August 22nd, 2025

I haven’t looked at my website’s contents since, well, September 12th, 2022. (See my last post.) Fortunately, not many other people have either. 😊 Funny thing to say when I’m paying for it. 

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I actually don’t know why I’m updating, considering I always thought I’d revamp this website as a gift to myself when I finally got that elusive publishing deal. I haven’t put much heart into it yet and I’m also super private. I’ve just reread things I’ve written here and cringed a bit, wondering who that person was. Goes to show that even when you’re older, you might keep changing (or growing?). 

Anyway. Here’s some honesty: I’ve truly been away because the last couple of years have been ROUGH. It’s not about my writing. My skin in that area is plenty thick, and I have a healthy understanding of how the publishing world functions and how and why I might not fit into it. But dealing with family trauma is something else entirely. So I’ve taken a hiatus from writing and my publishing dreams to be a caregiver. 

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Oh, I’ve been writing angsty poetry here and there and I’ve entered a couple of flash fiction contests too. At one point I made it through two rounds of voting before being cut. I made it to the second round of another contest as well. I celebrated that. And I’ve started a new novel. But I haven’t fully, 100% committed to it. It’s in my mind, the characters are clamoring for attention, but I’m distracted, busy, dealing with imposter syndrome, and wondering very realistically if my voice even matters in the YA literature world. The cruelty of the real world continues to surprise me every day. I never thought it would hit so close to home, or that worst-case scenarios would keep coming true every day. Why does it continue to surprise me then? I feel generally sorry all the time. I don’t know what to say. And I’m pretty sure I’m not the one who should be speaking.

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But what I’m really trying to talk about here is my writing life, and how I shelved Netted Chain Creek, my most recent, finished novel. This is not unusual for us authors, I know. We spend years on a book, only to decide, “Okay, you’re just another relationship to learn from. Maybe we’ll meet again, maybe not.” I can’t imagine that most people could do this. From the outside it must look like a complete waste of time. You’re hunched over a screen until your eyes cross, and your fingers feel like they don’t belong on your hands anymore. The sedentary nature of it is no doubt terrible for my health. It’s unpaid, truly difficult, emotional work that I don’t even want to show anyone anymore. My book seemed alive, but now its heart has simply stopped. 

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Here’s the whole story of its demise: I sent the book out to four beta readers with high hopes. All are wonderful writers and readers. I trust their opinions. Three of the four read my previous book Dear Bones and gave me such consistent, positive feedback. But you never know how readers will respond to your latest writing, so I sent out NCC with my fingers crossed. 

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One beta reader thought it was too dark, even creepy, and she couldn’t relate to either main character. I think it might’ve been a struggle for her to get through it. Two beta readers loved it overall. (One of those writers also writes darker YA contemporary with difficult characters and darker themes, so this seemed to fit.) The fourth beta reader said she was so sad while reading it but added that this was a testament to how well I develop real characters. (I’ll take that.) But did I want my YA readers to finish the last page feeling that depressed? (Like I bulldozed them?) Just for some context, one of my characters is dealing with some significant emotional and at times physical abuse in her home. But here I was, thinking I had written a hopeful ending—even for her. Of course, the reader sees that her journey to healing only begins when she is middle-aged, because the book has two timelines. She suffers tremendously from her childhood trauma until middle age. That makes sense for a YA book. Sigh. 

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When you get feedback that’s kind of all over the place, it feels a bit like whiplash. It’s personal, too, but I can handle taking a deep dive into my own psyche. What’s clear to me is that while I live my real life pretty optimistic and I laugh a lot, there’s a darkness that seeps into my writing—a darkness that must need to creep out. My characters deal with a LOT. It’s not necessarily what I’ve experienced personally, but it’s where my creative mind goes. I know what it’s like to face hard things. Maybe it’s too much for adolescent books (although I will scream out that many, many YA books deal with intensely heavy content—hello, Girl in Pieces—and we do need to represent the reality that a lot of real young adults are facing very hard things in their lives). But I digress…

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I took all my beta readers’ feedback to heart. Made spreadsheets. Went sentence by sentence to clarify/correct things if needed. The easy stuff. Then I started on some much larger revisions. Moved chapters around. Rewrote things. Started one draft that added a whole new POV, just to see how it worked. I was still hopeful and motivated. Willing to put in the effort and hours. After all, I’d been working on this book for years; I couldn’t give up.

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Mostly I considered the words of the fourth beta reader. I needed to lighten up the story. I sincerely didn’t want to make people sad. In the back of my mind I kept thinking about Dear Bones. It got rave reviews from everyone who read it, way different than the response I got for NCC. But did I get a publishing deal for Dear Bones? No. And a lot of the consistent feedback from publishers was: “This is just too heavy for today’s market.” It was right after Covid and quarantine. No one wanted my words. I even got: “We’re looking for happy, cheerful romance OR dark, twisty horror…not this.” Some editors hated the inclusion of Covid. “We don’t want to think about it, much less read about it.” (I kind of get it. But it still irked me that we might be erasing history and not representing those intense, challenging, scary years that today’s teens faced.) 

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So…leave it to me to follow up Dear Bones with something even darker…a work that alludes to a forlorn ghost that may or may not exist, unmanageable grief, lies, extreme family dysfunction, and lifelong regrets…Facepalm. So I worked on restructuring the ending of NCC so that it WAS more hopeful. I tried to give my characters more of a break throughout the story. I took away some conflict. 

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Then I sent the revision to my agent. And…her feedback was that it was too dark and too sad. (“Remember what happened with Dear Bones?” Oops, yes, I did.) She suggested I rewrite the “lighter” character’s POV, not the darker one’s. She suggested I needed more of a balance. Maybe some more humor. Some light romance, perhaps? She was right (of course, she's amazing) and I knew it then and I know it now.

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“Okay!” I thought, after digesting the feedback. “I can do this! No problem.”

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Could I do it? Not really. The bones were already in place. I didn’t know how to break them and reset them. I didn’t know how to fit the puzzle pieces of an intricate plot together with an all-new character. I killed the original one, but this new one wouldn't stick. I don’t know how many hours I put into trying to fix something so complex. Ultimately, I think the story tried to do too much overall. (Which is why I could never complete a sensible query.) But still I tried. 

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Then tragedy struck my family. And I couldn’t focus on anything but that. Something has also happened to my attention span during this time as well. My concentration is shot. I stopped reading. (Except for the internet which makes me miserable.) BUT I should say that I did cut myself off from the hateful nature of Elon’s Twitter—which was once such a happy place for writers. Somehow still knowing it exists, though—that those views still exist—well, that still weighs on me.

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My publishing dream is so deeply personal, and it’s only mine. No one checks in with me to make sure it’s getting done. I don’t clock hours. I can’t get fired. I have to prioritize it and be my own boss, which is challenging for me. I don’t talk about it much. I carry it with me and I imagine most people wouldn’t understand it. I don’t understand it. How can I put that many hours—so much of my heart—into a book that might not mean anything to anyone else? That my words might totally miss the mark? I can’t explain it.

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My new book has this really easy to define plot. I didn’t mean to go the YA contemporary route again, but it’s what my mind did. This book is easy to explain (kind of, because an intrusive voice still likes to enter my head telling me I’m making no sense and my ideas are stupid…yes, not my kindest inner dialogue). I have a complete outline that was fairly easy to put together. It has a beginning, middle, climax, end. A query draft was fairly easy to write. (What the heck? When does that happen?) I am trying to SIMPLIFY. Start small, build out. This story is clearly influenced by my own recent life experiences, but it’s fiction. And my main character is everything I was trying to rewrite in NCC but couldn’t. She’s upbeat, driven, funny, anxious. Loves her feisty grandmother to pieces. 

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Time keeps passing and life is going to keep happening. My family is everything to me, always, but writing won’t disappear. It’s not something I’ll retire from. And, I don’t know, maybe I’ll never get published. It’s really a scary thought anyway, honestly. Being that exposed. But I think I’ll just keep trying with this much intensity and this much dedication to improving. I have to.

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This was long and I don't care.