Newsletter, March 2025
As this month’s letter finds you, is it spring where you are? Are the flowers blooming and making your eyes water from the beauty? (Or wait, maybe that’s just the pollen.) It’s been feeling like spring lately here, the sky alternating between bright, uplifting sunlight and dark, stormy downpours. March is one of my favorite months because it’s when everything starts to come alive again, including me. Winter and I are not friends.
As promised, we’ll be talking about why I dropped my pen name this month, and also about a special anniversary I’m celebrating in March too!
Goodbye, Jay W. Song
In case you didn’t know, for the past two years that I’ve been an author, I’ve been self-publishing under the pen name Jay W. Song. That was the name everyone knew me by, and some even thought it was my real name. For a long time, I wished it was.
I was not confident in myself in 2023 when I first decided to get serious about my dream of becoming an author. My regular, boring, everyday name didn’t seem good enough to put on the cover of a book. And I didn’t want people who knew me to know what I had written, either. Enter Jay (a nickname my friends and family often use) W. (my last initial) Song (it fit with the poetry books I was publishing at the time). Jasmine Willis was boring and worked a regular day job, but Jay W. Song was exciting and daring and pursuing her author dreams. Jay W. Song was everything I was not—everything I aspired to be.
It seemed a brilliant pen name at the time, and I thought that I would carry it with me for the rest of my author career. But when I started the journey of publishing books, I hadn’t planned on one thing—making real, authentic friendships. I’m very much an introvert, content with a few close friends, so meeting new people and connecting with them was the furthest thing from my mind when I started sharing my books to social media.
Throughout my past two years of indie publishing, I met friends who inspired, supported, and encouraged me. Friends who sent me birthday presents in the mail and that I video chatted with and drove hours to see. Friends so real that they made my pen name feel… less so. When I introduced myself to friends in person or over video call, I didn’t want to be called Jay.
And recently, when I printed out a copy of Project SOLH to edit, I realized I didn’t want to see the name Jay on my books anymore, either.
Somehow, by showing up for her dream over and over again, and being supported and encouraged along the way, Jay found the confidence to be Jasmine.
Writing under a pen name gave me the freedom to be anonymous—to explore who I was as an author and a person without fear of judgment from people I knew. So that when I was ready, I could come back to myself again, and see that the person I had been all along was already good enough.
Project SOLH
I mentioned a special anniversary this month, and it’s for this book! March 18 is the birthday of this book, these characters who have lived with me for almost half my life. When I was in high school, I set myself a goal of publishing this book before I turned 17—yes, I know you’re laughing, and I am too.
This is the book that I always come back to, no matter how long it sits in the drawer. Every March, spring comes alive, and my love for this book comes alive again, too. In March 2023, I tried to save the mess of a draft that teenage me had written (and never finished), but quickly gave up and decided I couldn’t do it. March 2024, I sat down with Save the Cat and committed to saving this story if it was my last act on this earth. And with how much help that manuscript needed, it felt like the effort I put in to fix it very well could have killed me.
Now, in March 2025, SOLH just came back from professional developmental edits. This will (fingers crossed) be the last round of revisions before I start preparing my querying materials.
I know that the first book most authors write does not get published. But I’m channeling the naive determination of 17 year old me, because Asana and her story deserve to be real. One of my beta readers told me, “This is the sort of book that makes you want to be a better person,” and I think this is exactly what the world needs right now.
Project FOS
Snoozing in a drawer until SOLH is query ready.
What I’m Reading
This month has not been much of a reading month. I finished A Song to Drown Rivers. The prose was lovely and it was a fun, page-turning read.
Closing
To end this month’s newsletter, I just want to share a snippet of a poem from my lyrical novel, Silent Edelweiss.
“I've always thought that it must be
awfully painful
for flowers and trees and vegetables
to push themselves up
through the unforgiving earth
in order to make their presence known,
to give us life and sustenance and beauty.
“I know it must be
awfully painful
for you, Edelweiss, to suffer
unhappiness, and grief, and sickness.
But I also know
that just as plants and trees
are necessary to nourish life on earth,
so too is it necessary
for you to push through the unforgiving dirt
of your trauma
in order to reach the people
whose lives depend on you being here.
“There are lives you are meant to nourish,
just like the plants do.
The world needs
your presence.”
Winter is long and unforgiving, and the blossoms of spring unfold slowly. But the spring does not give up trying to unbury itself from the depths of winter, and neither should you.
See you next month!