Fuck.

And also… fuck.

Now that I’ve gotten that out of my system, let’s talk about how I disappeared for *checks notes* almost a year.

Marketing Burn-Out

I think I could make a blog post on this subject by itself, but for now, I’ll just say that I felt the need to take some time off from marketing and content creation, which spilled over into the blog and email newsletter. Consistent content creation is difficult when you only have one book out, and hyping an up-coming book is hard when you’re struggling for various reasons to finish it.

I decided to give myself a short break from trying to do both at once. I initially intended to take a break for a month, and then that break… just kept going. Big life events started to take shape (see below), and I started to question whether this “marketing content creator” hamster wheel was really what I wanted from my indie author journey.

Goodbye, Florida Man

In the midst of grappling with questions around how I wanted to continue my author journey, things happened with my (non-writing) career that put me on a trajectory for a major life change.

My husband and I are planning to move.

That probably doesn’t sound like that big of a deal and wouldn’t be for most people, but my husband has lived here practically his entire life, and I’ve lived here for the past 22 years.

In fact, I’ve lived on this same street for 22 years because my parents’ house was just 2 blocks down from the one my husband bought. We’ve spent the past decade turning our house into something truly unique and special, which made this decision, and all of the discussions around it, especially difficult.

We’re both excited and nervous, but mostly excited. And just as there was a lot of discussion before we arrived at this decision, there’s a lot to do before we get where we’re going.

Oh… Right… the Book

In the background of all this, I have still been working on the book, I promise. It’s just, as always, been more slowly than I would like. I think I mentioned before that Part 3 (out of 4) has the most plot snarls, and while I’ve done a lot to smooth those out, that means I also have to go back and smooth out the prose.

Of course, aside from the marketing break and the moving, there have been other distractions in the past few months, like… you know… the world feeling like it’s on fire all the time. Sometimes literally.

During times like these, it’s hard to understand my worth as a writer. I’m not capturing the current moment in some witty or reflective way. I’m not writing the next great rebellion epic. With this story, at least, I’m just writing out my own truth and trauma, and while I don’t think there’s anything at all wrong with art as self-reflection, I do wonder if everyone’s constant compulsion to look inward (and ignore those around them) might be part of how we got here.

It just feels silly somedays to sit down to my not-a-vampire post-post apocalypse story while all the horrors of modernity are rattling around in the back of my head. I’ve even thought of creating a Substack or another blog to vent those thoughts, as I don’t believe they belong here.

Despite all of that, I don’t want to quit or postpone Nightlands any further. I’m too close to finishing for that. Besides which, with book bans and censorship laws at an all-time high, some of which may even attempt to target authors, I guess writing at all is an act of rebellion.¹

In additional to all of that (isn’t that enough, though?) I feel like my attention span and sense of creativity have suffered from a combination of doomscrolling addiction and falling too deeply into the hermit hole. I have a lot of thoughts on all that too, but again, it might be best saved for another post.

I guess I can wrap all of this up for now by saying I’m alive, I’m still writing, and big things are happening. I want to keep in touch more, but also want to do it in a way that works for me, so we’ll see how that unfolds.

Until then, remember to put the doom-screens away from time to time, read all the books they tell you not to, and hug your people every chance you get.

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¹ This is where people tend to roll their eyes and say “that can’t happen here.” I really need everyone to understand that WE keep it from happening here, and WE can’t do that when a lot of us aren’t paying attention or taking it seriously.