It’s already November.

In Buffalo, November is something of a wasteland between the flamboyant farewell of autumn and the crisp, cozy chill and dazzling white of winter. It’s rainy, wet, muddy, bare. November is something we simply endure until Thanksgiving launches “the holiday season.” But this year, I’ve been intentionally looking for the natural wonder of the season. The rich browns and stark branches left behind by flaming leaves have their own humble beauty. Even the overcast skies and muddy puddles feel meaningful, important, if you’re open to that kind of grace.

November is sacred to Hekate, which is unsurprising the moment you scratch the surface of Hekate’s lore. In the Northern Hemisphere, the eleventh month of the Gregorian calendar feels like and is, in many ways, a gateway to the Underworld—a gateway to death, and hibernation, and the dreamtime. These things are also a part of life, even though they feel very much like the loss of it to those who resist them.

It’s appropriate, then, that November is where I find myself waiting, wondering, and trying to learn how to let go.

State of the Author: Recuperating

I’ve been busting my butt (too literally) to finish a draft of what I hope will be my sophomore novel before my agent goes on maternity leave at the end of the month. I’ve known since late May that this deadline was coming, but I didn’t know then that I would be incapable of writing for most of August and September. But, thanks to the last decade of work I’ve done on my mental health, I was able to come out of that period of grief in a reasonable amount of time (at least the period where it made the inside of my brain feel like fog over a lake that I was crossing on stepping stones, but could only feel around for the next stone ahead of me) and dive into a project that I am absolutely in love with. 

By the time I was able to write again I had a lot of catch-up to do, so that meant butt-in-chair, eight hours a day, five days a week. And then when it was clear I wasn’t going to make the deadline at that pace, twelve hours a day, seven days a week. But I managed! I finished the rough draft on November 3rd, and managed to squeeze in a round of revision before I turned it in on Friday, November 14.

If you look at my Scrivener stats in this image below (screenshot taken after I finished the first draft), you may begin to understand how intensely hard I worked on this project when I worked on it, but also how much I loved it, and how clear the vision of it was/is to me. 

However, due to my neurodivergence and lack of time for self care the last few weeks of my deadline, Friday the 14th was a struggle to get through. I was staring at the same sentences for 10 minutes at a time thinking I need to find a different way of wording this only to give up because the words were all gone. After I emailed the draft to my agent, I passed out on the couch for an hour while my partner was playing video games. I usually cannot fall asleep when the TV is on and making noises, so this was something. I felt, all weekend, like I had the flu. I slept something like 34 hours between Friday and Monday morning. We had tickets to see Wicked on Saturday (the musical, not the movie), so I dragged myself out of the house for that. While it was wonderful, I was yawning through most of it.

I’m starting to recuperate, but I need to be gentle with myself until I feel my strength come back and my brain stops feeling like it’s full of bees. It’s all good though. I have been through this before and know (generally) how to manage. And hopefully next time I’m on deadline I won’t have a two month crisis that makes it necessary to churn out almost 80,000 words in one month. (I also had to update a presentation this summer and travel to TX to give said presentation, so that took some time out of my writing schedule, too.)

So, for now, I am resting, getting back into a reasonable and sustainable daily routine, and cleaning my office. Maybe I will even find some time to read a book.

State of the Writing: Waiting & Dreaming

Because publishing is very hush-hush about delicate things, I haven’t spoken much about what happened to the second book of my “2 book deal.” Suffice it to say the industry can be messy and unpredictable, so I have been uncontracted since last year around this time (not because of anything to do with The Wilderness of Girls–she’s thriving in my opinion). There was another book that was supposed to be my sophomore novel, but the market has proven the subject matter doesn’t sell very well, so that’s been shelved for now. If I’m honest, I also wasn’t feeling good about how it was turning out, so it was a relief when my agent told me last spring to focus on something new. And even more of a relief when I told her the loose pitch for the monster book (TMB) and she was very excited about it!

She gave me the go-ahead in March, and on November 14 I emailed her the first revised draft of what I hope will be my sophomore novel. TMB is still untitled, but other than that it feels like one of the most complete novels I’ve written in one go since I finished up my web serial, The Poppet and the Lune, over a decade ago. The vision I have for this world and its story is so clear, and I have felt so good writing it, it reminds me of when I was young and undamaged by rejection, and still capable of being (joyfully) obsessed with my own stories. I would write scenes on the back of register tape when I worked retail. Or I would write scenes in the back pages of my notebooks during class. Back then, I was so excited about my stories that I couldn’t wait to get home and sit down at my computer and make magic happen. 

Then life got busy, and I got burnt out, and there were so many disappointments in my (lack of a) writing career that writing became fraught, painful, and more like trying to squeeze my soul from my bones. I kept writing (or at least thinking about writing, which is really half the process) because I love it even when it feels like suffering, but it was so hard. Even The Wilderness of Girls, which is the book of my guts, felt like chiseling something out of my own flesh instead of birthing something beautiful into the world.

Speaking of, when I was writing TMB I had not one but two pregnancy/birth dreams where I was suddenly in labor, but delivered the baby with ease, all by myself, without a moment of pain. How’s that for a metaphor? Because this book (apologies for the graphic imagery) slid out of me like it was just waiting to be delivered to the world as quickly and easily as possible. It has been virtually painless to write, not because it’s simple, but because I have been in love with every character I’ve created, every scene I’ve imagined, and every twist and turn that I’ve been inspired to torture my characters with. And those twists and turns seemed to be waiting, putin the open, for me to find them when I needed them, no brain-wracking necessary. It’s almost as if this book was downloaded from future me, who has already written it. And I love it.

It’s not perfect, because no early draft is perfect (it’s way too long, for starters, but that is my curse as a writer…unless maybe it’s meant to be a duology??? Because I have IDEAS and there is so much I DIDN’T include in the draft because it was already so long…). But I am obsessed with it. I’m making a playlist (I never do that). I want to make character art (I never do that). I am already anticipating the scenes my agent will want to cut so I can save them as deleted bonus material for y’all because they’re cute and funny as heck.

But, of course, these are all just my feelings about it, and it doesn’t necessarily mean anything about how industry professionals will feel. I have to wait and see what my agent thinks, and then I will have until March to revise, revise, revise. (Hopefully! I mean I have other ideas for books but I really want this to be my next published novel.) I will be very surprised/devastated if she hates it, but while I often doubt myself, I don’t think my instincts can be that far off.

Once I’m recuperated (already making decent progress there, so hopefully soon) I have another book I would like to play with while I’m waiting to hear back from my agent. Right now I’m looking forward to a slower, quieter winter (hopefully) where I will have a chance to build a sustainable daily, weekly, and monthly routine. I’m hopeful this winter proves as fruitful in this way as the last year has proved fruitful for my writing.

State of the Runcible Witch: Mending & Transmuting

All in all, I am practically “living the dream” at the moment. I get to write full time, which means I get to be my own boss, which means I get to rest and play and work on my own schedule. Financially things are tight but stable, and since my health has been improving I don’t even have huge medical bills to deal with or long days at the doctor’s office anymore.

But I am still grieving. Some days I wake up and realize I haven’t cried about my boys in a few days. Some days I notice something seemingly random and break down in tears. I cried during the first snow of the season; Rusty loved the snow and it was always a joyful moment for us when the first snow came and I would let him (and eventually also Nadja) outside for a happy romp. I cried when I sent my book to my agent; Rusty was always a part of any moment of celebration in years past. I’d written so many novels with him snoozing nearby, and he was often the first to know when I’d finished a draft, even if he didn’t understand why I was so excited. Luke had been around for even more novels, often sleeping behind my laptop while I wrote. He’d been around back in the days when I was Buffalo’s municipal liaison for NaNoWriMo (RIP). He was there when I finished The Poppet and the Lune web serial, then when I turned it into a novel and self published it. To be fair, I probably also cried last Friday because I was exhausted, but all I know for sure is that I laid on the couch and felt tremendous joy and loss, at the same time.

If I’m honest, the last six weeks have all been that way: less of a rollercoaster, more of a light switch. Joy and sadness were my defaults, it just depended if I was flipping on or not. I would meditate and journal in the mornings and cry, then [flip] I would get lost in the world of TMB and feel ecstatic to be so in love with a project that was flowing so smoothly. Then I would come home or downstairs from my office and [flip] be reminded that there are only three animals to greet me, not five. There is only one dog to let out, not two. There is only one “brudder” left to perch on the end of the dining room table, and he no longer has his pale mirror counterpart who would eerily match his posture and expression every time. These things still feel deeply wrong to me. As much as my writing has felt deeply right.

What’s harder to explain is this: since I’ve lost Luke and Rusty, I’ve begun to feel untethered to my identity. They say when animals pass they take along with them an entire era of your life, and that feels especially true to me now. I’m losing the version of myself that existed before I met my partner, who could be independent and alone if I needed to, because I had my little furry family to take care of; the version of me who experienced so many hard, life-defining things, and then who faced them head-on, determined to heal. 

When I turned 40 this past spring, I didn’t feel much about it. But these losses have made me feel ungrounded in ways I hear other people feel at milestone birthdays. Who am I now, without them? Who will I be when Leto is gone and it’s just Nadja and Mort (who is my partner’s cat)? My partner and I are committed to building a life and growing old together, but losing Luke and Rusty (and let’s face it, Leto is likely to pass sooner rather than later with stage 4 kidney disease and hyperthyroidism) feels like a loss of self I never could have anticipated, and still can’t fully explain, even to myself.

But from that loss of identity, I feel like I’m uncovering truth and clarity that I’ve been seeking for a long time. Or else, maybe I’m just crossing into that all-out-of-fucks-to-give realm of your 40s I’ve heard about, where I’m dropping the pretenses even I have tricked myself into buying into for most of my life. 

When I first sold TWoG I had a bit of an identity crisis, too. Who am I if I am not yearning to get published? What do I want besides that? I have some ideas, outside of the obvious (a stable career as an author) (LOL). And I think this year’s heartbreak has forced me to explore, once again and from my current perspective, what life really means to me, and what I want to do with mine (besides writing novels). As I’m sure some of you know, nothing makes you more mindful of the present moment than when you have lived side-by-side with the threat of loss, or counted the hours and minutes left in the life of someone you cherished.

This keen awareness of the present and of the passage of time has forced me to examine my priorities, desires, responsibilities, and needs. Writing is still way at the top, and I don’t anticipate that changing. But my relationship with myself has changed dramatically in the past year, even before my season of grief. I received my AuDHD diagnosis last November, and while I knew it would be helpful in my recovery from burnout and chronic fatigue syndrome, I had no idea how much it would change my internal voice, or how much it would shake up the beliefs I’ve always held about my own behaviors. Since getting my diagnoses I have come to love and accept myself from an even greater depth than before. I feel like I’ve woken up. I’ve become conscious of patterns I had simply accepted in the past–ways I sold myself short, or leaned into feelings that were expected of me, that made me appear a certain way, but weren’t necessarily true.

That’s kind of hard to explain, but my point is I feel more aware of what my brain is doing at all times, but in a beneficial way, not an overwhelming way. A curtain-cast-aside kind of way. And I think that’s going to be helpful as I rediscover and redefine who I really am.

Early Holiday Thoughts

In advance of Thanksgiving, here’s a brief list of the things I’m thankful for in 2025, a year that has been one of the best and worst of my life:

1. The kindness and compassion of strangers, and the healing power of feeling fully understood in your grief
2. Medical amphetamines, which have changed my life even more than Prozac did in 2018 (and I am ever grateful for the mental health professionals I worked with in 2018-2020)
3. My financial savvy (+ some windfalls/luck), which has enabled me to write full time
   1. Also, Care Credit, which allowed me to do everything in my power to help my boys, so that I had no doubts or regrets when the time came to say goodbye
4. My amazing partner who has been through so much this year, but has still been my soft place to land during my own heartbreak.
5. My amazing agent, who has been so understanding, patient, and supportive even as she is embarking on a major life transition of her own.
6. Live theater. We have season tickets to TWO local musical theater seasons (one touring Broadway professionals, one purely local), and they have been such a joyful way to spend time with my partner (and parents for the local one), as well as helping to refill the creative well.
7. The poem “Go to the Limits of Your Longing” by Rainer Maria Rilke. The whole poem is one of my favorite in the world, but the lines:
   

“Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”

Have been my life preserver during more than one hard time in my life. Right now they’re on the home screen on my phone. They may also be entirely relevant to the themes of TMB, and the theme of my adult life in general.

8. My own passion for and curiosity about life. This has sometimes been a burden more than a blessing, but it’s the thing that has driven me always forward: towards healing, breakthroughs, and uncovering my own authenticity. While I love to feel rooted and safe in whatever phase of life I’m in, I’m always looking forward to the next journey. Even if it begins in tears.
9. Leto, Nadja, and Mort, who continue to fill the house with love in their own special ways, even though they, too, are grieving.
10. The incredible honor of getting to know and love Rusty and Luke, and to experience their love, for 13/17 years. As the quote goes, “How lucky am I to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” (A.A. Milne) I don’t know if it can be summed up any more perfectly than that.

Ten seems like a good number to stop at, though I could go on. It’s strange to be so sad and yet so grateful, but that’s where I’m at.

Now I’m off to do some laundry and get out my winter clothes (yes, we’ve had snow fall and I still haven’t gotten my winter clothes out, THAT’S HOW BUSY I’VE BEEN).

Wishing you all Happy Thanksgiving and restful holiday season!