Do you believe in love after life?

In Jaysea Lynn’s “For Whom the Belle Tolls” the afterlife might not be what you expect.

Lily, the book’s main character, leaves her life in the Pacific Northwest behind when she dies from cancer. But she finds an unexpected family and a fiery romance as she runs the “Hellp Desk,” where souls sent to Hell for rehabilitation bring their customer complaints.

Lynn shared some details about the first book in the trilogy, inspired by a series she started on TikTok, ahead of an event planned for May 8 at Powell’s Books at Cedar Hills Crossing in Beaverton.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

Jess Hazel: So this is a pretty new way to develop a story and characters. You’re probably one of a handful of folks who have started a fictional world online and turned it into a book. So, can you explain what it was like to turn hundreds of TikTok videos into hundreds of pages of romance and fantasy?

Jaysea Lynn: None of this was intentional. When I started doing the videos, I came up with an idea when I was working as a cashier at Joanne’s. And I was like, “oh, this would be hilarious, like five-skit idea. Why not?” And now we’re 600+ episodes and like four years later.

But then with the book, because it’s a prequel, it was, “OK, how can I be intentional?” Because all of this stuff on TikTok just was like throwing paint to the wall and seeing what stuck. It was kind of like, “oh, now I’ve got to retroactively do world-building,” whereas with the book, I could be much more intentional with it. And it was really nice because the show on TikTok is a one-man band situation.

Hazel: Well, actually, I was going to ask about that one-man show aspect of it. The book switches perspectives between Lily and the main romantic interest. Did performing dialogue for the different characters in your videos help you develop those different voices?

Lynn: A little bit, yeah. They’re slightly different characters in the book than they are in the show. But there were definitely things where I was like, “OK, Lily’s gonna be very sarcastic and mouthy.” She has a certain pattern of speaking that, also being from the Pacific Northwest, I’m very familiar with.

Whereas with Bell, it was, “OK, he’s gonna have different lingo and different slang that he uses.” But his mental, his internal dialogue, I understood that a lot better. So I was lucky to have that one-two-punch. They’ve been in my head for years already. I just have to write them.

Hazel: As of this conversation, you have 1.8 million followers on TikTok. That’s a lot of people already invested in this world you’ve built. So how does having that audience impact your creative process?

Lynn: If I think about it for too long, I get intimidated by it because I’m like, “OK, what would a stadium of 1.8 million people look like?” I’m from Astoria, so my high school had 600 people. I look at it almost as a responsibility, too, because I do know that I have a really big platform. But I can’t go too deep into it because I am who I am and that’s too many people. I’m a small town girl, those are too big numbers for me.

Hazel: So the spicy scenes in this book, they’re very spicy. They’re very fun, and there’s some creative moments of intimacy throughout the whole book. How important was it for you to have Lily and Bel’s relationship develop in such a specific way?

Lynn: It was really, really important because they’re both very sensual people naturally. Both of them just like intimacy and they got to discover what real emotional intimacy as well as what physical intimacy looked like. So it was really important for me to have that friendship and also have them both just look at each other and go, “yes,” and have zero questions after that. Like, we’ll discuss it, we’ll figure this out. But yeah.

Hazel: Of course, a book set in the afterlife grapples with a lot of ideas surrounding faith, religion, how those can get twisted. In particular, there were some real struggles with Christianity. Can you tell us more about exploring what can be a traumatic relationship?

Lynn: That was drawn a lot from my experiences. I grew up very much in the church, very solidly Christian, until I was in college. I look back on it and it’s a great idea. Christianity makes so much sense in terms of what it values — of being kind to each other, do unto others, all of those things, and community.

But it’s gone so weird. It was like, “OK, what would that look like to have that genuine conversation, especially with God? What do we think God is feeling? What kind of conversations would you want to have?” I had a lot of conversations with a lot of my friends who were also formerly religious. What did we go through? What were we told?

It was that reliance on God — we reach out for comfort or communication or support, and like, I’m having a really bad day or I’m really struggling with this, and it’s like, “you just need to pray about it, like take it before God.”

And I’m like I needed a person. I just needed a hug and maybe a snack. I didn’t want to go sit and pray about it. There were some really hard conversations and hard research that I did to try and explore that and do it in a respectful way without just completely backing away from the conversation at all.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2025/05/04/astoria-oregon-author-book-jaysea-lynn-tiktok-series-hellp-desk-for-who-the-belle-tolls/