March – Q1 Writing Update

In which I was supposed to get a lot done in the first quarter of 2025 and I…did not.

It feels kind of silly whipping up a writing update when I didn’t accomplish much of anything… But I told myself that I would try to update everyone each quarter on my writing goals, so here we are. A promise is a promise. 🙂

It’s hard to sum up the first quarter of 2025. I had lots of editing work to do, there were a few trips taken and birthdays to celebrate, and February’s workload quite literally kicked my ass. In the past, if I haven’t had time to write during the week at all, I’ve tried to go to a coffee shop one day on the weekend for a couple of hours. And if that didn’t work, I tried to write in the evenings when I could. But my mental health for this entire first quarter of the year has been really shitty, so…yeah.

The truth is, friends, it’s hard to write a romance novel in which the world turns out okay when everything going on in the world right now in real life is, simply, not okay.

People keep saying that art matters now, more than ever. That in the midst of trouble and dark times, we simply cannot let them erase our joy and our art because that means they’ve won. And if we let them win, who will be the people who continue to fight back? Who will stand up to the bullies if we’re pushed down and decide to never get back up? Who will protect the moments of joy we do have?

But writing a romance novel, of all things? A world where two characters fall in love and everything is whole and perfect and people have a happy ending while so many in the world right now are being stripped from their loved ones, their homes, their rights? How do I write about love when every day is just a reminder of so much hatred and narrow-mindedness?

And thus, that’s why writing came to a stand still. Because I want to write Park City for Christmas and the other romance novels I’ve been plotting and thinking about for several months. I want to get my rough draft finished and sent to my editor sometime this summer. I want to wrap up edits on my Cinderella Retelling and get at least the ebook version into your hands before summer ends. I want to start edits on Project Summer is a State of Mind. I want to put myself out there some more – find my writing tribe, join a couple writing competitions, restart my street team so I can hang out with readers again, get better about responding to DMs, start consistently posting on social media, figure out where I fit in the changing landscape that is newsletters vs. SubStack. My youngest daughter just started daycare, which means I have more time to both get my editing/press work done AND write more often – I want to prove to myself and to my readers that I’m not wasting that time but actually making something of it.

But here we are.

I want to write about love – I ALWAYS want to write about love and how important it is and how it’s worth fighting for – but I find so little of it nowadays.

Perhaps this is too honest. Everything on the internet gets scrutinized now more so than ever, and you’re here for a writing update, not a look into my heart or the thoughts constantly running through my head. How to be a good writer, a good wife, a good mother, a good friend, a good daughter, a good sister, a good editor, a good business owner, a good marketer, a good ally, a good advocate, a good kind loving person – all on constant loop. But writing for me has always been a way to understand and experience the world and my innermost thoughts, and I feel like that’s probably why it’s such a mess lately.

The first quarter of 2025 has been a rough, oftentimes nonexistent, battle for words. I have very little to show for it. But even in the midst of my swirl of thoughts and my heartbreak at the world, I’m trying very hard to find a way to keep writing. Because at the end of the day, though I don’t see love winning much right now, I do believe with every fiber of my being that it’s worth fighting for.

And I’ll be damned if I don’t write about that – somehow, some way, even if it takes me days or weeks or months to stumble through and find the words.