Updates!

Or a long, unfocused diatribe I'm not apologizing for

I didn’t want June to pass by without any words, especially considering new people have been finding me and subscribing, to which I’m grateful and surprised! Thank you! I’m not sure what brought you here, but thanks for coming. I hope my future words are helpful, encouraging, and/or at least a bit entertaining. This post is going to be a hodge-podge of updates and the summer may be a bit quiet as I’m settling into a new job, but I’ll be back with more publishing and writing chats soon. I think.

The last few months have been really busy between a trip to Scotland, packing to move back to our home in West Virginia, and writing down the bones of an entire memoir. Yep. More on that in a minute.

First, the happy, happy news of my husband’s recent scan showing no cancer activity. For those of you who have been along for the last year and half, I haven’t written about everything here, and mostly kept health conversations for Caring Bridge, but just yesterday we got the best case scenario results we could get and it makes all of these other changes and decisions even brighter. He’ll be monitored, of course, and will stay on immunotherapy, but can stop chemo, which is a huge relief to us both. We are so grateful for the treatments and how effective they have obviously been, but chemo is brutal. So, so long to that!

We are back at Toad Hall in West Virginia, our little mountain bungalow we bought in 2019, and have spent the last few days unpacking and trying to tame our wild property. We have a lot of homeowner projects to take care of—some basic, some big—but the fact we even have them is wonderful! Stressful, but a welcomed kind of stress after a year and a half of not even knowing where we would end up. We’ve experienced displacement from home a few times in our relationship, so it’s especially sweet to be able to return to Toad Hall.

Back in December, 2023, we decided to take a big trip. We were able to save up some money while living with family and since we’d never traveled together, decided it was time to go for it. After a cancer diagnosis like the one we got, you realize how precious time is and how important experiences together can be. So we bought tickets to Scotland and after months of planning, hoofed it around the country for a solid two weeks in early June. I’ll write more on it, I’m sure, but it was spectacular.

A Scottish icon: the hairy coo

In the beginning of the year, I had been feeling pretty lost when it came to writing. Even more so publishing. As the panic of 2023 began to subside, a lot of personal mourning seeped in. Mourning for what we’d lost, for not knowing where we were going to end up, being stuck in someone else’s house, and for me, the lack of any ideas, contracts, or even desire to write for kids—the major thing that has been driving me for decades. There was something so big, and so life-altering about Joe’s diagnosis that it felt—still does—like a giant shift in thinking about what makes anything worth doing. I thought about how the bulk of my books came out in the pandemic, making it completely impossible for me to do any of the typical author stuff—events, signings, school visits, etc. And then, just as everything was starting to open back up, not only did I run out of contracts, Joe was diagnosed, and so the last year and a half has had me focused on that. This has been the recipe of a fizzled out career, I fear.

And yet, I kept plugging away at my journal, writing through all of this and trying to figure out what my future held outside cancer, outside being a children’s author, outside all of the identifying roles I tend to lean on. This coincided with a newfound strength for moving forward with Joe despite the unknown and our decision that we would go back to West Virginia despite all of the reasons we left it in the beginning.

When I journal I write my own conclusions. Time and time again I figure out exactly what I need to do, why I feel a certain way, or how to understand the world as best I can through my writing. In May this happened in a very big way and for the first time I saw a personal narrative arc—a prerequisite for memoir. I’ve been writing about my experiences for a long time, both privatly and publicly, but I’ve never seen a full arc for a book, only short essays or posts like this. But in May I saw it. A beginning, middle and end that framed a personal change. And so I wrote it.

Within weeks I had the bones of an entire book. And Joe’s recent clear scan is like the way unexpected cherry on top.

Climbing mountains with my love

I’m not going to go into the details, but wanted to share this because I think it’s incredibly important for writers to not box themselves in to a category or style or even a career. All of my published books came from outside a plan I thought I had. I worked solely on young adult novels, but a picture book biography was my first book deal. I never thought I would write middle grade and now middle grade is my biggest success. Growth only happens when you stretch yourself outside a comfort zone. Writing memoir is not new, but the ability to see a small puzzle of my life come together in a book for adults, that could (maybe) be published, is a terrifying and exciting new prospect.

One of the pieces of this puzzle was attending the retreat in April I talked about in a previous post. Something about this retreat, my experiences in the last year and beyond, and conversations with other writers helped this shift in my focus. You can listen to this conversation between Jane Houng and I in the Mending Lives podcast for a taste of it, as well as a bit more about Monolith, a book that helped me through the last year also.

I may return to a middle grade project I started in 2022, but for now I have moved on from writing for young readers. Maybe it’s a phase, maybe it is a true and solid shift, I really am not sure. I don’t believe in absolutes, but in following my heart wherever it goes and for now, it’s settled in this new space.

It’s a scary, but welcomed challenge.