I thought my previous newsletter would be my last for 2024, but it turns out that I have more to say.
I’ve been burnt out for a long time. That happens when you are living in survival mode for months on end.
Okay, years.
We collided with some tough times in the fall of 2022 and, when I’m being very honest with myself and giving myself time to reflect, the “tough” hasn’t really let up. It’s been a bumpy slide downhill, and each new bottom has revealed itself to be a trapdoor to further slippage…down, down, down.
I have cracked open the door a few times before, but with my husband’s permission, I think I’m ready to share a little more with the hope that someone else out there might find comfort in knowing that they aren’t alone.
Here We Go…
CONTENT WARNING: suicide, substance abuse
My husband is an alcoholic. We’ve known this for a long time, and he was doing a passable job “managing” it without a lot of interventions. As anyone with any experience surrounding substance abuse knows, the “managing” never lasts. That’s why it’s a problem in the first place.
I do want to lead with a good note: On Sunday, we celebrated a year of his sobriety.
How did we get here?
Back in the fall of 2022, things took a very sharp turn. My husband was one of six kids. His oldest brother, who suffered with mental health and addiction struggles himself, was in a bad place. In early September of 2022, that brother was killed in a car accident. His brother was a pedestrian who ran into oncoming traffic.
My husband’s drinking took a turn. I think I knew it, but he was hiding it so well, and I was probably lying to myself quite a bit.
Then, in the middle of December in 2022, my husband’s youngest brother, who also suffered from mental health and addiction issues, disappeared. It was in the news. All over social media. Over a month later, his body was discovered–a victim of suicide.
As you can imagine, my husband’s drinking took off like a cancer. I know he was using alcohol to numb the pain. He blamed himself for both of their tragic ends. In truth, he probably still does, but that is for my husband and his therapist to sort out–therapy that he began a few weeks before getting sober. Therapy, it turns out, was not enough. He needs the twelve steps and the fellowship of other addicts to bolster him. There is no shame in that.
He did everything he could to hide his drinking from me, which resulted in horrible and dangerous decision-making. I confronted him repeatedly, and he denied, denied, denied. Several times, he disappeared for the night, and the kids and I would wake up in the morning with no idea where he had gone, and I would have to hustle them and myself out of the house to school and work with the weight of that worry pressing on us.
I don’t know exactly which of several moments was “the one” that pushed him to a place where he could accept help, but eventually, a few days before Christmas 2023, I convinced him to go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. That was the first day of his sobriety. He attended ninety meetings in ninety days and still goes more than three times a week–usually five to six.
This change has been all positive, but the fun thing about parenting and existing in general is that as long as you are breathing and have people you care about in your life, there will be fresh new problems. The stress of late 2022 through all of 2023 felt like a firehose. 2024 felt like someone was incrementally closing off that hose. Now, it’s a steady drip because the worry of relapse will never go away completely, and I can only turn down the hyper-vigilance so much.
Why am I sharing this?
The reason it feels important to me that I share this much is because I am so proud of him, yes, but of myself–and this does, in a strange way, tie back into writing and creating. I promise that I’ll get there.
About two weeks before he finally decided to get sober, I gave up on the pretense of social media. My own mental health was fraying at the ends, and I needed a break, which is when I took a hiatus from social media, but I knew I needed to keep some connections alive to help me through. I was super brave and way outside my comfort zone and asked my followers if any wanted to stay in touch. Since then, I’ve established the most crucial friends that I’ve ever had on this journey–Michelle D, Michelle B, Casey, and Kristy, I love you from the bottom of my heart. The five of us have been connecting daily for an entire year now, and they have been a lifeline for me in ways I’m sure they don’t even realize and that I, a person who allegedly writes a lot, cannot find words to express.
That above paragraph is key to understanding how all of this circles back to writing and creating. It goes without saying, but I’m saying it anyway: their opinions and feedback are the ones I prioritize.
So when this core group suggests that maybe I need to “take a break” from writing, I seriously consider it from all angles. To be super, super clear: the break almost always came up in the context of me spinning out about querying–not about the actual writing of words in stories. Was I burnt out most of the year? Absolutely. Was querying while going through all of this the best thing for my mental health? I mean, no. Querying is bad for mental health on a great day.
I really started to wonder: why do I keep at this? I haven’t written brand new words in months.Will I ever again?
Dear reader, the truth is simple: Yes, I will write new words, and no I cannot stop writing, but I sure as hell can stop querying any time I want. Like right now. I haven’t sent a new query on BEFORE THE BRIDGE FREEZES since early December–and that one resulted in a full request days later from the biggest agent who has ever requested from me, and I died a little and might be a ghost but we’re going to ignore this little tangent and barrel on to the actual purpose of this newsletter.
Why I write:
I write because it is an escape that I can control.
I write because I enjoy the way words work together to capture an emotion, an image, a precipitous or poignant moment.
I write because–as long as I separate the outcome from the process–I love stories. I love the way small details interlock to create powerful emotions, like the music in BEFORE THE BRIDGE FREEZES or Sophie’s notebook in KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD.
I write because when I hit flow, it is a true release from all the other pressures in my life.
I write because it feels like play, like getting lost in a safe place.
I write because I can exorcize my emotional demons–otherwise they might devour me from the inside.
All of those reasons are enough. I don’t also need to earn money from this–though it sure would be nice!
(makes side note to print and pin this above my writing desk as a reminder when I’m whining about the business side of writing)
A RETROSPECTIVE
I owe it to myself and anyone else who might feel “less than” for not achieving huge things in 2024 to compile this year-end retrospective. I was so entrenched with survival mode that I didn't have the capacity to set a single goal for 2024. Yet, I am incredibly proud of all that I accomplished.
Proudest Accomplishments:
I wrote 113,387 new words this year.
84,693 towards BEFORE THE BRIDGE FREEZES.
5,733 towards revisions on KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD.
4,847 towards a brief revision on my sci-fi before kicking it out a few times into the query trenches.
18,114 towards a work-in-progress that henceforth shall be called GRAFFITI GIRL.
I made the decision to publish my young adult speculative thriller KINGS OF THE NEW WORLD as a serial publication on my Patreon and have shared or scheduled the first eighteen chapters.
I finished writing my young adult historical horror romance paranormal mystery thriller (what even is this book?) BEFORE THE BRIDGE FREEZES, revised it, and began querying it. I have received five full manuscript requests. Two are still out there (only sent two weeks ago).
I sent over 100 queries, on three different projects. Listen, I was really organized about it. There was a spreadsheet with multiple tabs involved, and one of those projects is my all-time favorite sci-fi. I only send queries out on that when an agent seems to be looking for sci-fi, but sci-fi appears to be currently dead in young and new adult, so…100% rejection rate on those few queries thus far. I won’t break down the numbers across all three projects because this started in 2023, and I frankly don’t have the mental space to go back and examine those stats so specifically. Every time you send something out like this, courage is required. Don’t scoff at the attempts.
Not including this edition, I have written five newsletters this year, and they all have above a 60% open rate on email, which is pretty impressive. My average view is 94, which is more than double my subscriber count. All this to say, people out there are finding value in what I’m sharing, and that makes me really happy.
I completed my reading challenge by reading 36 books. It was close.
Biggest takeaways and lessons from 2024:
As much as I loathe exercise, it does, in fact, improve my mood. Ugh. Why does this have to be true? (This is the second year in a row that I’ve proven this to be true sadly.)
Promoting your work is providing a service for others: connecting them with a story they might love. (I am still working on my comfort with this.)
A hybrid career in writing is valid.
Libraries are amazing resources, but waiting for a hold can really break a person’s resolve.
Sometimes, you have to be the one to reach out and make friends, even if it is way outside your comfort zone. Please see above for evidence.
Splurge on experiences, not stuff. I’m pretty sure my kids will remember traveling to Cleveland for the total solar eclipse for the rest of their lives. I doubt they will remember what they got for their birthdays this year–mainly because I don’t remember either.
Ask for help when you need it. Someone always seems to come through.
LOOKING FORWARD
As we head into 2025, I once again am not going to make any concrete goals–no word counts to hit or anything like that. As always, I want to remind anyone who’s reading this that if you are making goals for the new year, remember to keep those goals squarely within the limits of what you independently have the power to accomplish. Let’s steer clear of the strange manifestation goals of “I will land an agent” and other magical thinking nonsense–none of that will help you should you fall on hard times; all it will do is add “evidence” that the universe somehow loves you a little less. Why invite that into your life?
Since 2019, I have typically selected a mantra, word, or words to help usher me into the new year.
2024 … I didn’t set any kind of intention for 2024 because, as I said above, the end of 2023 was a dark time. I was in survival mode, and if you’ve ever been living in survival mode, you know that thinking about the future can feel like pouring acid on an open wound. There’s a reason why they say to take things “one day at a time.”
Sitting at the precipice of 2025, we are grappling with some unfortunate and new, scary worries while the big one from last year seems to be in the rearview. Whether I have simply learned to exist in survival mode or whether things truly are getting better remains to be seen, but I have the mental space to dedicate a word for 2025.
NOURISH
I’ve always thought of “thriving” as the opposite of “survival mode” but thrive has a little too much insistence and implication of busyness and “hard work” associated with it. Thrive lead me to flourish, which was almost my word, but the real question for me is: how can I take better care of myself in the new year so that I can flourish and thrive? Because really, when my friends were suggesting that I take a break, I know that they really meant that I needed to pause on the rat race mentality of my creativity and just take care of me.
Which is how I landed on NOURISH.
I would also like some applause for I have even made a little list of things I can do when I want to nourish myself.
Entertaining Distractions
I finally started watching Shrinking on AppleTV. It made me tear up a few times, which annoyed me because feelings can give me the ick, but…it’s really good. The characters are excellent, the dialogue superb.
I finished season one of Outer Banks. It’s such a great show for keeping me entertained during the aforementioned exercise that’s good for my little mood.
The Whispering Night by Susan Dennard was a masterful conclusion to the trilogy, which I highly recommend. I finally read The Westing Game because it has come up on so many lists in the past and it was massively on sale at some point, so it was waiting on my Kindle for me. I enjoyed all the little puzzles within the story. Juniper and Thorn by Ava Reid was a great read, too. It convinced me that I was on the right track with the way I wrote my horror, and that was affirming. This was also the first time I have ever read an entire book as an audiobook without switching between audio and ebook. Can confirm that I lost nothing by only listening to the audio with the exception of how to spell a few of the names and, in the end, who cares?
Also, I recently discovered Lady Whistlethreads, and wow. I love it so much. Check it out!
Words of Wisdom
Instead of finding a quote to summarize all my thoughts and feelings at this moment in time, I want to share a link to Beth Revis’s most recent newsletter, which brilliantly captures the value in taking risks and the important role that failure plays in our success.
And with that, for real this time, signing off on 2024 and ushering in 2025—ready or not.
Until next time,
😭 I'm so glad we all had each other through this shitstorm of a year. I hope you know I'm going to hold you to your commitment to nourishment ❤️
Brave, honest blog. I have a family relative who suffered with alcoholism and it's so hard. Keep going on your writing journey!