Writing in 2025

I haven't done a writing blog in a long time. I haven't been considered a writer in a long time. Life goes on and changes and ebbs and flows. And here it is. 2025. It's been a minute since I was published. These days, I'm more sales rep than writer. Working full-time as a rep for a liquor agency sounds like a great gig to many people. And it's not so bad. But full time is full time and life happened for about 10 years there between books. :)

I miss being a writer. I miss my little boy. (he's still around. He's just a big boy now. I love him just as much, don't get me wrong, but I miss the little guy) For me, those two things kind of went together - Mom and Writer. Because when I was writing, full-time-ish, it was when the boy was younger. There was swimming and school and friends, and life was busy and full. I fit my writing in and participated in the boy's life. Maybe too much. Who knows. It's got to be hard being the only child sometimes.

Anyhow, when he went to high school, I went back to work full time. On and off for a while. I kept trying to get back to writing. But the timing wasn't right. We needed extra income, so I worked. And I've been working for the last 10 years. I mean, I worked before that, too. When I was trying to get published. When I got published. Sometimes full-time. Sometimes part-time. But I always dreamed of transitioning to being a full-time writer again. My dream.

I got to do it for a while! And it was great. I truly loved it. There were hard things, too. There are always hard things, aren't there? No matter what your job is. But there were great parts. I loved being an author. I loved being the boy's mom who was an author. Like I said, they went together! I got to do a book tour, got a Rita Nomination, did school visits, conferences, and had a couple of trips to New York. And I wrote, a lot.

And then ten years of a different life happened. Some deaths. Covid. Some illnesses. Moving. New Jobs. Family stuff. Separating from my spouse of over 25 years. Life. Lots of life happened.

And then somehow, in the past year, I started finding my way back to writing. I always come back to writing. Sometimes, it's just for myself. Journaling. Writing scenes. I also always have a couple of books I've been working on (for a loooong time these days). I also decided to go in and do a fairly deep edit on a YA book that I wrote years ago.

It took a lot of time to go through it. And plump it up and trim it down. And while I was going through it, I forgot how many stages there are to writing books. The stage where you love your book so much and think it's brilliant and clever and so fun to write. And then that five-minute stage goes away, and every sentence sounds horrible. The stage where the first, maybe second draft, still sounds like garbage in many, many parts. The stage where you question your skills as a writer, and have writer's envy when you read the beautiful words of other authors. The stage where you question your audacity to try and write a real book, and you cut and rewrite and wonder if you're just making everything worse.

I went through that stage hard. For one thing, the book I was editing was different than my other YA's because it's a parallel life story (totally inspired by my absolute love of the movie, The Sliding Doors with Gwyneth Paltrow btw) There are magical elements and thus it requires some suspension of disbelief.

It also leans pretty heavily into the romance genre (which despite the Rita Nom, I tend to be pretty light on) But after I went through the self-loathing and cringing stages of rewriting, I got back to reading it, and feeling like, hey, this might be an okay book. (I totally see it as a movie in case you're a movie-making person. Call me wink wink.) So, I sent the book to my agent (Hello, Mrs. Agent whom I haven't spoken to in many many years, here's the edited version of the book I sent you over five years ago)

Luckily, she didn't tell me to beat it and instead said she would sub it to publishers. Of course, I know there's no guarantee it will sell. My expectations are so much lower than they were almost 20 years ago when I first started subbing books to the world. God that makes me feel old, and I already felt old when I was starting out as a writer, almost 20 years ago!

It's exciting. To dip my toe back into the game.

Hopefully someone will take a bite.

Wish me luck.