On returning after a long break

Wow, where did the past three months go? I turned around and BAM! it was already July. I think part of my disconnect is because Summer arrived a bit later for us than usual. I was fully prepared for rising temperatures back in early May, but with all the rain, we managed to stave off the worst of the heat until right now, here in July.

As you can imagine, life has really come up a lot this year. More specifically, it has bombarded me with its presence the most over the past four-to-six weeks. This has required a shift in my energy and my focus, one that left my writing waiting like a lonely puppy in the corner.

It also doesn’t help that I greatly overcommitted myself throughout the month of June, and as it came to a close, I found myself trying to disentangle from all I had promised I would do. A feat of monumental proportions for a recovering people-pleaser such as myself. Thankfully, I know some really amazing humans and every one of them was so understanding of my need to withdraw inwards in an effort to recalibrate.

It’s funny, though. Literally the very first week of my newly cleared schedule, you know what my brain did? It looked at the freshly opened days and immediately said, Huh…I’m weirdly available. I should probably fill up these empty boxes with tasks and meetings with friends.

Uhm, no brain, that’s not why we cleared everything out to begin with.

It’s been approximately a week and a half since the great calendar purge of 2025, and in that time, I have managed to bring myself back to the things I find most important, one of which is writing.

While I took my first baby steps towards the abandoned puppy in the corner that was my writing practice, I simultaneously picked up my own novel after having set it aside for just as many months. I was surprised to find myself growing more and more inspired to work on my second novel the deeper I fell into A Daisy in Lily’s Valley. Doing so almost felt as if I were reading someone else’s work, except there were memories attached to each chapter, each scene. And those memories helped to remind me just how far my novel came from that first draft. That it didn’t come out perfectly, it took a lot of refining and layering to get it to the place I wanted it prior to publishing.

I’ve also found that I am currently in a headspace where I don’t mind admitting. . . I think I might be a pretty good writer. I mean, if I came across my work in the bookstore (and it wasn’t written by me but someone else), I’d pick it up and really enjoy reading it. I’d fall in love with the characters and the subtle humor and the invisible words hidden between the printed words on the page. And that feels really weird to say out loud, but also deeply true. Which is kind of thrilling.

So, with my re-read of ADILV done and my calendar almost entirely blank for both July and August, I have set a new goal for myself: To show up to the page and write.

I’d honestly love it if I could manage to write every single day, but I’m not sure that is a realistic goal; instead, I’m aiming to write maybe 5 or 6 days of the week. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be writing my next novel, either. My goal is to simply show up to my computer and let whatever needs to come out come out. Yesterday, that meant writing the general outline of my monthly newsletter. Today, it looks like sitting down with a cup of chocolate mint tea and finalizing this blog post right here. Tomorrow I might section off the entire day and dedicate it to navigating my character through her next big adventure.

The point is, it doesn’t matter what I write, just that I fall back into the habit of writing.

And it’s kind of funny. Looking back at when I wrote that first draft of ADILV I realized, this is about the same time I had come back from a writing break then, too. Perhaps this is a big part of my process? Taking a few false starts before diving completely into the work and uncovering the juicy center of the story. I guess I won’t know until I start on my third book, but that is quite a ways away.