I thought it was time for a bit of a recap of where I’ve been, where I am, and where I’m going in this author journey—especially about the parts that are hard and why I’m still here, trying anyway.

Roses and thorns

I’ve explored some of this before, especially in my fears and journey posts, but never quite this way, because I never wanted to seem ungrateful that I get to be an author. I have an opportunity that some people can only dream of, and I do not take that for granted.

But with that gratitude for this chance comes the temptation to outwardly paint a picture of only sunshine and rainbows, for fear of all the bitterness that could be directed my way otherwise. And for fear that if I don’t appear wildly successful, I could disappoint or drive away readers. Yet that isn’t honest or even fair—to me or to you.

Though I have been extraordinarily blessed, so much so that I do not wish to complain, nor can I pretend this latest career turn of mine has been a bed of roses…unless it’s the kind with the thorns still attached. 😅

But isn’t this your dream? you ask.

Well, yes, I suppose. In the same way any reluctant hero answering The Call is fulfilling their “dream.”

In Dragon’s Blood, while Sarah is contemplating the first hints she’s gotten about her destiny, she asks Ben if he ever feels like quitting, and he immediately answers, “Every single torched day.”

That’s how I feel about being an author. It is perhaps the hardest thing I have ever done.

So why haven’t I quit yet?

Last year, I read this quote in Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer, and it hit me right in the solar plexus.

“Much is made of genius and talent, but the foundation of any life where you get to realize your ambitions is simply being able to out-last everyone through the tough, crappy times—whether through sheer determination, a strong support network or simply a lack of options.”

—jeffjlin, “Ang Lee and the Uncertainty of Success”

That’s me, I thought, breathless.

Except I’ve had all those things on this journey—determination, support, and a lack of options. Sometimes all at once or sometimes one or two at a time, propping me up long enough to get me through the next rough patch.

And the next.

And the next.

A lack of options

Yes, in a way, this is my dream…

…the dream of my ten-year-old self, the happy one typing away another chapter of my latest fantasy in my email program to send to my siblings and best friend. The one blissfully unaware and unafraid of all the difficulties that came with that kind of career.

But I started learning pretty soon after that, and kept learning, until by the time I was in the throes of high school career exploration, writing for a living was solidly a plan B, and kept getting further and further back in line with each refinement of my life plan.

If you want to know more about why, check out my fears posts, all of which still apply today.

In short, I found out that making a living as a writer is tremendously difficult just in terms of odds; it’s possible, but it can take years—decades, even—before you can survive on writing alone. (Spoiler alert: I’m not there yet.) And success requires doing things I was increasingly uncomfortable with: putting your work out there for everyone to judge, and especially putting yourself out there for everyone to judge. Or worse.

I saw what happened to one of my favorite authors at the time, Stephenie Meyer, and I saw what I thought was a rejection everywhere against the content I loved most (wholesome, bright romantic fantasy), and I flinched away from the thought of putting myself through that wringer. What’s more, in at BYU, I took a serious blow to my writing self-esteem when my application to Brandon Sanderson’s writing workshop was rejected. Not by him—by an assistant, who was kind and only offered feedback after I asked for it, but her reasoning that I should try to be more “unique” convinced me for years after that I couldn’t get published if I wrote what I truly loved.

Even before that, though, practically as soon as I began serious career exploration, I decided the author thing wasn’t for me. I never stopped writing, but I thought of it as a hobby that might, maybe, pay me something, someday.

In a way, I’m grateful for that mindset. I might never have kept up the joy of writing if I hadn’t told myself that that’s all it was for: giving me joy.

And now this is the part I haven’t really talked about on my blog yet: my other dreams and plans which never came to be.

Plan A

What was truly my dream? All along, even more than writing?

It was to be a wife and mother.

That’s an increasingly unpopular primary dream. I hate, I hate that I’ve been scared enough of criticism and snobbery to allow myself to relegate it to a “cringe” desire that I haven’t yet admitted to the world. My friends and family know. My churchmates know. Some workmates know. Heck, if you’ve between the lines in my books, then you know. But to put that out there for the world to see and judge? That took time.

So, fine, those judgy people I’ve been afraid of for so long can now be judgy. I know those voices exist outside my head because I see them everywhere. But it’s time to say that a family was my Plan A all along, even if it hasn’t yet come to pass.

The pain of that unfulfilled dream was also something I had to conquer before I could admit it to the world, but I’ve done much better on that front. I’m at peace now, and have been for several years. I know my life took the path it did for a reason and that I’m a better, stronger person for it. I’m not bitter. I’m grateful. Truly. Man, has life sometimes felt like an uphill battle alone, but I no longer feel alone. Somehow, through some miracle, I feel the joy and contentment I’d hoped for while I’m in the journey toward that goal that I only thought I’d get at the destination. In a way I can’t explain, I sometimes feel as if I have that family already.

Let me be clear that the dream of being a wife and mother has not been forced on me. No culture has molded me into its image. I am not mindlessly repeating something out of a lack of independent thought. The dream has always been there, and it has gone through many iterations as I’ve examined it methodically from every single angle, as I have done with all my dreams and goals.

I know that dream comes from the most genuine place inside of me, and what’s more, I know what it authentically would look like for me. I have done research on pretty much every aspect of family life. I have read books on relationships, nutrition, and raising children. I have taken preparedness tests and incorporated the feedback into my self-improvement regimen. And I have watched and listened, and listened, and listened.

I know, for myself, that I want a committed life partner and the opportunity to raise children with him, giving a few more souls as good of a chance at life as I received. And though I deeply respect every decision a couple makes together about how best to support themselves and achieve their highest potential, I have learned through research and trial that I will only be able to do that in the way my body and soul can sanction as a full-time homemaker. Because I simply only have that much left in me to give, mentally and physically, and that much should go to my family. (More on that later.)

I am not blindly succumbing to tradwife mentality. I am not the stereotypical “domestic” woman. I’m not crafty. I don’t sew, knit, etc. I don’t bake anything but decent cookies. I am a passable cook and do my fair share, but of all chores, cooking is perhaps my least favorite. (I will do the dishes every day of my life if someone else will cook for me.)

That is NOT to disparage any tradwives, crafters, sewers, knitters, crocheters, bakers, or cooks. You do what works for you and your family. Go you! I’m just dispelling any misconceptions anyone could be having about me when I say that the most sustainable role for my body and soul is to be a homemaker. My kind of homemaker is just someone who cleans, organizes, and dreams up better, more efficient, more sustainable ways of living. (You should see my dream home plans. They are DETAILED. I won’t say I’ve thought of literally everything, because I’m always coming up with something else, but I have thought of a LOT.)

I have gotten my degree. I have entered the workforce. At times, I’ve seriously considered being a working mother; I’ve had more opportunity to explore that possibility than any other aspect out of the necessity of supporting myself. I have listened to woman after woman describe what it’s like to work outside the home and have a family. At times, thought I could do it.

And then, as I went through plan B, then C, then D…I discovered I couldn’t. Because fate and my body had other plans.

Plan B and C

Plan B (if we’re not counting few weeks my senior year of high school in which I seriously researched being a psychologist) was to be an English teacher. That about lasted until a year into college, when I took an English usage class (basically an intro into what people typically refer to as “grammar,” though it’s much more than that) and had my heart practically sing during the lesson on punctuation. That’s when I gave up waffling between the teaching track and editing and decided solidly on…

Plan C, being an editor. That was still working with words, working in the publishing industry, and therefore might give me an in if maybe I someday wanted to try the author thing (after, of course, I was married and had a backup income, or after I retired).

Plan C.1 (yes, I’m making that designation a thing) was to be an in-house editor, but after thorough exploration in college, I concluded I could never live in New York and I wasn’t sure I wanted to try for any of the other publishing centers across the country, especially given how few jobs there were and how low-paying they were. I also knew from editing lots of academic nonfiction as a student that I preferred pretty much anything else, but I didn’t want to have to edit mature or graphic content. Thus…

Plan C.2, to be an editor for an organization outside the publishing industry. Definitely nonfiction work, but solidly within my comfort zone, and the highest salary potential I could hope for. Unfortunately, that took a while to actually come to fruition, even though I was highly qualified and had an offer in hand before I graduated college. (I am serious about how seriously I took supporting myself.) So, meanwhile, my parents very kindly let me move back home so I could I default to…

Plan C.3, which was continuing the freelance editing business I’d started in college. With my parents’ giving me a generous discount on room and board, and a fortuitous opportunity to be an interim managing editor for a small publisher, that got me through the couple years it took to get my start date for C.2.

I lasted four years on plan C.2. Four years…that nearly sucked the life out of me.

And it wasn’t the job’s fault. I had a great office, great coworkers, great management, and a great sense of purpose. I was editing great content and had fair pay and benefits, with lots of training, growth, and leadership opportunities. I was able to move out, save for retirement, afford car payments and healthy food—the whole adult millennial dream (minus a house, which I’ll get to).

No, the problem was all ME.

Those four years were when I discovered the true limits of my body and mind.

All my life, I have succeeded at whatever I have set my mind at. I’m not exaggerating when I say I have had teachers, mentors, coworkers, bosses, and friends tell me I was capable of anything and going anywhere. I am not a genius, but I am a great learner, a hard worker, a team player, and a meticulous planner and executor, skilled at identifying a vision and utilizing all resources available to me to achieve it. In this post, you have only had the tiniest glimpses into how heavily I plan and prepare for life.

And I could not make myself stay.

My entire last year, my goal was to explore any way to make me able to stay. I researched more comfortable professional clothing options, I tried blocking out office sounds with headphones and noise-masking soundtracks, I talked to a career coach, I got a high-up mentor, I explored other career paths within the same organization, I took up petsitting to reduce my commute times. I prayed. Oh, how I prayed.

I tried everything.

The problem

To this day, I still can’t fully articulate it to you what the problem was. I have found no satisfactory label for my particular brand of neurodivergence (as I’ve come to think of it) except to say that I am an extremely high-gain-sensory, empathic introvert.

Which means that simply existing as a human being is enough to drain my energy, and to sit in a cubicle (a cubicle, not even an open floor plan, which I did for an internship, and that was far worse) is to be in a constant state of high alert as my brain creates a nonstop mental map of everyone around me—their moods, their needs, their every tone, cough, look, or gesture. Even when I do not realize it, my brain is constantly creating a mental model of everyone I know (let alone the people around me) and incorporating every bit of information I see, read, or hear to anticipate human behavior.

There is a reason I could create a personality quiz and predict exactly which result each of my family and friends would get.

And I feel everything. Someone three rows down is complaining about home repairs? I feel it. I read a work blog in which someone is baring their soul, and I feel it. I edit something about a natural disaster, and I feel it. Someone comes to talk to us about poverty, and I have to run out the moment it’s over and sob uncontrollably in the stairway. The team is going through something hard, and I feel it, and carry more than my fair share to lighten the load. All at the same time.

And no, it is not something I can turn off.

I had someone once tell me they sometimes played a game in which they tried to imagine what it was like to be a random person passing by, and that floored me. At that time, I wasn’t aware that was something some people had to choose to think about, as if some people had an imaginative-empathic switch that could be flipped off.

I have no off switch. Now I am pretty sure I’m neurodivergent, but like I said, I’ve found no word for what kind. It’s the kind that can read a room in an instant; so understanding of human nature I often act as an “interpreter”; so empathic that the wrong book, movie, or social post in my feed emotionally destroys me for days; so in tune with my body and needs that I know the moment my blood sugar drops and I need to eat, and I know in my soul if a situation is wrong for me so strongly I cannot make myself live in it; and so introverted that I have almost no reserves to spare for those high-processing tasks if I so much as leave the house. (The grocery store is exhausting. It’s all that, plus bright lights, dozens of smells, movement everywhere, and visual noise galore. I walk through it most of the time in a daze.)

I’m not shy (since college), I don’t have social anxiety (since high school), and I’m not socially incompetent. In fact, I’m highly socially competent and even a great public speaker, and I’ve received praise for my leadership and administrative skills.

I just do not have the mental, physical, or emotional energy to be the #bossgirl everyone expected me to be.

Somehow, I survived high school and college and internships by sheer grit, the extra energy of youth, keeping myself in peak health, and having no other life. But those four years of my “ideal job” were the last my biology had to give to that lifestyle.

Especially when where I lived often wasn’t the recharging sanctuary I so desperately needed it to be. Rent was so unaffordable (especially housing that allowed my dog, Wes), I couldn’t live close to work without roommates, so I tried four different situations that didn’t work out for various reasons that were no one’s fault. When I moved back home again to save up for a house (thanks again to my parents’ generosity), my commute was so terrible it drained the last of my reserves dry.

Plan D

What those commutes did do for me was give me lots and lots of time to think. So when I finally broke and admitted I couldn’t do it anymore, I thought about my options in the car.

I considered going back to freelance editing or asking some of my publishing contacts for leads on jobs. By then, many editing and even publishing jobs were remote, so I reasoned I could still get a steady salary while working from home.

But I had discovered by then that I actually didn’t have a passion for editing. I loved the written word. But I loved reading it—and especially writing it. By then, I had worked with many superb editors, and I knew I’d never be one of them, because I simply didn’t care much about correcting other people’s writing. I was too pragmatic, still too much of a linguist (I graduated with a English linguistics degree, not an English literature/composition one), still more in love with the meanings and beauty and usefulness of words than their correctness. And I had a low-level chronic jealously that I didn’t acknowledge that I couldn’t be the one writing.

Thus, I would only ever be a “good” editor, and that wasn’t good enough for me. When I admitted that to a career counselor, she gave me a funny look and asked what was wrong with being a good editor. My answer was that my lack of passion, and therefore my lack of excellence, wasn’t enough to sustain me, given all the other factors.

So I was reluctant to continue in an editing career. But then what could I do? Go back to school? (I was really, really regretting not studying computer science or something else more practical, flexible, and with much higher earning potential.) Could I get a remote job with the education and skills I already had?

But then a little voice said, What about writing?

I laughed as I drove. Yeah, right. I’m looking for actual solutions here.

That laugh quickly died, though, when the voice quietly said, No. Really. What about writing?

And that thought filled me with a rightness that terrified me. That was the path that I thought I had done everything I could to avoid my whole life. Although that wasn’t entirely true. If I’d been truly trying to do that, I would have picked a math degree or something like that. As if a rope had tied me to the center, I’d still spun around writing, never going too far. My choices had limited my options in that moment to a maddening degree.

So perhaps it was finally time to give it a shot.

But just for a little bit, I told myself. After all, I had to now explain to my parents that I was both quitting my job and asking them to keep giving me discounted room and board while I tried a writing “sabbatical.”

That was the worst part—confessing, asking for trust and time. Though they gave me that when I finally got up the courage to talk to them.

My last day at my job was the end of 2022. Beginning almost immediately, determined to give my family something worthy of their trust and prove I wasn’t crazy (or…that kind of crazy), I descended into a mad writing sprint. It was glorious. Incredibly stressful on my body, given I had to feel everything my characters were feeling—but it was the happiest I’d ever been in my life. The hours (and nights, because I got little sleep) flew by as I did practically nothing but write. So, in three-ish months, I wrote over 400 thousand words, until I was finally done with what I thought of as the “first” book. (It later became the first three books of the Blood of the Covenants Series.)

I took a little time to edit and then sent it off to my family and best friend. And bit my nails waiting for their response. Would they like it? Better yet, did they think their trust had been well placed? Did they think I could do this?

I was starting to believe I could do this, and that was both thrilling and terrifying. Especially since I was starting to believe I had to do it. That I couldn’t stop with this little “experiment” of mine.

Fortunately, most of them loved the book(s). Or, in my dad’s case, at least saw enough evidence of professional quality to further extend his trust and support when I tentatively asked for even more time: time to finish the series and to publish it. So that was what I spent the rest of my 2023 doing, in between lots of travel to help family and doing what I could to support my mom with eldercare and projects at home. I finished the sixth and final (for now) book sometime around the end of 2023, then dove right in to figuring out how I was going to publish.

The year 2024 was my self-publishing journey; I already knew a lot about the industry, and even about the self-publishing industry (remember that circling rope?) but there’s nothing like diving in to actually publish instead of just dreaming about it and being part of the editing or small publisher side. Also, in my college and working years, I hadn’t had the time or energy to keep up with reading like I had before, so I was woefully behind on current trends.

Furthermore, though I’d taken Brandon Sanderson’s lecture series twice and had plenty of writing classes, I actually had very little formal training otherwise on how to write novel-length fiction, especially speculative and romantic fiction. I’d had plenty of practice (I’d written many novel-length manuscripts by then) but no real training. If I’d gone on to get an MFA, I would have, but I never wanted that. No offense to anyone who got and loved their MFA (good for you!), but from all I’d researched, I knew the benefits wouldn’t have outweighed the costs for me (and I still stand by that; all the things I really needed to learn, I learned best outside of an MFA program, especially given their almost universal biases against speculative fiction. I knew how to write to please the literati, but I was done doing that.) I hadn’t even picked up craft books that weren’t editing-focused. (A way I’d danced around the center. Remember how I convinced myself my writing was only for me, to give me joy? Then there was no need to stress myself out adding more to my workload of school and career by trying to professionalize my writing hobby.)

So when I finally sat down to write “professionally,” by all rights, I shouldn’t have known what I was doing. Believe it or not, I wrote the entire Blood of the Covenants Series almost entirely by instinct, unaware of formal plot structure, tropes, and trends. Especially in my chosen subgenre of (clean!) YA romantasy. I didn’t even know the romantasy genre existed. It hadn’t in my reading heyday of high school. In 2023, I simply wrote what I had desperately wanted to read when I was a teenager, without consulting anything that was currently out there. (So, actually, I was rather disappointed when I discovered during my market research that dragon shifter romances were already a thing—and disturbed to discover they were predominately erotic.)

Here I thought I was going out on a limb to finally write what I wanted to read. I thought I was risking a failed experiment and my family’s trust, and all that. Only to discover that in my absence, the industry had already caught the romantic fantasy craze—and in many cases, far surpassed my comfort zone. In some ways, how I’ve differentiated myself is by dialing things back, bringing back some of the bright innocence of my middle school and high school reading, combined with a writing style that has, by some trick of convergent evolution, kept the pace with the present. (As an example, I’d had no idea how common dual-first-person POV had gotten; I read it once in a paranormal romance series, so I knew it existed and would work for my story, but I didn’t know I was falling right in line with everyone!)

All that to say, 2024 was a whirlwind crash course for me. After a lot of research, I decided on self-publishing, going “wide,” and rapid-releasing the books one month apart from June until November. That was a lot of frantic business set-up, preparation, editing, formatting, and publishing, but remember—I was only supposed to be unemployed for the first few months of 2023. Then I took the whole year to write by living off of my savings and my parents’ generosity and faith in me. I funded my author business, my covers, and all other services and fees with the funds I’d been carefully socking away during my last job to buy a house. I couldn’t keep doing that forever, so I needed to start making some money, even though I knew it wouldn’t be much for a while. So I did what I had to do to publish all the books before the end of 2024—which I’ll remind you was year two of having no real income. That was incredibly stressful for me, since I desperately love financial security and independence. I had worked so hard to not be a poor starving artist, but now that I was in that situation and continued to feel strongly that it was what I was meant to be doing, I was going to make it work.

And so I did. I pinched every penny, tightened my belt, stopped buying practically anything, and kept myself and my business afloat on savings and prayers and family goodness alone.

Plan E

I stayed sane partly by telling myself that once the books were all published, I would get at least a part-time, remote job to cover what basic necessities remained and be able to give Mom and Dad more for room and board. And then, at the end of 2024, out of the blue, a small publisher I’d worked for before reached out to offer me that very thing: a part-time managing editor job that I could do from home. It appeared to be a sign.

The funny thing about signs…they’re not always pointing you in the direction you thought you were going.

I thought it was perfect. I thought that if I had a remote job, most of my problems would be solved. I’d done the job before and thought I could do it again. I thought I was finally reaching stable financial ground.

And then my body had other plans.

The small publisher was wonderful. Once again, it was a great team, good environment, good work. Pay wasn’t good (but fair for the company’s earnings—the publishing industry is a terribly risky and unprofitable one, let me tell ya), and the benefits were nonexistent, but I could start scraping by instead of plummeting.

Once again, the problem was all ME. Turns out remote jobs that are 75% email and video meetings are even more draining for me than an office cubicle where I got to work independently with minimal interaction. Not only that, but the fit was wrong. I could feel it in my soul. We were doing good things and publishing good books that would help people, and yet I could not bring myself to care. Every meeting, I just wanted to bang my head on the desk.

Once again, I tried desperately to find any way to be content, to streamline my work, to innovate or have passion projects to keep me going, but it wasn’t enough. The stress of such draining work combined with my soul’s discordance literally gave me a fever once. (And I do not get fevers easily. I had appendicitis in 2017 and did not run a fever until after the hospital finally admitted me, forty-eight hours after the agony began, when it was too late to keep my appendix from bursting.)

Whether the job simply coincided with a mysterious decline in my health or caused it, I don’t know and might never. All I know is that at practically the same time I started the job, my hormonal cycles—which had always been hard on my body—got progressively worse, draining more of my energy each month until I had nothing to spare.

And all that was while I was till trying to give equal time to my author business, still promoting my books and recording the audio to keep the dream alive. I had aspirations of also beginning to write my next series but, ha, that did not happen. For all of the above reasons plus the ones I’ve talked about in previous posts.

Because I’m so in tune with my needs, I kept myself from completely crashing and burning, but it was a close thing. I lasted five months before I had to give my notice, and my last day was a month later, meaning I only lasted halfway into 2025 on Plan E.

Plan F

I laughed when I realized I’d gotten to Plan F, because it sounded like “F for failure.” That’s what I felt like for a few weeks after I quit. A failure. Broken, especially when it came to my health. Foolish in constantly looking for greener pastures. Ungrateful. Spoiled. Weak. Someone that everyone else thought had such promise, but who was only good for one single job, and one job only, because of all the choices I’d made in my life and my body that gave me no other options.

Let me be clear: I never fully sank into clinical, chronic depression, and I never truly wallowed in self-loathing. I was extremely fortunate to still be able to largely keep and salvage my mental health. But neither will I lie and say there was never a hard day, that I never cried into my pillow, or that I never had those thoughts.

Nor will I tell you that everything magically got better once I stopped fighting fate and fully set myself on this path, once and for all. The financial instability and emotional exposure of this work is still very hard on me. (Although, in one regard, it’s been excellent for my mental health: authors often complain about how isolating writing can be, and I’m always gleefully thinking, I know, right? That’s the best part!) What’s more, I’m still on a physical health journey, and I’m not sure if I’m getting anywhere with it.

As I said before, this is still the hardest path I’ve ever walked. But it is the bearable one. It is the one I think I can keep walking my whole life. It is the hardest in terms of how much it has made me grow, how much it has taught me, how much it makes me be brave and have faith and heal my wounds and face my inner demons and choose hope and love. Oh, man is that hard, and scarier than anything. But it is easier than trying to keep forcing myself down a path I wasn’t meant to walk, or to keep going in circles forever around my mountain while I work up the courage to finally ascend.

Do I feel like quitting? Every single day.

Why haven’t I?

Well, partly because, as I’ve just illustrated, I have no other options.

Support and Determination

But also, as I said in the beginning and have touched on many times through the no-options section, I am so incredibly blessed to also have the family support that I do, which hasn’t wavered yet. I never wanted to be dependent on the generosity of others for this long, but I am so grateful for the help I’ve been getting that makes it possible for me to start an author business, when I have found pretty much no other way to support myself, given the needs of my body and soul.

I am also incredibly thankful for all of you, whoever you are. You readers really are the reason I can do this. Your words of encouragement have brightened my day and kept me writing. Your generous reviews, your subscriptions to my newsletter, your recommendations—they all matter far more than you think.

I have also been supported by what I can only tell you is the hand of Providence. I have always had enough savings to cover my basic necessities without asking for actual money (versus just cheap-to-free room and board). Just enough. But enough. My clothes, my necessary electronics, my tools and supplies have all lasted long enough. In a way, I think I really was meant to take that part-time job in 2025, if only to give my finances the last little boost I needed to clear the hardest hurdle—and to make it clear, once and for all, which path was meant for me.

I still am not making enough to completely support myself and might not for years yet. But last year, I was finally able to make my business self-sustaining, and this year, I finally began paying myself. A pittance, but enough to somewhat stabilize me.

All that has refueled the fires of my determination whenever they run dangerously low. I’ve always been self-driven, or I wouldn’t have made it this far. Jane Friedman often says that the single greatest determiner of whether a writer will make it is simply…grit. A quiet, undying love for the work that keeps the writer persevering until they beat the odds. Passion wouldn’t have been enough alone for me to make a career of it, but with support and no other options, well….

I have seen too many signs to make me deny any longer that this is the mission I’ve been given, so I determined to do my best.