My
Story
I was nineteen when I signed with my agent, and my first book came out a few years later as part of a three-book deal. From the outside it looked like everything I'd wanted. From the inside, I was learning in real time how much I didn't know — how much of the creative process I'd handed over, how much of the marketing was mine to do with no money and no roadmap, and how many questions I should have been asking but didn't. I wrote the next book in my contract twice; both drafts came back rejected. And it all landed while my own life was getting heavy in ways I hadn't begun to face.
So I stepped back — for more than ten years. I never fully let go of the "what if" that pulls me into a story, but for a long time, writing the way I once had felt out of reach.
Coming back has been gradual, not a lightning bolt. It was only this past year that I really understood how much I missed it — and decided to do something about it. I'm still healing, and some days I can't summon the energy for the thing I love most. But I want this more than anything, and that's the direction I'm taking my life.
Here's what I know now that I didn't at nineteen: life will get in the way, and the work is hard even on a good day. None of that means the dream is over. It means you get to come back to it.
That's what my work is about now — for the writers still finding their way in, and the readers who love the same stories I do.
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