Newsletter, February 2025
Welcome back to another letter from your friendly neighborhood writer pen-pal. Got some coffee or tea to sip while you read this letter? Lately, my go to has been an iced peppermint mocha from a little independently-owned coffee shop near my house. (I’m not a huge fan of the taste of coffee, so I always let my ice melt before I drink it.)
February has been a month of unexpected and big changes in my author career: first, I decided to try traditional publishing! And second, I decided to write all my future books under my real name instead of a pen name, which is why this new website now exists. I talked about both decisions briefly on Instagram, but I wanted to discuss it more in depth here as well as give a recap for those who don’t follow me. This month, we’ll talk about my decision to switch from self-publishing to traditional publishing, and next month we’ll talk about the death of my pen name. I can’t do both in one letter, or else you’d be here so long you’d have to get more coffee!
Traditional Publishing
After self-publishing two poetry books (and originally planning on self-publishing my debut fantasy novel), I decided that being an indie author was not a good fit for me. Toward the latter half of 2024, I became utterly exhausted, burnt-out, and frustrated with writing. I’ve been writing since I was in elementary school, and this has never happened to me before. Writing is my joy and the thing that keeps my heart beating on the worst days, so when I started feeling angry and frustrated and resentful toward it, I knew something was capital W wrong. I took a break from all of my projects for a couple months, and it helped my creativity return, but when I finished the draft of SOLH that I was going to send to my developmental editor, that same sense of burnout and frustration returned.
And then I realized that feeling was actually a little bit familiar. I felt the same way, though on a smaller scale, when it was time to publish my second book, Silent Edelweiss. Slowly, it dawned on me that the actual process of self-publishing a book was making me miserable. I loved writing Dawn, Edelweiss, and SOLH, but when the writing was done and I had to move on to things like registering ISBNs and setting up ARCs and street teams and uploading files and ordering proofs, something in my soul died a little bit each time. It was overwhelming to have to manage all these logistical nightmares after having spent months pouring my heart and soul into a book. Even more overwhelming when you factored in the limited amount of time I had to do all of this on top of working a full-time job and dealing with chronic illnesses.
With SOLH, I discovered that other than writing and editing the book, I wanted to be as hands-off from the actual publishing process as possible. I wanted to spend more time writing and less time worrying about ebook files and formatting and ISBNs. And that’s simply not possible as an indie author. You are the writer and the entire publishing team both. And that was simply too much for me to handle.
Enter traditional publishing. . . Yes, I know you still have to help market your books whether you’re an indie or trad author, but the thought of never having to log into IngramSpark’s website again was like a breath of fresh air.
And to be perfectly honest, being traditionally published was what I had always dreamed of for myself. High school me imagined that SOLH would get a book deal and be my debut novel, but she was so afraid of querying and rejection letters that she never gave herself the chance to try. (That was probably for the best, because the state the book was in at the time was absolutely not ready.)
Fast forward a decade, and I still have that same dream—and that same fear of rejection, too. But I’d rather fail than never try at all. And so here we are: I cancelled my cover reveal tour for SOLH (yes, the cover was already done!), inactivated my BookFunnel account, and waved goodbye to IngramSpark with maniacal glee. It may not be this book, or the next one, or the next one, but I am committed to getting traditionally published, even if it takes the rest of my life (but I really hope not).
Project SOLH
This book was not written with traditional publishing in mind. If you had told me last year, even last December, that I would finally stop listening to my fears and give traditional publishing a try, I would have told you that maybe you’re looking for a version of me in another timeline. Not this me. No way.
Obviously, if I had known, I would have done a lot of things differently—like not writing a story that’s 165,000 words. This is way too long for any agent to accept from a debut author, so the scissors and the red pens must come out with a vengeance. Since my manuscript was already with my developmental editor by the time I decided to switch to trad pub, I went ahead and continued with those edits. It certainly couldn’t hurt to have professional eyes on my book before it was time to start querying. I asked my editor to help identify places where I could condense or cut scenes that weren’t serving the book, so I’m hopeful that will make my job at least a little bit easier.
SOLH comes back from edits on March 14, and I can’t wait to start the work of transforming her into the final, best version of herself. I read several craft books over the past month to help me prepare for revisions on my other book, Project FOS, and I’m excited to apply everything I’ve learned to this book, too.
Project FOS
Speaking of Project FOS, the first draft is done! It took me 4 months (November - February) to write this one, which was a month longer than draft 1 of Project SOLH took me last year. But this book is dual POV and infinitely more complicated in terms of both character arcs and world building, so I’m still pretty happy with that pace. I’ve started outlining a map for revisions for draft 2, but this project will have to go on the back burner soon when I get my edits for SOLH back.
What I’m Reading
A bit of a slower reading month because I was determined to finish my draft of Project FOS!
Water Moon
Iron Widow
Heavenly Tyrant
Water Moon was a beautiful, haunting fever dream of a book. Like Studio Ghibli but much darker and for adults. The prose was exquisite, and the story ripped my heart out in the best of ways. It was an instant five star read, and I will absolutely be annotating this later. Iron Widow was fast-paced and brilliant, and kept me up until 2 AM finishing the ending. Heavenly Tyrant. . . honestly, it felt like a completely different book, and I didn’t enjoy it near as much. I also was not expecting it to have another book to follow-up, because these two books were marketed as a duology.
Closing
Your coffee’s probably cold (or gone) by now, so I’ll just leave you with one last thing. If there’s something you’re afraid of that’s standing in the way of what you want, then I hope you realize how much bigger your desire is than your fear. I hope you realize that whatever it is you want is worth braving the scary thing for.
Sincerely,