Earlier in this long phase of unemployment, I had a mentor who was experiencing an extended spell of joblessness, too.

“I pray for closed doors,” she told me.

That sounded counterintuitive. I was praying for open doors.

“If it’s not the right opportunity, I don’t want to waste time and energy on it,” she explained. “So I pray that if a door is wrong — at least for me, at this time in my life — it will close quickly.”

That made sense in theory.

In practice, she and I both struggled to remain hopeful as door after door closed. Doors we thought would surely open didn’t, or they opened just a crack, and we let ourselves get excited about walking through — only for them to slam in our faces.

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A few weeks ago, my friend Amanda Lunday and I took a field trip to conduct some research for our various writing projects.

Similarly to when I realized, last summer, that I didn’t know a thing about gold mining and there was a relevant museum in my backyard, I’d just run into a scene where my characters were traveling by train, and I needed help. Online research told me that the journey would take six to eight days, or 36 hours. Obviously, those are very different time frames that potentially impacted the way I narrated the journey.

To do a deep dive and hopefully get some answers, I checked locally and discovered the Pikes Peak Trolley Museum, which also offers some info about trains.

We got a fantastic tour from John Haney, author of the book Pikes Peak Trolleys, who provided a wealth of information about streetcars in Southern Colorado and showed us the museum’s collection of old trolleys, including one that served as a tiny house after its retirement, and another that’s being restored right now.

After being an actual late 19th-century trolley, I realized that the chapters in which my slight 17-year-old FMC hauls a bulky baby carriage up and down a series of streetcar steps are not going to work. (Yes, I had her doing this multiple times.) So that will need to be revised.

I also learned that the ceilings of train depots and roundhouses turned black from the steam, so that’s a fun detail that I might be able to slip into a description at some point.

While the museum didn’t have a restored Pullman car, we did get to tour a caboose and learn about living space and working conditions on the trains, which was fascinating.

They also displayed an 1891 map that proved extremely useful, as it showed the exact railroad line and route my character would take—the Chicago, Rock Island, & Pacific. I could see which cities she would travel through on her journey, which may or may not matter in the final draft (I’m still toying with the timing for a key telegram) but is cool to know either way.

I will note that we were at the museum on a 90+ degree day. We’d brought our own water, and we were offered more inside, and we still didn’t have enough. This is an old roundhouse without air conditioning. Not only was it very hot, but the air was also extremely musty. For people with mold allergies, it’s a challenging environment. I think we both were struggling to breathe by the time we got to the outside part of the tour. If I make a return visit, I’ll load up on allergy meds beforehand and plan to go on a more temperate day!

But it’s also abundantly clear that this museum is a labor of love by volunteers who live, eat, and breathe trains and trolleys. The level of knowledge and information was incredible. Mr. Haney obviously loves his job and answered questions very thoroughly and with passion. For anyone in the area who’s interested in streetcars and trolleys, or the history of transportation more broadly, I recommend this museum as a must-visit.

We decided to continue with the train theme by having lunch at Brakeman’s, a burger place in the old depot downtown.

Then we went to the Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum, which occupies the old courthouse and is operated by the city. The current exhibits were mostly new since the last time I was there. They feature an A-Z of the Pikes Peak Region, a “150 objects for 150 years” local history snapshot, and “Until Forever Comes: This Is Ute Homeland.”

The museum also reconstructed several rooms from the house of local author Helen Hunt Jackson (which have been there since my childhood) and a space focused on the health industry, which centered on the mineral hot springs in Manitou and sanitoriums. People with tuberculosis traveled here from all over because of the dry air. (On a personal note, my great-grandfather passed away in eastern Colorado en route from Minnesota to the Front Range for that exact purpose.)

Amanda’s research interests are hers to share, so I’ll just say that at this stop, I wasn’t trying to gain specific information as much as see clothes and furnishings from the era about which I’m writing. Sometimes I struggle to visualize what a curtain or a rug or a dress might have looked like. It’s helpful to view vintage items, not so I can copy them, but just to get ideas.

We also learned about Fannie Mae (Bragg) Duncan, an African-American businesswoman who owned a downtown jazz club for decades and pioneered racial integration here. I grew up in Colorado Springs, yet had never heard of this remarkable woman. I’m not sure whether that reflects the racism inherent in my K-12 education, a puritanical aversion to any discussion of nightlife, or (most likely) both. Anyway, I found the display about her life intriguing, and I hope to someday track down a copy of her memoir, Everybody Welcome, to learn more.

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Back in April (I can’t believe it was that long ago; the summer has flown), I came to the ultimately liberating decision to chop the first 70 pages of my novel.

Rather than leave those pages on the cutting-room floor, though, I saved the draft on my Cloud account and started a new version.

A few weeks ago, I came to another crossroads. I had 185 pages I was happy with, and without actually rereading anything, I felt like the latest revision of the novel’s first half had done what it needed to do.

But my FMC was on the cusp of a really, really tough choice that I did not want her to have to make. I spent several days trying to find a way to avoid forcing her to make that choice, to figure out how (and whether) the book might work without it.

And then I got a reminder of why having good writer friends is so important.

I had lunch with Marta Lane (check out her “Living with Big Dreams” Substack!) in the beer garden at a local German restaurant.

And we talked writing, as we do. And she cared enough about both me and my book to ask hard questions—questions to which I didn’t have answers, questions that probably made my lower lip jut out like a toddler about to have a temper tantrum.

Questions that sent me reeling, to be honest. I wondered whether anything I’d done was salvageable, whether I was going in entirely the wrong direction.

Around that time, I found myself juggling a couple of freelance editing projects and a volunteer commitment, so, both by necessity and by choice, I stepped away from the MS for a bit.

These breaks have been more crucial to my process than I ever imagined.

Then I went on a research jaunt with Amanda Lunday, another writer friend. (I’ll probably share more about this trip in a later post.)

Between museums, we stopped for lunch and talked writing, as we do. And I discussed Marta’s questions and how I didn’t know the answers, and I wondered whether that meant my book didn’t have a through-line or my FMC wasn’t compelling enough.

Amanda asked more questions that helped me talk through motives and choices. And I finally started to feel like I could see a way through the thicket.

Before I continued with my revisions or cemented any choices, however, I decided to read those first pages aloud (a suggestion that Marta passed along from Boo Walker).

And, dear readers, my new opening pages were terrible. They were so dry and boring that I could barely stumble through them.

It turned out that, instead of starting too early in the story, this time around I’d started too late. Chapter 1 opened with a choice that, as Marta helped me understand, didn’t make sense without some context. Instead of providing that context in an organic way, I’d tried to patch it in with flashbacks and scenes where people stood around indulging in explication-heavy arguments.

Luckily, I still had those opening 70 pages, stored in the old draft on the Cloud. I pasted them back into the working MS and then cut a significant number of them— the same delays I’d axed before, which kept me from getting to the story.

And now I’m back to starting where I started three drafts ago. AKA I probably should have trusted my earlier instincts, but I’m also glad I experimented with a few different ways in. Now I feel less random about it, more like, yeah, this is the entry point that works.

But adding those chapters back poses another challenge. I’ve now got an unwieldy doc that’s 461 double-spaced pages, 125K words (but hey, it was 133K three days ago, so I’m heading in the right direction!). That means I need to find places to trim a lot of words, while still leaving room to develop some characters and actions in later chapters, because the whole thing needs to hit closer to 100K.

That’s going to involve murdering more darlings. There’s no way to avoid that.

Oh, and that hard choice I didn’t want the character to have to make? I’ve realized she has to make it. The story isn’t going to land the same way if she doesn’t.

But it’s going to be tough to write.

On Tuesday, I took my car for maintenance that I thought would be done within an hour. It ended up being four. (My husband was at work, but some kind friends offered to pick me up and take me home, then drive me back when my car was ready. If I’d had any inkling it would take that long, I would have accepted!)

Anyway, on the way out the door, I’d grabbed a couple titles off my TBR stack. One of them was Julie Clark’s The Ghostwriter, most of which I read while sitting on the hard chair in the auto repair shop, and which I absolutely loved.

And it was exactly what I needed to read that day, because I ran across this piece of dialogue:

“I’m going to give you the same advice I give all young authors I mentor. You can’t protect your characters” (p. 81 in the paperback edition; italics in the original).

I’ve tried so hard to protect my FMC.

And I can’t.

This felt like confirmation: She has to make that hard choice. You can’t protect your character, Monique.

I have to walk through it with her.

I have to hope readers will love her enough to take that journey, too.

And now I’m going back to the MS, to do my level best to make that happen.

Last Thursday—July 23—would have been my dad’s 80th birthday.

My mom, husband, and I celebrated with a trip to the Flying W Ranch, one of Dad’s favorite places, on Sunday. We ate chuckwagon fare and listened to the cowboy tunes he loved. We saw wild bighorn sheep and captive (but not tame) bison.

The Flying W Wranglers—the Western band who provide musical accompaniment—did a rendition of Merle Haggard’s “Colorado” that my dad often listened to on CD. He loved the chorus:

If God doesn’t live in Colorado, I bet that’s where he spends most of his time.

That ran through my mind on Sunday.

I hope you enjoy these photos from our visit. I hope you get at least a glimpse of what Dad loved so much about the Flying W Ranch and about the Colorado Front Range.

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E.L. Chen’s Slasher Summer is an entertaining tribute to 80s (and beyond) slasher films. If you’re a fan of Halloween, Friday the 13th, Nightmare on Elm Street, Scream, and similar franchises, there’s a lot to love here—from character names to the setting of a cabin by the evocatively named Cedar Lake. There’s even a legacy local film, Slasher, which has launched a cottage industry of memorabilia, a summer festival, and theatrical reenactments.

And of course there’s an axe-wielding, masked killer stalking a group of young adults savvy enough to quickly realize they’re in a real-life slasher movie and to accordingly engage with (or ignore) the tropes.

As high school students, the seven main characters—Carrie, Jen, Tiffany, Jason, Michael, Patrick, and Freddy—formed a club, the Jumpscare Society, to celebrate horror films. They also served as the live cast for summer showings of Slasher, playing stereotypical characters that reflected many of their real-life identities.

But after a betrayal early in their senior year, Carrie moved away to live with her dad and hasn’t seen any of them since.

Four years later, at Patrick’s urging, they reunite at the Slasher cabin in the woods—the scene of the filming and now a rental filled with props and memorabilia. Unbeknownst to the others, Jen has also invited Carrie, whose presence promises to bring old rivalries, scores, and resentments to the surface.

But then a masked figure dressed in the Slasher’s signature gray hoodie and red plaid coat begins stalking them…

The main cast consists of the seven Jumpscare Society members, all of whose names hearken back to one or more horror icons, and the book is told in their shifting POVs:

• Carrie, like her namesake in the Stephen King novel, is the virginal daughter of an overly religious single mom. Sweet, shy, and meek, she always played the Final Girl in the Slasher cast, until the high school scandal changed her life. Her therapist, Wes, has encouraged her to return to Cedar Lake to find resolution.

• Jen is a lesbian Latina Goth art student, whose cynicism and desire to stir things up keep her friends on their toes.

• Tiffany, her unlikely best friend, is a blond cheerleader who only joined the Jumpscare Society because her sometime boyfriend, Jason, did. Their on-again, off-again relationship has entailed years of cheating, manipulation, breakups and makeups, but now Jason seems to be moving on while Tiffany is ready for a permanent commitment—despite a fling with her sexy TA, Clive.

• For his part, Jason is a skilled football player less interested in going pro than in making a positive impact with his life. Openly bi, his past includes not only the relationship with Tiffany but also a fling with a basketball player and a weighted moment with Patrick that continues to resonate with them both.

• His cousin, Michael, grew up across the hall from Carrie in the apartment building where they both lived. The son of two alcoholic parents, Michael was often bullied and mocked in school, and he dwelled in Jason’s shadow, particularly after Jason’s parents took him in. Now a student at MIT and a tech-bro-in-training, he returns to Cedar Lake to show his old high school classmates that they underestimated him.

• Patrick is a preppy, gay Black man studying economics at Harvard and learning to cook as a hobby. His sister, Clare, was strangled in her sorority years earlier, leading him to found the Jumpscare Society after he moved to Cedar Lake.

• Freddy, a stoner who cares for his parents and works as a janitor at the movie theater, is trying to write his own slasher screenplay. He and Carrie were among the few Asian-American students in their school, so people often assumed they were related or dating.

In addition to the core seven and true to genre conventions, there are outsiders who might turn out to be the Slasher or additional victims: Carrie’s abusive ex, Daniel, who leaves her threatening voicemails and has been stalking her; and Russ, a park ranger whose mother refused to let him join the Jumpscare Society in high school and who turns up in suspicious circumstances.

The book is campy and fast-paced without taking itself too seriously. As a fan of slasher films, I delighted in the Easter eggs sprinkled throughout (and I’m sure there are many others I missed, as my genre knowledge is not as exhaustive as Chen’s clearly is!).

Mild spoilers follow:

One criticism I’ve read is that the story is predictable. Maybe that’s true, in that the book follows well-established slasher tropes—and I’d even argue that some predictability is part of what genre fans adore.

The phones will not work.

The car tires will be slashed.

The intruder who’s knocked unconscious will suspiciously disappear.

People will die in gruesome and graphic ways.

As always, splitting up is a really bad idea, and as always, our cast does it anyway.

I semi-guessed who the Slasher/s was/were, but I didn’t really try to figure it out, and after the big reveal, I found myself flipping back to see if I’d missed clues. The identity and motive felt pitch-perfect, totally on-brand for the genre.

And the Final Girl twist (accompanied with hilarious dialogue about who actually gets to claim Final Girl status) was a subversive surprise.

I will say that as much as I enjoyed this book, it probably won’t appeal to people who aren’t fans of (and familiar with) the slasher genre.

For those who are, though, it’s a treat. As someone whose house is decorated with paintings of Freddy, Jason, Michael, and Ghostface, I found Slasher Summer the perfect read for a balmy summer evening out on the patio.

Today I bring you two nonfiction titles I’ve recently read as research for my novel.

I consulted Michael Bronski’s A Queer History of the United States because several of my characters fit into the broad category that we’d now call queer, and I wasn’t sure what that would look like in the early 1890s. How openly could they express their affection to each other? Would they discuss their identities? How would other characters understand (or not) their relationships, and how might they react?

This book did much more than answer those questions. There’s a lot we can only extrapolate from reading between the lines of journals, contemporary books, and court cases. It seems apparent, though, that a defined “queer identity” would have been anachronistic, and openly discussing it would have been risky, given a moral climate in which they could be arrested for engaging in certain sexual acts.

Bronski points out that the ways we understand queerness, gender, and sexual orientation today did not exist throughout much of American history, so defining historical figures as queer is inherently problematic. For example, many women dressed as men to fight in the Civil War. Does that make them all transgender? Some returned to living as women after the war, marrying, and having children. Others spent the rest of their lives presenting as male.

But in a society where women often had very limited options, does the decision to exist as a man reflect a gender identity and/or a strategy for resisting norms to attain greater economic and social freedom? In most cases, we simply don’t have enough insight to say—and those questions might not even have been relevant to the experiences of the people in question.

Bronski presents these kinds of ambiguities as necessary to the examination of queerness in American history. He analyzes the construction of “masculine” and “feminine” ideals, their place in the development of the American psyche, and the way they shaped and challenged the emerging queer community.

As a straight, cis woman, I appreciated these discussions because they helped me understand not just queer history, but also the way femininity has been defined and imposed throughout the past several centuries and the political agendas behind specific concepts of the feminine (and masculine).

And as a writer seeking to respectfully and realistically depict queer relationships, I found the book a treasure trove of useful, thoughtfully presented content.

Gilded Age sexual mores also factor into Betsy Prioleau’s fascinating Diamonds and Deadlines, the biography of Miriam Leslie. Born to a white father and very likely an enslaved mother, Miriam belonged to a family of loosely defined relationships. Her “mother” — the woman who raised her as a daughter but probably was not a blood relative — ran a boarding house and may have been a madam. One “brother” came from unknown origins.

As the family fell on difficult times financially, there is evidence that Miriam turned to prostitution. She also briefly traveled and performed with Lola Montez, who had been the paramour of her brother prior to his mysterious death.

Probably through her demimonde connections, she came to the attention of a Congressman, who introduced her into society. Despite her family’s economic struggles, they remained well-connected, and she possessed the class background to successfully navigate the upper (but not upper upper) echelons.

After a coerced early marriage and annulment, Miriam married an anthropologist, Ephraim G. Squier, whose global exploits had enabled him to indulge in a more sexually adventurous existence than many people of his era. As his wife, Miriam became known as a fashion icon, even attending Lincoln’s inaugural ball.

Later she divorced Squier to marry media magnate Frank Leslie, following a scandal that tore apart his own family. She subsequently moved her lover, Western poet Joaquin Miller, into their home and lived with both men for a decade. She worked beside Leslie to expand the publishing empire, and because of their reach, they were able to counter negative publicity and gossip about their personal lives and her origins.

After Leslie’s death, she took over his businesses and ran them successfully for many years. She also briefly and disastrously married a fourth time, to Oscar Wilde’s brother, Willie.

In a society predicated on whiteness, maleness, and monogamy, she attained a high position despite defying the norms. Yet to do that, she betrayed others like her. She promoted the same moral codes she transgressed, and she actively engaged in racism and classism, denying to others the same opportunities she enjoyed. But at her death, she left her vast fortune to support women’s suffrage.

Reading her story helped me understand how a woman in this society could rise from a scandalous past to attain financial, social, and business success, as well as the tradeoffs she made to keep her status and the strategies she deployed for answering critics.

This is an engaging commentary on the excesses and hypocrisies of the Gilded Age, as well as an important examination of a historical figure who is far less well-known today than she was in her era, when she reigned as a highly influential voice shaping fashion, culture, media, and ideas of womanhood.

The Aspen Acres fire started a week ago yesterday. Hubby and I were running errands that afternoon when we noticed the plume of smoke southwest of us, and we watched through the day as th…

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When I read for pleasure, I often skim. I’m a very good skimmer—it got me through my MA program!—and it often enhances my appreciation and understanding more than a close read does.

I frequently get bogged down otherwise. When I try to absorb every word, my mind wanders. I lose the thread. I reread the same paragraph five times. Skimming requires more intense focus, at least for me, and that in turn usually leads to better retention.

(This probably doesn’t have to be said, but I’ll say it anyway: When I read for the purpose of teaching a text, editing, reviewing, offering feedback, and/or assessing, I’m reading with a microscope. I don’t drift off because I’m focused on specific aspects and I’m writing copious notes. Maybe that’s part of why I’m such an inveterate skimmer when I read for pleasure.)

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That doesn’t make it irrelevant to me, though—quite the opposite. Juneteenth is a day for me to listen and learn, grieve and celebrate.

We cannot begin to address the wrongs of the past if we don’t even know what they are. And I don’t believe communal healing—or forgiveness or redemption or growth—can truly occur without acknowledgement and deep amends.

Ditto for Pride Month.

This year, Juneteenth also coincided with a challenging writing week for me. I’m on the cusp of a pivotal chapter that might be the most difficult to write out of this entire novel. It’s the “raising the stakes” scene, and bad things will happen to my FMC. I don’t want them to happen to her—every atom of me does not want to treat her this way—but her subsequent choices aren’t going to land if readers don’t understand the alternative. Early critiques bore this out.

Even so, I’ve procrastinated for two weeks on writing this particular scene.

One of my goals in this novel is to depict trauma with sensitivity and compassion. Another is to show that trauma isn’t the end of the story—it changes us, it narrows our choices, and often it alters who we are in substantial and painful ways. Trauma costs us things we would never voluntarily give up, whether that’s our sense of safety or trust (in other people and/or God), relationships or professional advancement, our sense of ourselves and how we move in the world, often all of the above. It’s a fire we walk through, and it burns fiercely—consuming not just the detritus we’d like to lose but also pieces of ourselves that we thought were essential to our identity and survival.

And sometimes we come out the other side braver, wiser, stronger, more empathetic, more loving.

The opposite can happen too, of course, and probably it happens more often.

But the story I’m writing is the one where trauma doesn’t win, where it refines and polishes rather than destroys, where the only options you face are paths you would never have chosen, and you have to choose one anyway and, in the process of walking it, find ways to heal and grow and thrive.

How do I write this in a way that feels genuine? And how do I express trauma without gratuitous, excruciating detail? How do I write with authenticity and depth, without causing unnecessary harm to anyone (myself, readers, the characters)?

So I’ve been seeking out other writers who tackle trauma, whose work can offer templates for what to do (and not do).

And these threads came together in my Juneteenth read, Burn Down Master’s House by Clay Cane. (Check him out on Substack!)

Spoilers follow. You’ve been warned.

This is a raw, brutal, violent, yet triumphant novel. It’s about human beings—Luke and Henri, Ruby and Josephine, Mama Bess, Larkin and Charity, Solomon and Emma Jane and Abram—who are treated as property, degraded in unimaginable ways, yet who retain their humanity and, most crucially, their ability to love and hope, care for each other, and forge a future.

In his author’s notes, Cane talks about how he took real names and stories of people who were enslaved—people about whom, in some cases, little is known; people whose names and lives and fragments of their stories appeared in memoirs, court documents, or historical records. He fleshes them out, gives them histories and families, friends and lovers, hopes and goals.

A few months ago I reflected on certain writers who depict women’s trauma with varying degrees of depth and development. So I was curious to see how Cane would tackle these topics, and I admired much in his approach.

His opening chapter depicts sexual violence not against women, but against men who are enslaved. At risk of sounding prurient, this is something I’ve always wondered about. With sexual violence against Black women horrifically pervasive and well-documented, both during and after enslavement, I couldn’t imagine there weren’t similar incidents with men. But I didn’t recall ever seeing them mentioned, either in works of history or in novels. Perhaps it’s another act of erasure, intentional or not, against the queer community—and as an openly gay man, Cane challenges it at the outset of the novel.

He references the historical sources that hint at such incidents and identifies names of two men who likely experienced them. He handles these scenes with tact and grace, making clear the full horror and shame without unnecessary play-by-plays.

When the novel later depicts similar violence against women, he takes the same approach, letting us know what happens and how it impacts the characters without lingering on the details.

Perhaps most impactfully, he remains within the perspective of the people suffering the violence and trauma. Although he tells the story in third-person narration, he does not use this as an excuse to detach from their points of view; instead he stays in their minds and bodies, telling us what they feel, how they endure, when they dissociate, and most of all how they hold their heads high afterward, refusing to be broken.

Where the book does become more graphic is in the revenge narratives.

Each of the four chapters tells a story of brutalization and degradation in which people who are enslaved somehow manage to turn the tables on their tormenters. There are poisonings, bloody killings, maimings, and burnings. In these renditions, Cane lingers over details, documenting with precision how the evil of certain individuals comes back on them. It’s satisfying but also, at times, hard to read.

Yet the subject matter indicts me for my own squeamishness, for my desire to look away from the horrors.

The people who were abused, whipped, tortured, chained, and mutilated didn’t get to opt out of those experiences. And as Cane makes painfully clear, the other enslaved people who were forced to watch didn’t get to choose to close their eyes or turn their heads away.

So why do I think I deserve to protect myself from the mere act of bearing witness? Why do I think my innocence is more worth protecting than anyone else’s? These questions trouble me and challenge any assumption that stories are supposed to let me remain complacent and comfortable. After all, growth—and insight, understanding, healing, redemption—do not come from complacency and comfort.

Another aspect I appreciated is Cane’s treatment of Christianity, which shows the complexity of its role in the Southern system of slavery. He depicts the Bible as both a tool of oppression and a path to liberation. The same book that legitimizes the cruelties of slavery offers hope and purpose and inspiration to those who are enslaved. Some reject it, choosing other paths; others fortify themselves with it.

In telling stories of trauma and survival, revenge and redemption, he brings to the fore hard questions and horrific truths. He doesn’t relegate violence to a convenient plot device, and he isn’t a sadistic voyeur. But he also doesn’t shy away or soften the events. He doesn’t shield his characters from brutal treatment or tough choices. After all, no one, divine or human, historically shielded them from brutal treatment and tough choices.

Burn Down Master’s House is challenging and troubling and provocative. And it’s a stellar example of how, and why, to write trauma.

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This week started with my perfect writer’s day.

I woke up and wrote for hours. The work went well, really well. The chapters felt tighter than they had in earlier drafts. The revision questions that had initially seemed cumbersome—What does the room smell like? What do the people smell like? What can they hear? What choices does the FMC make?—were leading to more thoughtful descriptions, vivid sensory experiences, and the momentum that I knew had been missing from the opening chapters.

After the writing, we went to Ute Valley Park for a walk. We thought it would be a short walk. We thought we would be rained out after 5 or 10 or 15 minutes. But “Let’s just go anyway,” my husband said. We’d driven by the park a half-dozen times and always said we wanted to check it out sometime. On Monday we had time, and I’d asked him earlier if we could do a walk or hike that day. So he figured even if it was short, at least we’d make the effort.

The rain held off, except for a few sprinkles. More to the point, the lightning held off. We ended up wandering for more than two hours, covering six miles of trails that took us from marsh to meadow, pine forest to scrub oak, valley floor to rocky ridge. We saw one deer in the distance, and I spotted a coyote, well concealed in a clump of bushes.

We loved the place. We loved the abundant wildflowers, the smell of pine needles, the crunch of birds and squirrels hopping through last year’s leaves.

It was exactly what I’ve always pictured when I think about my ideal day as a writer: hours of rewarding work, followed by hours of hiking through beautiful, peaceful landscapes with my soulmate.

You’d think after a hike like that, I’d sleep like a rock, but you would be wrong. I don’t sleep well, as a general rule. It’s partly genetic (I don’t think anyone in my immediate family sleeps well) and partly PTSD.

Since my dad passed, it’s been really bad. I’ve had to censor my before-bed reading, because the nightmares have gotten worse, and they’re often triggered by stories that seem innocuous in daylight. And that’s after a lifetime as a horror fan had left me, I thought, fairly inured to most nightmares.

So I tossed and turned. Through the open window, I heard Great Horned Owls shrieking back and forth all night, and while I love their presence, in my half-awake state I started worrying that what I thought was two owls might only be one, increasingly frantic for its mate as it landed on various perches in the neighborhood. And then a dog howled, and I wondered whether it was being attacked by the coyote I’d seen down the street a few months ago. Then another dog howled. Then I wondered why people left their dogs out all night. Then I remembered the bobcat last summer and worried about the dogs. I’d finally drifted off when the landscapers arrived and spent what felt like hours leafblowing right under the window. (No, we do not have our own landscapers! We live in a complex that hires them.)

Maybe some other time I’ll write more about the fear that is intertwined with my grief, the fear that keeps me from sleeping and rouses me in a cold panic when I do manage to lose consciousness for a few minutes.

The suddenness of my dad’s collapse was a brutal reminder that anything can happen to anyone at any time. And you can trust that a higher power is in charge, that there’s a reason for everything, all the stuff—but the trust doesn’t protect you from the unexpected, from loss, from pain.

One of the realities of my life right now is that my husband is working hard so I can be a full-time writer, at least until I finish this book. And that means that when I have a bad night, I don’t get to indulge my natural inclination to hide in bed the next day with a stack of books. I still have to get up and get to work; that’s my responsibility to him, my contribution to this partnership. I have a job. It’s just not a job that comes with a paycheck, at least not yet.

So after two or three bad nights in a row, I was still writing. I was still adding texture to my chapters, thinking about the sounds and smells and tastes and touches as well as the sights. (My default is to rely on visual descriptions. I have to intentionally add other senses.) I was still thinking about choices. I was still being surprised by decisions my FMC made.

Wednesday I wrote this new chapter that landed in a totally different place than I expected, but it was the place where it needed to land. It revealed something about my FMC that I’d struggled to put into words. It added to the fraught situation in which she finds herself.

I felt so good that even though I’d met my goal for the day, I decided to plunge onward.

And the next chapter I tackled was a mess. A total mess. I finally stepped away from it feeling like I’d been wading through mud. It ended up being a pastiche of scenes from the earlier draft, conversations I wanted to keep but couldn’t quite fit anywhere, summaries to show the passing of time.

Worse, I had spent chapters building, rather clumsily, to a threat and grappling with the question of how you live under this cloud, knowing this bad thing is probably going to happen and you have a limited amount of time to prepare but also can’t speed up your confrontation with it. Character B resolves to address it in a certain way. Then Character C makes a rousing speech about how she’s going to handle it. All along, we know Character D is best equipped to take care of the situation but also has the most to lose. And I wasn’t sure how the scene was actually going to play out or who would do what—just who needed to be where when the dust settled, in order to launch us into the next part of the story.

I was flailing. In the space of one bad chapter, I felt like I’d lost the thread of the entire novel.

When I’m crabby and exhausted from not sleeping and the writing feels like a slog, it’s really hard not to let misery take over everything. Wednesday night I had to be very intentional about resetting. I had to sit outside on the deck, in the quiet of a summer twilight, and feel the dusk settle calmly around me. I had to allow myself to relax into a movie night with my husband.

And I came to a decision.

I was going to take Thursday off.

This goes against the conventional wisdom, which says you press forward no matter what. Writers I love and respect advocate for this. The quality of the work doesn’t matter, they argue, as long as you’re getting something written down.

But that’s not how I work. And one of the things I’ve learned, over the past thirteen months of writing this novel, is to trust my gut. When something feels off in my writing, something is off. And the best thing I can do in that moment is not to power through but to step back.

I’ve also learned to trust myself to be disciplined enough as a writer and a person to not use this as an excuse to slack off. This wasn’t going to be me taking a week to retreat into my TBR pile. This was me taking one day, a day when I worked on another project and met my mom and brother for dinner. A day when I chatted with a friend and worked out (at least after I kicked the cat out of the room; she had her own adorably distracting workout with my dumbbell and then yelled at me until I did lifts with her instead of the weights, but when she started nibbling on the speaker cable, she had to go).

Contrary to the conventional wisdom, this one unscheduled day off did not derail me. It let me back-burner those pressing story questions. It let some ideas germinate. It meant that, when I couldn’t sleep last night, I had the perspective to think through what had felt like insurmountable obstacles a mere twenty-four hours earlier.

Now I know where the story is going. I know how we’ll get there.

And I can’t wait to get back into it.

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Note: I’m intentionally being obscure about the identities of the writers I discuss here, including using generic pronouns. The purpose of this post isn’t to bash anyone but to chart my own growth and a recent epiphany.

When I was a baby writer, I shared my work with someone close to me. I’d only let a handful of people read my fiction, so it stung when this person responded, “Oh, you need to read [writer A]. They do exactly what you’re trying to do, except they nail it.”

I dutifully checked out [A]. I didn’t think they were doing exactly what I was trying to do, but it was close enough that I could see why my friend made the comparison. We were working in the same genre, listening to the same music, writing about the same subculture, creating stylistically similar prose. I realized that anything I submitted anywhere would inevitably be compared to their work.

But we weren’t writing about the same kinds of characters, and we weren’t pushing the same boundaries.

To be honest, and with the clarity of hindsight, I didn’t yet know which boundaries I actually was pushing, or which I needed to push in order to create something new.

We were both writing about people like ourselves. What I was too young and too vain to realize was that iteration of me wasn’t particularly compelling. Not enough to land a book contract, certainly not when [A] and their coterie had already laid claim to that niche with their far more transgressive, provocative personae and characters.

Because yes, [A] had cronies. They led me to other young (five to ten years older than me) writers, including [writer B]. Their photos looked glamourous and edgy. They all lived in fascinating and/or quirky places, traveled the world, hung out backstage at concerts and in VIP lounges at clubs. They were who I aspired to become, living the kinds of lives I dreamed about.

I devoured their books, although they mostly left me feeling unsatisfied. There was enough there—enough of the world I loved and wanted to write about, of the music, of the pieces of myself that I didn’t see reflected anywhere else—to keep me coming back, but not enough to calm the hunger. To resonate deeply. I could have loved them, if only they had written characters and stories I could love.

Ironically, I also felt like because of the overlap in our work, their success precluded the possibility of mine. Rejection slips from the handful of places to which I submitted my early stories only confirmed this sense.

Fast-forward to me in a series of mind-numbing office jobs. In between tasks, I’d follow the careers of [writers A-F]. Most had blogs. Some were also active on message boards and chat groups, giving me rabbit holes to explore and lurk in on slow workdays. I even interacted with one or two of them online.

In the broader context, I disliked and sucked at adulting. I grudgingly accepted that I couldn’t show up to my office job every day looking like an extra from a music video. But I grieved the need to shed, deny, or ignore so much of myself just to keep the lights on.

I wondered whether [A-F] felt like they also needed to shed, deny, and ignore parts of themselves, once the subculture that launched them faded into obsolescence. They moved on from it, with varying degrees of grace. Some spoke of it with nostalgia, others with disgust and denial.

They collectively presented a template for me, an ideal, but also, in a sense, a diminution. A failure of that early vision, that synergy, that moment that had shaped all of us.

I came to admire and appreciate the directions in which some of them took their careers. I’ve enjoyed following [A and C] as they’ve grown and adapted and experimented with new genres. Others [D, E, F] burned out—they peaked early and then disappeared offline.

But [B] snared me in a different way. I developed a compulsive need to hate-read everything they wrote.

[B] loomed as both inspiration and foil. Over time they became a lot of things: the critic’s voice I’d never be good enough to impress, the person too cool to accept my friendship, the unrelenting gatekeeper to a world and a life I desperately yearned for, the writer whose words almost—but never quite—landed with me.

Lately I’ve been going through my boxes of unread books. I have an embarrassing lot of them. I’d put off dealing with them, but after weeks of sorting through my dad’s papers and stuff he’d saved, including old floppy disks (two cases!), I became a little more motivated to go through my own stuff. The last thing I want is for my husband to have to deal with the chaos of my office if something happens to me.

So one day I open a box, and there are two books by [B] that I bought long ago but never read. These are hefty hardcover tomes that have accompanied me through the last five or six moves, and I decide it’s time to fish or cut bait. Either I read them, or they go.

So I started one, and I hated it. Shocking, I know. I ended up having a lively conversation about it with AI (another habit that’s in danger of becoming an addiction if I don’t watch myself). Predictably, when I first typed in the author’s name, AI praised them, and then when I expressed my issues, AI did a total 180 and joined me in a cathartic venting session.

I’m ashamed to say it, but that chat helped me understand some things, including the respective career trajectories of [A, B, and C]. And why [B] had such a hold on me for so long.

They represented, in many ways, my own unrealized potential, the direction I wished my life and writing had taken. For a long, long time, I thought that direction would have been far more fulfilling than the life I’ve actually led. It’s been very hard to let go of that belief, and of the hope of encountering slivers of nostalgic brilliance that I’ve yearned for but never actually discovered in [B’s] work.

Finally, I gave myself permission to accept that I’m never going to appreciate or enjoy their stories. Their words are never going to be the ones I’m looking for, and the emotional torment of hoping and then being disappointed is toxic. Life is too short, and there are too many good books, to waste time and energy hate-reading.

There is no rational reason it took so long or had to be this hard. But it is what it is.

[B’s] books are now in the donation box, bound for the Friends of the Library. Clearing them out made space on my shelf and, more importantly, in my head and heart.

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Grief is hard.

I mean, duh. Obviously.

I didn’t know what to expect, and I don’t suppose I thought about it much. But it’s showing up differently than I would have anticipated. I don’t feel numb or shell-shocked. Until this weekend, I didn’t even feel especially sad, although Saturday night I started crying and now it’s hard to stop. Mostly, I’ve been irritable and impatient. Grief squeezes out sideways, in lethargy and listlessness, in frustration with people who are preoccupied with matters that, in light of losing a parent, seem trite and self-indulgent. (It has not helped to be aware that until three months ago, I was just like them.)

Yesterday, I found myself laying on my yoga mat in the darkness, sobbing. “I know I need to keep putting one foot in front of the other,” I said out loud, “but I don’t see a path going in any direction that I actually want to take.” But even as I spoke the words, I realized that many, many—probably the majority—of people throughout human history must have felt exactly the same way. Why do I think I get to be special?

My husband and I had an intense 3 a.m. conversation about the need to grieve and to make sure grief doesn’t cross over into depression. That’s a valid and real danger, one I’m trying to guard against, but lately it feels like a losing battle.

One of the things I’ve noticed since my dad passed—okay, let’s be honest here; I haven’t noticed it so much as my husband has pointed it out repeatedly—is that I keep apologizing for everything. I’m sorry for my sadness. I’m sorry for my irritability. I’m sorry to be taking up space, I’m sorry I still can’t find a job, I’m sorry I’m crying again. And like genuinely sorry, not passive-aggressively sorry.

Accordingly, tonight when I was at the store, I apologized to the cashier. “I’m going to be your least favorite customer of the day,” I said as I unloaded my very full cart.

“Why?” he asked, looking surprised.

“Because I have a ton of stuff, including cat litter on the bottom of the cart that I’m going to have to lift up, and pretty soon I’ll have to show you an ID, and I brought shopping bags but they’re buried under everything else.”

“So you’re buying a lot of stuff because you’re at the grocery store,” he said. “That doesn’t make you difficult.”

Then he told me that a month ago, he almost died. He stressed that he wasn’t telling me this to play on my sympathy but to make a human connection while he rang up my purchases. He had a massive heart attack, and his neighbor, who is a PA, performed CPR on him for twenty minutes.

“I should be dead,” he told me. “Or at the least, I should have such severe brain damage I can’t function. But I’m me, I’m messed up anyway, so I figure, who would even know if I have brain damage?” he laughed.

Then he told me how his brush with death had changed his perspective. “When customers are difficult, I just think, I should be dead. It’s a blessing that I’m here at all. In the grand scheme of things, it doesn’t matter if someone is having a bad day and takes it out on me, because at least I’m here to experience that.”

That’s totally the opposite of the way I’ve been feeling. Instead of being bothered by every little thing, this person is grateful to be alive.

Because he was so open with me, I felt comfortable telling him that my dad died six weeks ago.

“Can I give you a hug?” he asked. “Hugs are my love language.”

So he came out from behind the counter, and we hugged.

“Now we’re friends instead of strangers!” he said.

I left the store feeling lighter, feeling seen and cared for. I met the person I needed to meet today. By sharing his own story and his insights, he gave me a way to keep putting one foot in front of the other, to follow this path even though I don’t know where it leads.

And to do it with the kind of gratitude that leads to grace, for both myself and others.

Dear Copper:

You were my COVID-19 foster fail from the Humane Society of Statesboro and Bulloch County. I remember when the volunteer from the rescue brought you to me: You hopped out of her car and ran straight to where I waited outside my apartment door. You were squinting and grinning, your tail wagged so hard your entire body wiggled, and I instantly fell in love.

But I already had a soul dog, Rufus, who was in Colorado that semester, and I didn't think he would like a canine brother. He didn’t hate other dogs, but he didn’t particularly enjoy their company. I also didn't know if I could provide your best life, and I wanted you to have the opportunity to find a better home if one existed.

After three months, two adoption events, and one meet-and-greet, the better home had failed to materialize. Plus, I’d watched you react to other dogs, taking cues from them, and I thought if anyone could coexist peacefully with Rufus, it would be you.

I’d gotten to know your quirks. How hard you pulled on the leash but also how you loved to face-dive into soft grass and carpet. How you stalked the massive pine cones at the park. How you ignored rabbits but wanted to chase every squirrel up every tree. How if I let go of the leash you’d roll down the hill, wriggle around on your back, then race joyfully back to me. My one and only “natural” copperhead sighting was on a walk with you, which felt magical.

Also, it’s not an exaggeration to say that during that very dark fall of 2020, you—your keen empathy, your funny face, your hugs, your need for walks and routine—saved my life. So the least I could do was to provide you with a home for the rest of yours. We made it official that November.

You ended up being the (mostly) ideal brother for Rufus. You taught him how to “dog” in ways I never could. When we drove up to my parents’ land in the mountains, you dolphin-leaped and tunneled through three feet of snow. Rufus acted so playful that when I sent video to friends, they couldn’t believe he was the same sedentary old guy they knew and loved. And when you thought Rufus was roaming too far away, you’d lope out beyond him and herd him back toward me!

Later, I took the pair of you to a nearby park, which had a pond with a fountain. Rufus always seemed terrified of running water, and I’d never gotten him to walk past that fountain. He would drop to his belly on the sidewalk and refuse to budge no matter what I did. But the first time the three of us went, I saw him look to you. You had no idea fountains were scary—you love water—so you kept trotting happily along the path. Your courage seemed to inspire him, and he followed as though he’d never had any concerns.

On an April afternoon, you both splashed through swamp water along the greenway trail, showing such obvious joy that everyone walking past laughed with us. Driving home with muddy dogs was a minor price to pay for such bliss.

The night we left Georgia, a ferocious thunderstorm started just as we were about to hit the road. I’d gone back into the apartment for a final load of stuff while my mom waited in my car with you—and the storm burst the sky wide open. I’d settled you on one side of the back seat and Rufus on the other, with boxes and a crate between you, but my mom said that at the first thunderclap, you yelped and plowed through everything to reach Rufus. You spent the entire trip to Colorado on the floor, him on the seat above you, like you were occupying bunk beds. You needed the comfort of his presence.

And when Rufus passed in July 2022—during another ferocious thunderstorm—you and I were beside him. As soon as he felt our presences, he calmed.

The life you’ve had with me has been less stable than I would have liked. We’ve lived at five different addresses. I’ve transitioned through three full-time jobs, all with different schedules and demands. You became my official ESA, and you’re so empathic that I worry about the amount of my stress and angst you’ve absorbed. You remain terrified of loud noises; the intense hail of summer 2023 traumatized you so deeply you’re now on Prozac.

But you got to adopt a new human (plus a new dog brother and cat siblings). You love hugging and leaning against him, doing trust falls and giving high fives. He can sometimes calm you when I can’t. He’s brought you with him to work a few times, and he says you were born to be a therapy dog—you’re the right blend of adorable and sweet and funny and goofy. And it’s built your confidence to find something at which you naturally excel!

You’re less sure about other adventures. You did not love Dog Days at the Zoo, as evidenced by the way your tail remained tucked between your legs and you never face-planted into the snow or dirt. Given the way the mountain lion studied you, I can’t exactly blame you for being spooked.

On the other hand, you’re enthusiastic about hikes, you love splashing through rivers and lakes, and you scramble up and down rocks! You thrive when we train at the Zoom Room agility course and your energy gets a focus.

Your muzzle is starting to show white, and when light hits your eyes, the cataracts are obvious. But you still love hikes, and you’re so focused and strong that you can pull me up steep hills. You still want to chase every squirrel up every tree. You still puff your ears out like a gerbil’s when you’re happy, and you squint your eyes, grin, and do the cutest little tap-dance when we come inside from walks.

Happy ninth birthday (April 28), Copper. I can’t imagine the last five and a half years without you, and I hope we have more incredible years together ahead of us.

Dear Max:

Every time I question my wisdom in taking the job I lost last year, I remember that it was worthwhile if only because it brought you into our lives.

You see, three years ago, I was checking local news websites for a story they’d just done about my employer, and I noticed a headline that said “Home Sweet Home” with a photo of a big black dog. Thinking it was going to be a feel-good piece, I clicked the link. And it turned out instead to be a Pet of the Week feature about a five-year-old guy who sounded like the perfect buddy for Copper.

I sent the link to my man, who warned that you’d likely be gone before we had a chance to meet you. After all, you were a TV star. I think the story aired on Tuesday, I found it on Wednesday, and we didn’t have a day off together until Sunday. I told him I was totally fine with that; if you went to a good home, I would be happy for you. But deep down I knew you weren’t going to someone else’s home, because you were ours.

We checked the Humane Society website on Sunday, and your profile was still listed, so we drove across town to meet you. When you came into the room, you barely noticed us. You ignored the treats we offered, instead trotting around the perimeter with your nose to the floor. We learned later that you had been at the shelter for sixteen days (which is a long time here). I have no way of knowing whether you’d met other people during that time or whether we were the first to show interest. Maybe you’d gone into that room and then back to your kennel so many times you’d lost hope. Maybe you’d never been inside the room before, and all the new smells overwhelmed you.

Regardless, I knew you were ours, and I needed to find a way to let you know it too.

So I slipped off the chair and sat down on the floor. And you immediately came to me, plopped your massive head into my lap, and rolled over so I could rub your belly.

When you and Copper met, the two of you sniffed at each other, and then you both broke into a beautiful dance.

That’s not to say you always get along or that your relationship has been without its issues, but each of you has in many ways been the friend the other clearly needed. I love watching the way you learn from each other and help each other “dog.” Your indifference to thunder, hail, and fireworks has unfortunately not transferred to him, and he still hasn’t quite figured out how to play with you. But his joy at being in water has shown you that splashing around is fun instead of scary, and now when we go to the creek or the lake, you wade right in, stalk rocks, and get the zoomies.

Unlike Copper, you absolutely adore Dog Days at the Zoo. You revel in all the smells and the excitement of meeting so many other dogs and humans. You always want to play with the meerkats. You’ve booped noses with a giraffe and locked eyes with the leopard for an electric moment. The first time we went, we sat beside the glass with Goma, the silverback, right on the other side, and it felt like a profound moment of connection as the two of you studied each other. A woman with a stroller asked if her son could pet you, and you allowed this tiny person you’d never met before to throw his arms around your neck and bury his face in your fur.

You’re fiercely protective of anyone you allow into that enormous heart of yours—and your heart expands every time you meet a new friend. On walks, you whine whenever you see other people, dogs, or cats because you want so much to say hello. You don’t always know your own size and strength, but you try to be gentle with smaller and older creatures. You particularly love Bailey, who lives across the street and is a fraction of your size but adores you every bit as much as you do her. The kids in our neighborhood also know you and Copper—although your enthusiasm means they actually prefer him. (“Copper’s more mellow,” one of them told her friend, much to our amusement. “Max is a little overbearing.”)

It feels like only yesterday that we met, yet at the same time it feels like you’ve been part of my life, and my heart, forever. You filled the hole left by Rufus’ passing, although you haven’t replaced him—and I wouldn’t want you to. You are your own special guy, loyal and energetic, talkative and brave, goofy and sweet.

You’re eight now, which I think officially makes you a senior dog, although no one’s told you. Your muzzle might be starting to show white, but you still have the energy of a puppy and a joie de vivre that constantly inspires me.

As we say often, we hit the jackpot with you. I hope we have many more years left together, Max, and I’m grateful beyond words for the time we’ve already shared. Happy Gotcha Day (April 16)!

I had a productive 10-day stretch of working on novel revisions. Or at least it should have been productive, but I didn’t feel good about it.

The word count slowly crept down, from 106K to 104K to 103K. (For reference, 100K is the max some agents will consider for a debut historical fiction novel.) I added an opening chapter. Developed my main character’s goals. Fleshed out some other characters who had been one-dimensional in the earlier draft. Wrote a damn good (if I say so myself) soliloquy on how damaging Romeo and Juliet can be when taught in the wrong way to impressionable young teens. (I can’t be the only kid who came away from that play obsessed with love, death, and “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” right?)

As I noted earlier, I’d worked up a new outline with chapters to add or rearrange (for purposes of pacing and/or character development). I also wrote out a schedule of how many pages/chapters I needed to tackle daily to meet my admittedly ambitious goal of being finished by the end of April.

I’ve been working on this novel for a year. And I know that’s pretty standard, but non-writers think it’s a long time. Finding a gracious way to answer questions like “Are you ever going to be done?” or “You mean you still haven’t finished?” or “You don’t even have a job, so how can you not write a book in a year?” is challenging. And in my head, I felt like a failure for not finishing it in six months.

Or in two. I mean, there’s always going to be someone who whipped out a paradigm-shifting work of utter brilliance in a fraction of the time it’s taking me. And it’s really tough to get over wanting to be that person.

Along with feeling discouraged that I wasn’t keeping up with a schedule that turned out to be unrealistic, I ended my writing time on Monday wondering why I felt so dissatisfied and just meh about everything I’d done for the past 10 days. Grief was surely part—grief, I am finding, renders a lot of things just meh—but writing had begun to feel like a slog rather than a joy.

I knew I’d need to revisit the pages I’d completed. I had a feeling there was too much dialogue. Too many people voicing too many opinions that didn’t impact the plot. Too much repetition. Actions that began to feel forced or contrived for who the characters were turning out to be.

Worst of all, I didn’t think my first 10 pages would captivate an agent. They didn’t captivate me. And one of my rules of thumb is that if a writer is bored with her own story, then readers are definitely going to be bored with it.

Many of my revisions had been intended to add elements that people in critique said were missing. To create the kind of characters and story that will appeal to agents, editors, and readers. To be sure the novel has a through-line, a compelling question, an overriding goal for the main character.

My first inclination, despite my dissatisfaction, was to plunge forward. Writing can’t always be fun, and just because I wasn’t enjoying the process now and didn’t love most of what I’d recently written shouldn’t be a reason to stop. Should it? Isn’t that the direction in which lurks the danger of an abandoned manuscript?

While part of my mind said, “You’re at a good place to step back and reassess,” the louder part said, “You can’t afford another break, you lazy wretch.”

That was my angsty mindset when I went to sleep Monday night and woke up Tuesday morning: not liking where I was but not knowing where to go from there.

Without intentionally choosing to take a break, I ended up not writing for two days—and it was exactly what both the book and I needed.

My husband and I met up with friends at noon on Tuesday, and when we came home, he decided to take a nap on the sectional sofa before heading to work. Instead of going upstairs to write, I curled up on the other part of the sofa with a book and a cuddly cat.

By the time he left, I was more interested in finishing the book I was reading than in returning to my problem-riddled MS. So I decided to indulge myself.

And in the back of my mind, as I read, I’d begun to think about rules, about when to keep them and when not to, about how a book isn’t just a checklist of do’s and don’ts but has to function as an organic and compelling story.

Several hours later, hungry animals wanting their dinners pulled me out of my head. I stood up, and instantly—with clarity, certainty, and relief—knew what I had to do to “fix” my novel.

Cut the first 70 pages.

Yup, 70 pages I’d just spent a week and a half toiling over, trying to do all the things I believed I was supposed to do. The 70 pages that, I realized now, just postponed the actual beginning of the story.

Murder your darlings.

Even that amazing soliloquy about Romeo and Juliet that I hoped would help establish the through-line and move the story forward. It doesn’t, because at that point there’s no story to move forward.

Somewhat to my surprise, as I contemplated cutting almost a fifth of the MS, I didn’t feel upset or angry or demoralized. I felt energized.

Battling the word count had meant constraint; I worried about not being able to develop ideas and characters enough, that parts of the plot might feel rushed or minimized. Getting rid of 70 pages means space to tell the real story, to focus on the characters and events that matter most, to not be sidelined with interesting but ultimately irrelevant subplots.

I felt engaged with the book again.

That night, when I couldn’t sleep, I piled up eight or ten recent historical fiction novels from my TBR stack—books that are on bestseller lists and/or that people have raved about to me and/or that have been promoted heavily at bookstores—and read all of the first chapters.

Because although I now knew which scene to start with in my own novel, I had multiple ideas for how to approach it and wasn’t sure which would be the most effective (or market-friendly).

My wee-hours survey showed me that there’s not one right way to start a story. Some of the novels open with heavy dialogue and action. Others focus on setting the stage, providing background into the characters and situation. Several commit the dreaded info dump, and a few do it so well that I can’t see the story working without it. Some have prologues; some don’t. Some modeled the template I’d been trying to follow: a catchy intro, then backtracking to gradually build the character and situation (and sometimes that kept my attention; sometimes it didn’t).

Some novels began in really compelling ways. The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, Burn Down Master’s House by Clay Cane, The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, and Tough Luck by Sandra Dallas all grabbed me hard, and I can’t wait to see where these stories go. Others were less engaging, but I’m still curious enough to want to read further. One bored me so much that I skipped most of it—then it ended with a twist that hooked me.

So I need to find the way in that works best for my story.

And rules are great—as guidelines. But I need to trust my gut rather than adding a chapter that feels superfluous just for the sake of checking off a box based on someone else’s idea of what a novel should contain. I need to trust my instincts enough to believe I can establish a driving quest and a through-line and a compelling character without stopping to interrogate whether and how every scene enforces these elements. I need to trust my experience as a reader, a writer, and an editor.

Because at the end of the day, I’m trying to tell a redemptive, engaging story—not check items off a to-do list.

I’m glad I wrote those 70 pages, because I came to a deeper understanding of the people who live in my novel, of the events that lead to the start of the story, of the conflicts and tensions that erupt into the untenable situation in which my main character finds herself.

I’m also glad I only had to lose 70 pages before I kicked those other voices out of my head.

And I’m gladdest of all that I get to axe those 70 pages. I never expected that murdering my darlings would feel so liberating.

My dad passed on Tuesday, March 31, and his burial and memorial service took place Monday, April 6.

People told us the grief might hit hardest in the days after the service. Leading up to it, there were preparations to be made, and the days around the service were hectic. Family and friends traveled from Alaska, Montana, Arizona, Iowa, South Dakota, Illinois, and Minnesota, as well as from other parts of Colorado. We had a big family dinner on Easter Sunday and a luncheon after the service Monday. I caught up with relatives I hadn’t seen in years, and we shared laughter as well as tears and memories.

My husband and I also took the dogs to Cottonwood Creek so I could say goodbye in my own way. I’ll probably write more about that later.

The service captured my dad’s life—his dedication to church, rigor as a professional engineer, appreciation of muscle cars, sense of humor, craving for travel, love of nature, dedication to his grandkids. It was a beautiful celebration of who he was.

But then, as I’d been warned, emptiness settled in. Family left town. Those of us who remained felt exhausted, wrung out, incapable of even minor decisions.

Not having a job was a blessing during my dad’s illness, but it also meant I had nothing concrete or structured to return to. The past 13 months have been a series of new normals, limbos, and uncertainties. I spent several days feeling listless and lost.

I expected sadness and weariness. I didn’t expect discontent, prickliness, and irritability. I caught myself picking fights, especially with my husband, who was incredibly supportive throughout Dad’s illness and did not deserve my angst.

I needed a reset.

Dad was very interested in my novel. (Frankly, I think he was relieved I finally moved away from horror.) I’d hoped to finish it before he passed. But his illness progressed more quickly than we expected—which was a mercy—and now I’m grateful I still have work to do on it, because it has given me something to return to, a focus I desperately need.

After those first few days of dark lethargy, I sat down and wrote out a schedule to finish revisions by the end of April. That project is turning out to be more ambitious than I realized, as I’m reworking large chunks of content to give my FMC more agency, more personality, more “main character energy”—and to make some of the other characters more fully realized.

And I’m cleaning stuff out.

My dad might have been the tidiest hoarder in the world, but when you have a drawer full of check stubs going back to the 1980s and boxes of floppy disks, I’m not sure any word but “hoarder” really suffices. Going through old files and shredding documents occupied multiple family members for the better part of a week. My car trunk is still full of stuff my mom sent home with me that I have to sort through.

And from what my cousins said, my dad’s older brother was the same way.

Which was a wakeup call for me, because guess what? I am, too.

For the past year of unemployment, I’ve told myself that I’d go through my stuff—boxes that have been sitting in storage or the garage for years—before I went back to work. But it’s a daunting project, and I’ve put it off. I think I figured once I had a job offer and a start date, I’d have more sense of urgency.

Well, now I’m motivated.

But productivity isn’t enough. Productivity is a good use for my angst, and having these projects gets me out of bed and moving, and these are all good things that need to be done. But productivity alone isn’t helping me come to terms with loss or begin healing.

My husband’s work schedule is changing, with the result that he had Wednesday off this week. So he suggested that we visit the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo. It isn’t the vacation I’ve been craving, but it’s a fun place to go for a day, and it’s special to us. It was where we went the first time we hung out together outside of work, and it’s also where he proposed in August, and we hadn’t been back since then.

We have remarked in the past that the zoo is always a pleasant surprise. We never know what to expect, but something amazing always happens.

Wednesday was full of amazing encounters.

Sully, the nine-month-old baby gorilla, was out and about and active! We watched him swinging around on ropes, drinking water, playing with sticks. His mom, Asha, occasionally grabbed him for some grooming or nursing. He approached the troupe’s other female gorilla, Kwisha, for auntie time. And then Goma, the silverback, crossed from the other side of the enclosure to check on his family. Sully approached, but Asha quickly swooped in, grabbed Sully, placed him on her back, and went outside.

We loved watching them all interact: the way Sully played and imitated his mom and explored his world. Asha gave him freedom but also stayed close and intervened when she felt she needed to. When a group of rowdy children banged on the glass and shrieked, she immediately swung the baby onto her back and carried him off to a quiet corner of the yard for some mommy-and-me time.

The three mountain lions were alive with predatory urgency. We suspected there might be wild deer just beyond our view, because they were very focused on something out on the mountainside! They raced around their habitat, chuffed, let out low growls.

The wolves, whom we seldom see except in quick glimpses, rested near the viewing window. An otter played in the water, rolling around and around on the surface before diving to skim past us. The mother and juvenile hippo surfaced together, snorting air. I even got to participate in the “elephant hydration experience”—pouring cups of water and Gatorade into Lucky’s trunk.

But we spent the most time with the lions.

The two lionesses were grooming each other in the dayroom, with the alpha male nearby. The other male—a bachelor son of the pride—was in the outside space, sleeping in the sun. As we watched them, we marveled at how similar they are to our cats, albeit 50+ times larger. The gestures, the playfulness, the affection are exactly the same. And when one of them leaped up and went over to sharpen her claws on a log, we laughed because our babies do the same thing with their scratching post.

We were so absorbed in watching the lionesses, and the reflections in the glass obscured so much, that we did not realize for several minutes that Abuto, the alpha male, was also sleeping right next to the window, feet away from where we stood.

As we studied him, marveling at his size—a tail as thick as my husband’s arm, paws almost the size of my head—he stirred. Then he stood up, stretched, and went over to the lionesses for some interaction. (Okay, he tried to mount one, and she wasn’t having it, and that was pretty hilarious.) He turned back toward us, and I looked into his eyes—tawny and magnificent and serene. I felt awe and humility and gratitude and connection, as well as sorrow that he’s confined in a habitat (albeit what seems to be a good one) in Colorado instead of roaming the Serengeti.

In that moment I had a strong sense of my dad. I thought about his faith, about the many times the Bible likens God to a lion, about the passage promising that “the lion and the lamb will lay down together.” How safe a lamb would be with such a protector! I pictured my dad with his arms around that majestic mane. Aslan in The Chronicles of Narnia came to mind, too, and what a pure, strong, noble, wise, majestic being he is.

I’m describing this poorly, trying to put something ineffable—transcendent, redemptive, transformative—into words.

After my dog Bishop passed a decade ago, I had two experiences that gave me a sense of his presence; a reassurance that his spirit continues to exist, that he is happy and free from suffering, that we are part of a much larger reality of beauty and peace and love that will remain when all the externals are stripped away. That’s the same sense I had, magnified even more, as we stood shoulder to shoulder and eye to eye with the lions fifteen days after my dad passed.

It is such a gift. Perhaps someday I can describe it better. For now I can only receive it with awe and gratitude and love—and try to share it as best I can.

When we learned about my dad’s brain tumor, I set up a CaringBridge page so the community—my dad’s pickleball buddies, my mom’s friends from the Y and Curves, our extended family all over the U.S., my parents’ church congregation, friends—could stay up to date on the news.

I try to keep my feelings and opinions out of the content except in the most general of ways. The page is about telling people what’s going on with Dad, not about me.

This is the post that says things I need to say and can’t express on CaringBridge. It’s angry, so be warned.

My parents are evangelical Christians, and their friends post a lot of comments about God being in control, being thankful Dad is going to heaven, praying for healing, etc.

I believe Dad is going to a better place. I believe that the sweetness and light that pour from him on his good days reflect a greater reality of transcendent love, joy, and peace that is beautiful to glimpse and even more incredible to imagine in full.

But this “meanwhile” he is suffering through is HARD.

It doesn’t comfort me to hear that “God is in control” when I see my dad sobbing like a toddler because he can’t form the words he wants to say.

It doesn’t comfort me to hear that “Dad gets to beat us to heaven” when he’s sleeping under an oxygen mask in the same bloodstained hospital gown he’s worn for the past three days.

And when people tell me they are praying for a miracle or for healing, I wonder what they think that looks like. Dad is a 79-year-old man with an inoperable mass spread through a quarter of his brain and growing rapidly. He has spots on his liver that might also be tumors. His kidney function is low. He has had heart issues for years. He is in the hospital right now being treated for pulmonary embolisms.

Do people think God’s going to miraculously take all of that away somehow? My dad’s not going to live forever.

I don’t tell them my feelings, because the prayers and talk of heaven do provide comfort to my mom and some other family members. I have no right to take that away.

But those same remarks rub me raw.

What helps me are hugs, affirmations that this is really tough, and conversations with people who have gone through similar situations.

Yesterday when we went to visit, a nurse made a comment that was derogatory and derisive about my dad’s inability to communicate. He called it across the hallway to the doctor who was going into the room at the same time as we were.

As I heard the words come out of the nurse’s mouth, I first thought, I hope the family of the patient he’s discussing isn’t hearing this. Then I thought, Oh, no…I hope he’s not talking about my dad. Then, Surely he sees us heading toward the doorway of the room of the patient he’s referencing and will stop. Then, He is talking about my father like he’s not even a person, and he doesn’t care that we are listening to this.

I was pushing my mom’s wheelchair. She, thankfully, did not hear, and I didn’t want to stop and call out the nurse on the spot. Also, it was more important in that moment for us to meet the doctor in my dad’s room and speak with him.

But later I called the hospital. I left a voicemail with the patient experience people, who have yet to call me back. Of course.

I called again and spoke with a chaplain, who assured me she would visit my dad and also speak to the floor supervisor. I asked her to keep that particular nurse from going back into my dad’s room and be sure that anyone caring for him understands that he’s a human being, not a sack of meat with a pulse. She asked if I wanted her to pray with me, and I managed not to scream. What would be the point of prayer?

I called at 10:30 last night and spoke with his charge nurse, who assured me that his overnight nurse is kind and provides excellent care.

I also left a one-star Google review of the hospital, because it is not acceptable that a nurse thinks my dad’s inability to talk is funny. And I’m sorry if I sound like a Karen, but the fact that I had to leave a voicemail and wait for a call back to even discuss this is also not okay.

(I keep saying nurse. He might have been a CNA or an orderly; I didn’t actually see him, just heard his voice.)

Maybe I am overreacting. At least one of my siblings thinks so, and maybe they are right.

I’m flailing in a darkness I can’t describe, lost where no one can find me, unable to see a way forward.

Underlying all of the other anger is rage at the way Americans treat dying.

My dad loved the outdoors. He drove to his land in the mountains at least once a week so he could work outside, doing fire remediation and running the wood chipper and weeding along the gravel road. He loved skiing, as long as he could, and hiking. He was planning a road trip to Alaska this summer.

He worked in the church nursery and could always get crying babies to quiet down by singing them the Pink Panther theme song (for real, it worked). One of the mothers in his church called him a “professional grandpa,” and he glowed at that accolade. He loved being a professional grandpa.

He also taught kids’ Sunday school and led a Bible study and ran the kids’ weekday evening group and served as an elder. He visited people in the hospital and led outings for seniors. He drove people to the airport and medical appointments in Denver.

He was a smart man who loved words and enjoyed challenging me at Scrabble. For him to struggle with even basic language now is almost too cruel to comprehend.

He would not have wanted to spend his final weeks or months helpless, confined to a hospital bed, unable to function.

His existence is real-life body horror. I have seen things I never wanted to see, and knowing he has had to not just see them but live through them, feel them, is more than I can wrap my brain around.

He has lost his dignity. He has lost his selfhood. When doctors come into the room, they talk to us about him as though he isn’t there. (The nurses are much better at addressing and including him, even when he can’t respond.)

Underneath everything else is the horror and helplessness. This is how the American medical system works.

I hope that when my time comes, I have a kinder end than my father is being allowed to experience.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my process, at least as it’s looked in the past and as it’s shaping up for The Parlor House Rag.

Now that I’m elbow-deep in revisions, I wanted to share a bit more about this part of the project. This is where I have sometimes stalled out on past stories and where I saw the VAST majority of my writing students pretty much just quit (aka hand in their first draft without any polishing). For which I can hardly blame them, as I spent my academic career doing exactly the same thing. But when you’re trying to write a novel you can sell commercially, you have to keep trudging through, so here we are.

I disagree with the oft-repeated advice that revision is where the real labor of writing takes place. That’s not to say it’s unnecessary, but for me, crafting a solid first draft that I can actually work with—switch around, build on, sculpt—is a crucial part of that “real labor.”

The fact that it’s also a more fun, satisfying, and creative part doesn’t negate the heavy lifting it requires.

Revision is a lot less enjoyable—for me and, I suspect from years of working in communications and teaching writing—for most other people, too.

First, it requires the humility of acknowledging that every sentence that has flowed from your pen (or through your fingertips to the screen) is not an impeccable, muse-inspired masterpiece.

That might sound obvious, but as someone who tied my identity to being a “good writer” from the time I was seven or eight, I struggled to accept that admitting imperfections did not negate my ability as a writer. I was the poster child for what Carol Dweck calls “fixed mindset.”

Not until I worked as a newspaper editor did my perspective change. I interacted with poor writers who treated every edit as a personal affront, while some of the strongest writers modeled stepping back and admitting when they needed help. I’d always hated peer review, but I learned that there’s a world of difference between exchanging your paper with a random classmate who may or may not have paid attention to the instructions, and giving your work to a colleague whose writing you respect and whose insights you value. Collaboration with the right people not only makes a piece of writing stronger, it’s vital.

But revision also requires seeing value in your writing at a stage that’s focused on what isn’t working.

It’s easy to become discouraged. I think we all go through the “Is it worth killing trees to print out this dreck?” angst, and I’d even suggest that’s a healthy ego check. (Also, I just read the chapter “Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket” in Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, and her words remind me that, hyperbole aside, a tree did actually die so I could print my MS, and I have a responsibility to ensure that my words respect that sacrifice.)

It’s easy to let discouragement become ennui, lack of motivation, indefinite postponement. Life is busy, and there are always urgent tasks that demand our attention. I can justify actual writing because it feeds my soul. It’s sometimes harder to rationalize spending time and effort on revisions that leave me feeling cranky and unfulfilled and snappish, especially when I don’t know whether this book will sell—whether it will find an agent, a publisher, and enough readers to make being a novelist a viable path for me.

Writing, in that sense, is an act of profound faith. And revision is a part of the process that tests every ounce of faith I can summon.

Anyway, enough philosophizing; on to the nuts and bolts. These are my nuts and bolts. They might or might not be helpful for anyone else, but I share them in the hope that they inspire you in your own work!

First, I printed out a hard copy of my MS. I do a lot of work on my laptop, but for actual editing, for getting deep into a piece of writing and being able to flip back and forth between pages, I love hard copy.

I read through the whole book with green pen in hand, making edits, asking questions, suggesting changes, and cutting. The MS weighed in at an unwieldy 118K words, and I need to add some content, so I prepared for, and made, deep deletions. So far they have been relatively painless; I haven’t yet had to murder my darlings. But I suspect that’s coming.

At the end of that process, I created a reverse outline on my trusty yellow legal pad.

I love reverse outlines—well, love is a strong word, but I find them invaluable. I started using them on my own without knowing they were a real thing with their own term. When I found out reverse outlining is a legitimate revision technique, I was delighted to share it with students—especially those, like me, who instinctively cringed when they heard the word “outline” because outlines as a prewriting strategy had proven counterproductive for them.

Anyway, I summarized the main action of each of my 54 chapters. Doing this helped me see that some chapters could be combined, some were just rambling and didn’t deserve to be chapters at all, and some would work much better in a different part of the book.

Then I wrote a fresh outline. I listed the chapters I have, the chapters I need to add (17 as of now), and the content that will move around.

Then, and only then, did I create a copy of my draft on my laptop and set about making all of these changes. I prefer to make a copy, rather than working in the same file, in case I cut something I want to add back in later or need to refer back to the earlier version for any reason.

In my online draft, I am making the changes that are easy to make. I am highlighting areas that require more research or development. I am moving paragraphs around but not yet trying to make them cohere in their new homes. I am noting where I will add content, on another day when I feel more creatively inclined. I am cutting huge swathes of text (so far, down to 104K words) but not yet doing the work of condensing pages into paragraphs where that’s necessary.

At the end of this process, I’m going to have a messy, unpolished sprawl that I already dread and fear will feel totally unmanageable. I’m not as close to THE END as I had hoped, and that’s a tough realization because I don’t realistically know how much longer this will take or how much more work I have to do.

But I’ll sit back down and start from Chapter 1, filling in all the gaps and the blanks, trying to wrangle this into a coherent, cohesive story that I’m proud of and that people will want to read.

And when I’ve given that my best shot, I’ll pass the MS off to my trusted beta readers (a service for which I can’t pay, but if you want to volunteer, let me know; I’m willing to trade beta reads!) and hope they can see through the parts that feel like brick walls to me.

My goal is to be querying agents before my dad passes. In an ideal world, I’ll be able to tell him I’ve landed a contract. His eyes light up whenever I talk about the book and the progress I’m making. This is especially poignant because for most of my adult life, he has treated my writing like a hobby that interferes with my career, not as a potential career of its own. The fact that over the past year he seems finally to have understood how vitally important this is to me means more than I can say—and this book is the final gift I can offer him.

Note: I wrote most of this on Feb. 12 but didn’t finalize it then because of the news about my dad on the following day.

Yesterday (by which I mean the time between my sleeps, not the strict calendar parameters of Feb. 11) was quite possibly my most prolific writing day ever.*

And it concluded with me typing, just before 3 a.m., the words THE END.

*Part of me really wants to share that word count, but I have decided not to, for two reasons. One, it’s not a competition (and yes, that includes me with myself). Two, yesterday I chose to sacrifice quality for quantity, and that is not how I usually work. Equating progress with hitting a data point—word count—is a false equivalency and, at least for me, a dangerous trap.

Now I tackle the weighty process of revision: paring down this 118,000-word behemoth to a length that readers (and agents and publishers) will find palatable.

The initial cuts should be relatively straightforward, because I can think of at least two chapters that probably serve no purpose except to take us from Point A to Point B, and there are other false starts, characters I introduced and then dropped, and repeated ideas and themes. All of those are no-brainers for the axe.

But whether that will get me to the right length—particularly with other characters and themes fleshed out a bit more, and the added “interiority” and development I’ve been told my protagonist needs—is a question I won’t be able to answer until I’ve done the work.

On Writing Process and “Process Writing”

I have taught in several “process”-oriented writing programs. The idea behind this pedagogical approach, as I understand it (having never received formal training, because apparently it’s one of those things you’re just supposed to know by osmosis if you spend any time around a university composition department), is that the focus is on the process — how you create and revise a piece of writing — rather than on the finished product.

I see some value in this, in that I believe it’s useful for every writer to figure out the process/es that work/s best for them. But I also fear that it creates artificial expectations for how writing is “supposed” to work and how it functions in life. In most situations I can think of in which writing carries stakes — a press release, a resume, a research paper in almost any non-English course, a scholarship application, a novel — the audience doesn’t know or care how you produced the work, as long as you didn’t plagiarize.* They’re not going to give you an A for effort. They only judge the quality (and timeliness) of your final result.

*Exceptions exist. Savvy consumers of news, for example, want to know and be able to trust the process of research and fact-checking. The same holds true for academic research. But in these situations, the quality of the final product still matters. I can’t think of a single case in which a solid process saves a lousy product.

Of course, a healthy grasp of process can enhance the finished result. And that truth has been foundational to how I teach process writing.

My biggest issue with the whole concept is that it’s often rigid, presenting students with a series of steps to follow rather than allowing them to figure out what works best for them. And the typical Composition I process sequence — thesis statement, outline, rough draft, peer review, revision, final draft — has never worked for me. Literally never on a single paper I have ever written in my entire life. In classes where we had to follow these steps, I ended up resentfully wasting time on busywork that didn’t enhance (and sometimes actively harmed) my writing.

In the world of fiction, this process framework shows up in the oft-repeated advice to just get your entire draft written; don’t stop to revise, because you might lose momentum and never finish.

The one time I followed this guidance on a novel, I wrote a murder mystery with an insanely high body count, because every time I ran into a snag, I tossed in another killing. By the end, there were somewhere around 25-30 corpses, no coherent plot, two or three (?) different killers, at least three disparate motives, and enough plot points for four separate novels.

In other words, it was a mess.

It was such an unsalvageable mess that I had to throw out the entire second half, and I’ve never managed to wrangle that MS into any kind of shape or even complete a second ending.

Rushing to that first ending did nothing but muddle the entire story.

But the experience wasn’t a waste, because it taught me to listen to my gut, respect my own process, and incorporate advice from others only when it feels organic and harmonizes with how I create my best work.

How I Drafted This Novel

This time around, I started a draft. I had an idea what it was about and where it was going, but I knew a lot would change as I wrote. I’m a “pantser,” not a “planner,” and the last thing I want is what I call How I Met Your Mother syndrome, in which the writer is so invested in a specific outcome that they ignore all of their characters’ growth and development and transformation in order to force a predetermined ending that doesn’t work.

About 65,000 words into the first draft, I realized that pushing toward an ending was just going to waste my time and create a lot of unusable content unless I went back and tightened up the beginning. I had also received some valuable critiques, and I believed that slowing down to incorporate them would strengthen the story (and save time in the long run).

For me, those critiques were helpful input to receive early on. But other writers I know avoid seeking any feedback until they’ve completed the entire draft. Again, my point here is that people create differently, there’s not one right way, and you as a writer have to figure out what works best for you.

So I started a second draft. I created a separate document, because I wasn’t sure what from the first draft I might keep, what I might cut and then regret, what didn’t work where it was but might be appropriate to add later. Essentially, I wanted an archive of content I could draw from.

And again, I eventually hit a point where moving forward felt futile without going back to revise and polish and make sure the foundation worked.

So I created a third draft. And that’s the one I finally finished.

I started the novel in April 2025, and I typed THE END in mid-February 2026. That’s less than a year, and along the way there were months I got sidetracked writing short stories, months I didn’t write at all because I was focused on freelance projects and job-searching, and a six-week stretch lost to depression and anxiety (well, more like existential despair and all-consuming panic, but you get the idea).

In a nutshell—I don’t feel like I sacrificed any momentum by writing my novel in the way that worked best for me. On the contrary, sometimes going back and looking at those earlier pages rekindled my enthusiasm and motivation.

On Revision

Because I don’t work in discrete drafts for anything except long-form fiction, I used to think I didn’t revise at all. I thought, arrogantly, that I didn’t need to.

But at some point—maybe when I really delved into my own process so that I could teach “process writing” in ways that felt both authentic to my experience and genuinely useful for students—I realized that I do revise, and I revise a lot. I just don’t usually do it as a distinct step.

I write a paragraph or a page or a chapter. And, especially with shorter works (short stories, articles, etc.), I immediately go back and reread what I’ve just written, tweak it, and only then move on. (This is one reason why I mentioned earlier that I think word count is an artificial measure of progress.)

I’m often told my “first drafts” are very polished. That’s because they’re not first drafts, in the sense of a “get everything down without stopping and don’t worry about fixing anything” first draft. That’s simply not how I work. My first drafts are the results of passionate writing, careful revision, and thoughtful reflection.

When I edit or beta-read books, I often tell the writers I go “shoulder deep.” I plunge my hands into the guts of the piece and try with surgical precision to identify what works and what might need improvement.

Now it’s time to go shoulder deep on my own book. I will have to operate. I will have to amputate. I will have to be ruthless.

I don’t know how long this step will take or how much it will hurt or how fulfilling or aggravating or rewarding it will be. But I know it’s vital.

Anyway, that’s my process…at least thus far, for this novel.

Just as one way of creating a novel doesn’t work for everyone, I don’t think we have to limit ourselves to one way of creating every novel we write. My process will probably change with practice. I’m open to trying new approaches as I grow in my creative life.

What’s your process? What have you tried? What works for you? What doesn’t? I’d love to read your insights in the comments!

I struggled with gratitude for a long time. I sometimes felt like people weaponized it against me during hard times or shamed me for ingratitude when I could barely function.

During the Fall of 2019, I bought a gratitude journal and resolved to write in it daily. A lot of pieces of my life were falling apart* and I felt like I needed the practice.

*In retrospect, pieces of my life weren’t falling apart so much as people were showing me who they really were—a lot of people in a short span of months, which led to both betrayal and the sense that I was a stunningly poor judge of character—at the same time I was coming to terms with major trauma in my past.

Then COVID-19 hit, and gratitude felt like a sick joke. Acquaintances posted daily gratitude lists on social media, and they talked about things like beautiful houses, abundant gardens, loving spouses, delightful children, family togetherness, game nights, meals cooked. Or the joy of quarantine for introverts who could finally avoid human contact and tallied up books read.

I had none of that.

I tried to be grateful for what I did have—my dog Rufus, my cats, a patio garden at my apartment, a nearby park with beautiful flowers—but I was so overwhelmingly lonely and alone, isolated and bereft, that my attempts at gratitude felt like settling for so much less than everyone else I knew possessed. I felt unloved and unwanted, unworthy of a caring partner to spend lockdown with. Reading for pleasure was impossible; I could barely summon the focus and energy to conduct my classes online.

And after considering myself an introvert for my entire life, I had recently become more outgoing and social. When I heard the term “ambivert” for the first time, I realized that described me perfectly. I need people and I need solitude. All of one and none of the other is a recipe for disaster.

I quit attempting gratitude lists after an evening when the only thing I found to be grateful for was that I’d managed to stand up and get out of the shower after crying on the tub floor for 30 minutes. (I later shared that in a virtual support group and was scolded for wasting water. Which, yes, I did, and that’s first-world entitlement, and I needed grace that day, not judgment.)

Developing gratitude—sincere, from-the-heart, non-forced gratitude—has been a long and slow process, and a lot of it has to do with seeing the arc of painful situations bend toward redemption.

Yeah, that guy I thought was my soulmate turned out to be a lying, manipulative jerk—and because of the work I did to process that situation, when I encountered a kind, sweet guy who had done and continues to do his own work, I recognized and valued that. I learned that a soulmate isn’t someone you instantly lock eyes with and just know, but the person who drives through hurricane-level rain to be with you after your dog dies, the person who sticks around to navigate the minefield of your trauma triggers, the person who pushes through his own discomfort to do things you love. Who hikes with you and surprises you with tickets to the Wolf Center. Who proposes to you at the zoo. Who dons his Michael Myers mask and hides in dark corners to try to make you scream, or at least scream with laughter. (Recently we were playing one of those quiz games for couples, and that was our answer to the question, “What’s the weirdest way you show your love for each other?”)

In other words—life isn’t perfect, but I don’t have to look hard or far to find reasons to be grateful for him.

And yeah, I had a stalker, and that was terrifying and traumatic—and because of him, I trust my husband in a way I wouldn’t be able to if I hadn’t seen him protect me in real time. And when my job entailed working with people who had similar experiences, I could provide empathy, support, and trauma-informed communication at a level I wouldn’t otherwise have known how to do.

And yeah, losing my job (and everything that led up to it) was painful and infuriating and humiliating and invalidating—but because of that, I’ve had a year to write my novel, make new friends, and evaluate what kind of life I want to shape.

Rufus’ passing wrecked me, and I will always miss him. But I got to have six years with him, six years that healed us both and gave me memories I cherish (like the time he leaped over me to grab a French fry from my friend Pam’s mouth; or the time I asked if he wanted to walk around Unicoi Lake with me, and he burrowed into his Memere’s side so emphatically that we knew he understood my question and wanted no part of a hike!). I am grateful that he got to meet and immediately bond with my husband, and I’ll always believe he held on until he knew I’d found the right man.

Because of the space Rufus’ departure left in our lives, eventually we were able to bring Max into our family. And what a blessing Max has been.

You see where I’m going with this: Gratitude is not just easier but possible now that I can point to positive outcomes from hard experiences. I know the idea is to be grateful no matter what, to have faith that things will work out, but baby steps, right?

On Christmas Day, my husband had to work, so I met my parents for dinner at Red Lobster and then went back to their house for a Scrabble game with my dad.

Dad and I have played Scrabble for years. We have what he’s described as a “friendly competition.” We want to win, but we also admire each other’s good plays and even help each other out occasionally.

For years, I held the high score of 436 points. But on Christmas Day, Dad blew me out of the water. He formed seven-letter words on three of his first four plays, finishing with (if I remember correctly) 445 points.

It was the game of a lifetime.

I’m grateful that he got to have that game. That we got to have it. To share the fun and the laughter and the dizzy disbelief as his tiles kept aligning with words in the dictionary and spaces on the board.

On Friday, Feb. 13, my dad collapsed during a game of pickleball at the Y.

Apparently he had been feeling off all week—enough to mention it to a few people. He kept missing the ball when he played, so he’d discussed having his eyes examined. On Thursday he came home from his physical and told my mom he’d requested a cognitive exam because he felt like he was slipping mentally. She reported his frustration at not being able to navigate the computer, at having to type via hunt-and-peck method. Another elder at his church told us that he’d seemed not himself at their Tuesday meeting, asking questions that had just been answered, “which isn’t like him; he’s so sharp.”

There were signs, but no one put them together until afterward.

Over the past nine days, we have learned that Dad’s collapse was due to a seizure, which in turn was caused by a large mass in his brain. He has not yet stabilized enough for biopsy to be an option, but the doctors believe he has aggressive glioblastoma.

My dad might be able to come home for hospice care. He might be able to walk, with help. He might get to see his grandkids again. But barring a miracle, his days of pickleball and Scrabble—and driving to his land in the mountains, going glamping in the fifth-wheel, serving as a church elder, teaching Sunday school, comforting babies in the church nursey, leading Bible study, telling jokes, taking road trips to Alaska, leading the active life he loves—are over.

And yet we are all so grateful. In this season of sorrow and uncertainty and pain, I am overwhelmed with gratitude.

I am grateful that he collapsed on the pickleball court, where people immediately acted to call an ambulance, and not while he was driving, or at home, where my mom would have had to figure out what to do.

I am grateful that the last activity he got to engage in with the full use of his body was something he loved.

I am grateful for that Christmas Scrabble game and his high score—a record neither of us will ever break, now.

I am grateful for the loving communities that have surrounded and upheld our family: my parents’ church, the pickleball people at the Y, extended family.

I am grateful for my Aunt Gretta, who lost her husband to pancreatic cancer and has known how to walk through this ordeal with my mom in ways none of the rest of us can understand. And for her care for me; last Saturday, she walked into my dad’s hospital room and said, “Monique, go home for a few hours. You need time away.”

I am grateful that my siblings were able to come and that my sister is taking leave from her job to stay with Mom.

I am grateful that I don’t have a job right now, because I’ve been able to spend more time with Dad, been available to help Mom when she needs it, been able to leave for the hospital at a moment’s notice when necessary. I can’t even imagine the challenge of just starting a new position, not having accrued FMLA time, and trying to learn the ropes at work while supporting my family and processing my own feelings.

I am grateful for a kind man in my parents’ church, a man I’d never met, who blessed me with one of the greatest acts of generosity I’ve ever experienced.

I am grateful for a friend who, unasked, cooked enough food to last my husband and me for most of the week.

I am grateful for nurses and doctors and CNAs who know my dad’s name and care for him with dignity and grace.

I am grateful that I just read North of Hope by Shannon Huffman Polson, a memoir of a daughter grieving for her father, because it prepared me for this whole experience in ways I could not have foreseen.

I am grateful that at 3 a.m. on Thursday, Feb. 12, I wrote THE END to my novel. I still have an unwieldy, 118K-word draft that needs to be whittled down to something manageable and coherent—but the story is finished.

I am (again and ever) grateful for my husband, for his intuitive sense of when to be present and when to allow space. For his hugs and neck massages. For his wisdom, willingness to listen, care for our fur babies (one of whom he had to take the vet on Friday), willingness to drive across town with an overnight bag for me on that first horrific night when I stayed over at my mom’s. And for his unceasing efforts to make me laugh and remind me how much I’m loved.

This one is more complicated. After an extremely painful situation at church (see earlier comment about 2019) and my recent experience at a faith-based nonprofit, I was done with Christians, at least in groups. I know and respect individual Christians. But put them together in an organization, and there is no more destructive force, at least in my experience. My mom keeps inviting me to her church and telling me, “They’re not like that.” But I’m sure all the old church ladies at my former congregation would have said the same thing—and look at how toxic they were.

I can’t definitively say that someone else’s faith is performative rather than sincere. I can say that the way I have experienced the faith of most Christians leads me to believe that their faith ends where life gets difficult—where love demands sacrifice or even just discomfort, where compassion carries a financial cost, where supporting someone with a history of trauma might mean taking a hard look at the attitudes and systems that perpetuate that trauma. I’ve watched people line up to say loud public prayers, then, behind closed doors, argue against treating people with the love and grace taught by the Bible they just quoted.

I want no part of such religion.

But my parents’ church is proving me wrong (and my mom right). I am awed and humbled at the outpouring of support and love from their congregation—the many people who have visited Dad at the hospital, who are bringing food to Mom, who have offered to drive her around (because everyone but her agrees that it is not safe for her to be driving right now). And their love has spilled over to the rest of us—hugs, phone numbers given, offers of help.

And so many boxes of cookies from the Dutch bakery that I started taking the stairs to my dad’s seventh-floor room just to offset a few of the calories I was indulging in! I’m grateful for that, too: that my body can climb seven flights of stairs. I used to take that for granted. I don’t anymore.

So much gratitude.

But I’ve learned this, too: Gratitude does not take away the wounds.

We are going to lose our father. He does not seem to be in physical pain, but he has moments of deep anguish when he realizes the condition he is in. He wept when a nurse asked about pickleball. He shouts with frustration when the sounds coming out of his mouth do not resemble the shapes of the words he wants to speak. He curls into a ball and sobs with loss and overwhelm and exhaustion.

My brother could write about the anguish of this moment and conclude with a Bible verse praising God. I can’t, at least not yet, not with sincerity. I can’t skip over the grief and sorrow of Good Friday to land on the joy and redemption of Easter. And I don’t need to. We are all mourning and coping in our own ways, and that’s okay.

I have also come, in these days, to realize that whatever intellectual doubts I’ve entertained about an afterlife, I absolutely believe, in my heart, that one exists and my dad is going there, and he will be healed and at peace.

And in the “not yet,” I feel cocooned in love.

My husband observed that my dad has a purity of soul, but it seemed diluted with life—with commitments and obligations and responsibilities and hobbies and the desperate need to outrun the clock, to squeeze all the activity he could into whatever time he had left.

Now that all of those externalities have been stripped away, that purity, that light, shines through undiminished.

Over the past week, we have shared moments of joy and connection, love and laughter unlike anything I remember.

And for those, I am particularly grateful.

Two weeks ago, my husband had a last-minute, all-hands-on-deck work meeting.

As soon as he told me about it, I had a cold feeling. I knew what it was about. But I didn’t say anything because I didn’t want to panic him.

Turns out he knew, too, and didn’t want to panic me. But we were both right. His entire department was eliminated. With less than two week…

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