I have a brand new website!

 Big news from my little corner of the world... I have a brand new website! 🎉✨

It’s a cozy home for all things me: my journals, behind-the-scenes peeks, writing adventures, and of course my small-town romance books filled with second chances, sweet kisses, charming main streets, and happily-ever-afters.

If you love heartwarming stories, notebook dreams, and a little sparkle of everyday inspiration, I’d love for you to visit.

And that’s not all... a newsletter is on the way! 💌 Think exclusive updates, book news, sneak peeks, journal musings, and extra cozy surprises delivered straight to your inbox.

This feels like opening the front door to a new little bookstore on Main Street, and I’m so excited to welcome you in.

Stay tuned for links, launch fun, and all the lovely things ahead! 🌸📚

AND! An official author headshot thanks to BREKKE FELT!

(you guys! this is getting real!)

A Quiet Return

A Quiet Return

Lately, I’ve started to feel small flickers again.

A paragraph that lands instead of dissolving.
A chapter that pulls me forward instead of exhausting me.
A sentence that hums quietly in my chest.

Not the roaring comeback story we love to celebrate. Just small, ordinary moments that whisper, I’m still here.

I’m learning to trust these beginnings. To let them be enough. To stop measuring recovery by output and start measuring it by presence.

This year taught me that creativity isn’t something I have to chase. It knows where to find me. It waits patiently, like a book left open on the nightstand, holding my place until I’m strong enough to keep reading.

And when I do, I’ll arrive not as the person I was before, but as someone softer, steadier, and far more compassionate toward the quiet work of healing.

The Year My Creativity Went Quiet

The Year My Creativity Went Quiet

Last year didn’t look dramatic from the outside.
I showed up. I worked. I did what needed to be done.

But inside, everything slowed to a hush.

I was living with active mono and adrenal exhaustion, and the hardest part wasn’t the physical fatigue. It was the way my mind, the place I usually live most fully, went dim. Reading felt impossible. Writing felt like trying to lift something heavier than my body knew how to hold.

I’m a voracious reader. In a normal year, I move through 75 or more books the way some people move through seasons. Stories are how I rest, how I think, how I make sense of myself. Last year, I was lucky to read five.

Five.

Each one felt like a small miracle and a quiet grief at the same time.

When Your Identity Runs on Empty

Creativity isn’t just what I do. It’s how I orient myself in the world. When I couldn’t read or write, it wasn’t only frustrating, it was disorienting. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror of my days.

I didn’t lack ideas. I lacked bandwidth.

Brain fog isn’t just forgetting words or losing focus. It’s watching your curiosity stall out. It’s wanting to follow a thought and realizing the trail disappears after a few steps. It’s knowing the joy is still there somewhere and not having the energy to reach it.

I kept telling myself I should be grateful I could still work. That others had it worse. That rest was a privilege.

None of that made the grief smaller.

Slowing Down Without Calling It Failure

The hardest lesson this year wasn’t learning how to rest. It was learning not to call rest a waste.

Our culture doesn’t know what to do with invisible healing. There are no gold stars for nervous systems recalibrating or adrenal glands recovering their rhythm. There’s no applause for days when the biggest accomplishment is not pushing past the edge.

I spent months wrestling with the fear that I had lost something essential. That my creativity had left for good. That a year without output meant a year erased.

But healing doesn’t erase time. It changes what time is doing.

While my body was recovering, something quieter was happening. My pace softened. My nervous system learned what safety felt like again. My relationship with productivity loosened its grip.

Nothing flashy. Nothing Instagrammable.

Just necessary.

Creativity Doesn’t Disappear, It Waits

What I’m learning now, slowly, is that creativity isn’t a faucet that dries up forever. It’s more like a tide. When the body is overwhelmed, it pulls back. It protects its energy. It waits for the conditions to feel survivable again.

This year didn’t take my creativity from me.
It asked me to trust it enough to let it rest.

Reading is starting to come back in short stretches. Writing arrives in fragments instead of floods. I’m learning to honor what shows up instead of mourning what doesn’t.

I didn’t waste a year.

I invested it in staying alive, in staying functional, in staying gentle enough with myself to heal.

And that, I’m realizing, is not the opposite of creativity.
It’s the soil it needs.

Writing conferences and posts and self-editing

There are many, many writing conferences in the states, but some of my favorite ones are in Utah. My #1 favorite conference is usually held in May: Storymakers Conference.

This year, the conference went virtual, due to #covid19. And while I didn't get to "see" my friends I usually see once a year, I was able to 'attend' more classes than I ever did when the conference was live.

For the next couple of months, I'm going to write out my notes in, hopefully helpful, posts. These will be based on my own notes that I will try and make sense of all the words!

The Final Draft: Advanced Self-editing by Kelsy Thompson (editor)

You can edit in different ways and I'm sure I'll be posting more about editing. In Kelsey's class, she taught different levels of editing and how to self-check them.

Start by looking at your:

Narrative

Plot

    Self-check:

      Are your character's goals specific? Attainable (but not too easily)?

       Does the story have too many or too little subplots?

Character

   Self-check:

       Do the characters serve the main plot?

       Are supporting characters fleshed out?

       Do I have too many characters?

       Do they have a symbiotic relationship?  Symbiosis defines three basic relationship types occurring between living entities: mutualism, where both species benefit; commensalism, where one organism benefits and the other experiences no harm; and parasitism, in which one entity benefits, sometimes at the cost of the other.

Tension

    Self-check:

         How does the tension flow?

         Is the tension internal AND external?

        Are you pulling punches to protect your character?

        "In places of higher tension a very agreeable person can be put to their limit and blow up  

Tension exercise:

Examine every scene, define your source of tension

Assign a level of tension 1-10 --> 1 lowest, 10 highest

This exercise should give a fresh look at the scenes and where the tension lies. Where do you need to amp up the tension or give some down time?

Subtext

    Self-check:

        Use incongruence as a way to 'show' there is more going on then meets the eye.

            For instance, A Type A personality who is having a hard time might not shower or clean their apartment for days when upset.

        Is there more happening on the page than just words?

       

Pacing

    Self-check:    

        Do I have a mix of slow and fast pacing?

         Are flashbacks slowing the pace?

Voice

    Self-check

        Am I using the right POV for my characters?

        Am I carrying in sentence length?

        Is my character's voice consistent?   

Tone

    Self-check

        Do I establish tone from the first chapter and carry it through the whole story?

        Does every scene have a tone?

        Does every character have their own tone?    

Line editing and proofreading

    Self-check

        Show, don't tell

        Avoid adverbs

        Find and crutch words

    A cool way to do this is to use Wordcloud to find your crutch words and edit them for better words or take out completely. I love this idea! Look at the words of my Work In Progress and what words I need to eliminate:

The story is about Gretchen, but maybe I've used her name too much? How about 'said?' I use that a ton, as well as didn't, like, hand, head, time, etc. I'll plug those words into my 'search and find' tool in Word and see if I can cut those words or restructure the sentence to be stronger.

Proofing work

    Read your manuscript out loud

The labor of editing

    Let your brain rest between your editing passes

    Don't edit more than a couple of hours a day

Two great editing books:

Self-Editing for Fiction Writers by Renni Browne and Dave King

Writing Deep Scenes by Martha Alderson and Jordan Rosenfeld