formed in proximity to control rather than care. As she navigates fractured family bonds, the weight of a husband’s death, and the unsettling reemergence of people who once knew her too well—or not at all—Mary must decide whether survival alone is enough, or whether reclaiming her life requires a reckoning she has long avoided.
​
Written with psychological restraint and emotional precision, Watch as We Cry is a literary novel about the cost of being wanted instead of understood, the quiet violence of erasure, and the courage it takes to remain present when leaving has always felt safer.

Fairest in the Land

Completed Work

​Snow White awakens from her cursed sleep not into love, but into control. Declared a miracle of national renewal, she is nearly crowned without consent, bound to a prince she barely remembers, and confined within the palace as a living symbol of stability. Prince

Charming insists his kiss saved her life; his devotion soon curdles into surveillance, obedience, and silence.
Aurelion is ruled by the Mirror of Verity, a sentient artifact whose judgments of beauty and worth function as law. Its pronouncements shape marriages, labor, and political legitimacy—and determine who is allowed to remain visible. As Snow White grapples with the loss of bodily autonomy and the years stolen from her life, she uncovers a buried history. Her stepmother, Queen Elara, remembered as monstrous and vain, was once a capable reformer declared obsolete when her beauty faded. The huntsman who spared Snow White was executed. The dwarfs who sheltered her were exiled. Survival was never forgiven.
​
With the help of a covert servant and a scarred enforcer, Snow White learns the truth: the Mirror is not divine, but engineered. To break its hold, she must destroy the system that resurrected her—and decide what kind of power, if any, she is willing to claim in its place.

Again, Maria loves her photoshop unapologetically.

Nightbound

W.I.P

​Nightbound is a work of speculative literary fiction about inheritance of memory, of guilt, and of the histories that refuse to remain buried.

After the death of her grandmother, eighteen-year-old Lucy Adler had returned with her family to the shores of Lake Superior, where the past feels unusually close, the lake listens, the ore dock looms. At night, Lucy and her younger brother Joey begin to dream of places they have never been, rooms without windows, narrow streets, names spoken in languages they do not know, and fear that feels procedural rather than imagined. What begins as grief-driven disturbance slowly reveals itself as something far more deliberate: a shared inheritance of memory that spans generations and crosses moral boundaries.

As Lucy uncovers fragments of her family’s carefully managed silence, the dreams intensify, drawing her, her brother, and eventually those she loves into a reckoning they did not consent to, but cannot refuse. The past is no longer content to be remembered; it demands witnessing. And love, once a refuge, becomes an ethical strain when truth threatens to dismantle what remains of safety.

Haunting, intimate, and morally unflinching, Nightbound explores intergenerational trauma, inherited responsibility, and the cost of remembrance. It asks what it means to live alongside history without acknowledging it, and what happens when memory insists on being carried, spoken, and finally named.
​

What We Sore

Completed Work

What We Swore is a psychological literary thriller that interweaves trauma, memory, and obsession through the lives of a survivor, a detective, and a killer bound by a shared past.

​Sixteen years ago, Lane Aimes disappeared from her quiet Northern Michigan town. She was found weeks later, barely alive, bound inside a remote cabin—betrayed by the two boys she trusted most. One vanished. One went to prison. The town moved on. Lane never did.
​
Now in her late twenties, Lane lives in Detroit, scraping by on freelance photography jobs while quietly building an artistic body of work she keeps separate from her past. Her photographs do not depict trauma itself, but what lingers after—the people who endure, suspended between harm and survival. When her first gallery show draws the attention of Eric Westin, a police crime-scene photographer investigating a series of ritualistic murders, Lane is pulled into a world she has spent years trying to keep at arm’s length.

Eric’s work is defined by precision: bodies arranged, patterns repeated, violence rendered deliberate. The killer he is chasing leaves behind scenes marked by restraint and intention—details that feel uncomfortably familiar to Lane. As their lives begin to overlap, professionally and emotionally, the boundary between observer and participant starts to erode.
The past resurfaces when Lane encounters Detective Jack McGregor, the man who carried her out of the woods years earlier. His return fractures the careful distance she has maintained, reopening memories she has survived by burying rather than confronting.

As the murders escalate, the lines between Lane’s history and the present investigation begin to blur. What Eric documents is no longer abstract—it is personal. And when evidence suggests the killer may be drawing from crimes long buried and conveniently forgotten, Lane must decide whether to remain behind the lens or risk becoming a witness once more.

What Remains

W.I.P.

Grace enters the woods on an ordinary day and does something irreversible—or almost does. The novel begins there, in suspension.

What Remains traces the life that led to that moment, a childhood shaped by trauma, a mind that learned to survive through distance and quiet endurance, and a woman who built a life that looked stable from the outside but required constant self-erasure to maintain. Grace loved deeply first as a teenager, then as a wife and mother, but love, for her, has always existed alongside absence, restraint, and waiting.

When a long-buried relationship resurfaces and the fragile balance she relies on begins to fracture, Grace is forced to confront the limits of endurance. Grief, memory, and obligation converge, narrowing her world until disappearance feels less like escape than inevitability.

​Told in spare, emotionally precise prose, What Remains is a novel about survival without guarantees, intimacy shaped by distance, and the quiet reckoning that follows when a person realizes that staying alive is not the same as living. It asks what remains when love is imperfect, healing is incomplete, and the future offers no clear redemption—only the choice to stay.

Elliot Pierce

Completed Work

When Elliot Pierce returns to Langston, the imposing country estate of his longtime friend Colonel Mansfield, he expects only to settle a dying man’s affairs. Instead, he is drawn into a request that will reshape every boundary he believes himself to hold marriage to Mansfield’s daughter, Kate, not as romance but as protection—an arrangement meant to contain a past that threatens to surface.
​
What Elliot does not yet understand is that Kate is already carrying a truth capable of undoing that fragile containment. It is a secret rooted in harm rather than shame—one that does not belong to her alone and therefore cannot be freely disclosed. Bound by loyalty and conscience, Kate becomes the silent guardian of a truth that steadily erodes her position, her safety, and her sense of self. As society rewards her composure and punishes her restraint, the cost of silence becomes increasingly exacting.

As marriage deepens, Elliot begins to recognize that love alone cannot shield his wife from the consequences of what she is protecting. What begins as ethical restraint gives way to reckoning, as he confronts the limits of gentleness in a world that mistakes silence for consent. His loyalty to Kate evolves into something more dangerous and more irrevocable: a commitment not only to love her, but to answer the violence done to her—by systems, by individuals, and by the past that refuses to remain buried.

Elliot Pierce is a Gothic, psychological and moral novel about secrecy and survival, examining the cost of bearing truths one is not permitted to reveal, and the transformation of a man who learns that marriage is not only a bond of affection, but a vow to stand between harm and the one he loves—no matter the consequence.

---

Thin Line

Completed Work

​Thin Line is a literary novel exploring love, consciousness, and the ethics of recognition through the fragmented experience of narcolepsy. After a near-fatal car accident, Jane, a disciplined museum curator, develops a neurological condition that destabilizes her sense of time, memory, and continuity. During involuntary sleep transitions, she begins encountering a man who exists only in the liminal space between waking and dreaming—someone who remembers her when she cannot remember herself.

As Jane’s waking life becomes increasingly stable through medical treatment, her dream relationship deepens, forming the only consistent emotional thread in an otherwise fractured reality. The man does not rescue her or promise escape; instead, he offers a form of recognition she has never allowed herself to accept—attention without demand, presence without performance.

As medication threatens to erase him, Jane must confront a devastating question: does healing require surrendering the most coherent relationship of her life, or can love be considered real if it exists only within consciousness?
​
Refusing easy answers, Thin Line examines intimacy, consent, and self-worth through a neurological and metaphysical lens, blending psychological realism with dream logic in the tradition of Ishiguro and Hustvedt. The novel ultimately asks whether love must be externally verifiable to be ethically meaningful—and what it costs to choose stability over interior truth.

She Was

W.I.P

​When seventeen-year-old Natalie Mitchell pulls her town’s golden boy from the depths of a lake, she doesn’t feel like a hero—she feels altered. The single, breathless act binds her to Sandy Grayson in ways neither of them expected, unsettling Natalie’s quiet, carefully ordered life and exposing fractures beneath Wake Forest’s idyllic surface.
​
As whispers spread and attention sharpens, Natalie finds herself navigating a tangled emotional landscape: her long-held feelings for her best friend Gavin, her uneasy growing closeness with Sandy, and the weight of being seen as someone she no longer recognizes. Then tragedy strikes close to home, forcing Natalie to confront grief, responsibility, and the limits of the control she’s always relied on.

Set over the charged final year of high school, She Was is a tender, atmospheric coming-of-age novel about the stories we inherit, the ones we tell ourselves, and the irreversible moments that quietly redefine who we are. It explores first love, moral courage, and the unsettling truth that saving someone else can change the course of your own life forever.
She Was.rtf

Things They Don't Tell

W.I.P

Things They Don’t Tell is a psychological romance about love, secrecy, and the fragile boundary between connection and collapse.

​When Grey, a reclusive photographer fleeing his past, arrives in New Orleans, he does not expect to run into Sophia Bloom—the quiet girl he once protected in high school, now a woman carrying her own history of abandonment and harm. Their reunion is electric, intimate, and unnervingly fast, reigniting a bond that was never fully extinguished. As they grow closer, Grey’s inner world begins to fracture. He hears voices no one else can hear. His thoughts unravel. His moods surge into grand plans and sink into terrifying voids.

Sophia senses that something is wrong long before Grey is willing to admit it. Torn between her instinct to caretake and her need for safety, she must decide whether love is enough to withstand what he is not telling her—and what he may not yet understand himself.

Blending romantic intensity with an unflinching portrayal of mental health, Things They Don’t Tell explores how mental illness distorts perception, how trauma binds people together, and how truth—spoken or withheld—can save or destroy a relationship. It is a story about the cost of silence, the ethics of love under strain, and the quiet bravery it takes to choose honesty over fantasy.

 Non-Fiction Works

Loving a System: ​A Practical Workbook for Couples Living with DID and OSDD

W.I.P

​Loving a System: A Practical Workbook for Couples Living with DID and OSDD is a comprehensive, trauma-informed relational workbook designed to support couples in which one or both partners live with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) or Other Specified Dissociative Disorder (OSDD). Written by licensed professional counselor Sara Rice, M.A., LPC-S, this workbook integrates contemporary trauma theory, attachment research, and clinical best practices into an accessible, step-by-step guide for building safety, communication, and intimacy across dissociative systems.

​Rather than framing dissociation as pathology, the workbook conceptualizes systems as adaptive communities of parts shaped by developmental trauma. Couples are guided to develop a shared language for dissociation, understand the origins and functions of different self-states, and distinguish trauma-time reactions from present-day relational dynamics. Central concepts such as the Window of Tolerance, switching, protector logic, attachment wounds, and internal cooperation are explored with clarity and compassion, allowing partners to respond with attunement rather than misinterpretation.

Each chapter combines psychoeducation with structured worksheets, guided journaling, couples reflection prompts, and practical communication scripts. Topics include system-aware communication, navigating switching in relationships, working collaboratively with protector parts, supporting child and vulnerable parts ethically, managing conflict and repair across parts, trauma-informed intimacy and consent, daily functioning and shared responsibilities, and creating predictable routines without rigidity. Special attention is given to consent, pacing, and safety, emphasizing that healing occurs through choice, trust, and regulation rather than pressure or forced disclosure.

The workbook is designed for flexible use: couples may move sequentially or selectively, revisit chapters as needed, and adapt exercises to their system’s capacity and therapeutic context. Therapist-facing notes provide guidance for clinicians who wish to incorporate the workbook into individual or couples therapy, while remaining clear that the partner’s role is not to replace professional treatment.

Loving a System offers a rare, system-affirming relational resource that validates both the lived experience of dissociation and the partner’s emotional reality. Its ultimate aim is not integration or symptom elimination, but the cultivation of secure attachment, mutual understanding, and sustainable connection—supporting couples as they learn to love not just an individual, but an entire internal system with dignity, respect, and care.

---