First, some exciting updates. I’ve had an intense burst of motivation for the past couple weeks, and I finished the first draft of The Bramblespell Branch Library much earlier than anticipated. The book is soon to be off to my beta readers, and my current goal is to have it ready for a September release.
This is a huge deal for me because this is the first complete draft I have finished since 2020. I’ve written hundreds of thousands of words into projects that stalled out or didn’t get finished for one reason or another. Some of them I worked on for years and still haven’t been able to finish. I started brainstorming Bramblespell in September 2025, and started writing in November 2025. That puts me at just about six months of drafting (into an actual complete draft, not one with big holes or no ending). Considering everything going on in my life and world, this is a huge win for me. I will be celebrating!
In Alchemy news, I have finished rereading it and fixing any errors I found. It still needs one more review from my editor. I also ran into some issues with formatting it for print. I originally planned to use Vellum to format the book, but I want to customize the interior a little more than Vellum allows. Since I have access to Adobe InDesign through work, I decided to learn how to format the book in InDesign myself. That has been a big learning curve for me, but I think I finally got it figured out.
I’m still hoping to release my edition of The Alchemy of Letting Go this month! I’ll update when the listing goes live.
When I sat down to write this week’s update, it was originally just going to be an update post. But I realized that my mental health is intrinsically tied to my writing, and therefore I wanted to provide some additional context.
A few years ago, I was diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety Disorder (also called GAD). I suspected for a long time that I had anxiety, but I didn’t start talking to a therapist or exploring treatment options until 2023. Turns out that anxious people tend to resist opening up about their feelings to complete strangers, who knew?
It wasn’t until I began treatment that I realized how much my anxiety was actually affecting my life. Almost all aspects of my life improved once I found a medication that worked for me. I was more successful at work, I was better at managing my social relationships, and day to day tasks became easier. Before I was medicated, I often thought people secretly hated me, which made maintaining friendships really difficult.
Medication isn’t a magic pill for me, however. I still struggle with avoiding things that feel negative or cause me stress. Unfortunately, because of my negative experiences with publishing my debut, this meant that I often avoided writing, as well. Because there was that little voice in the back of my mind telling me I’d failed, and even if it was a completely new project or something just for fun, I was carrying that little voice around with me for several years, and it was insidiously preventing me from writing. Sometimes it even prevented me from reading, which is something I love to do!
I think this is something that a lot of debut authors, clinically diagnosed with anxiety or not, deal with. Once your writing–your artform that you love–is tied to publishing and all of the stressors that come with that, it can start to feel like a negative thing. Our brains are wired to avoid things that are negative, dangerous, or painful. I was sad about my debut year, and it was painful to think about the things that went wrong, which meant writing itself became painful. If I didn’t have writing built into my life, I might not have written anything at all.
And even though I was writing at least once a week (thanks to my weekly in person writers group), I wasn’t finishing anything. I started several projects and floundered on them. If I’m being honest with myself, I was afraid of finishing. Finishing meant doing something with the finished manuscript. That something was most likely querying again. And querying was tied to publishing, which was painful to think about. Therefore, my brain was preventing me from finishing any project. I toiled for more than three years on projects that were going nowhere, and I didn’t even realize that I was sabotaging myself from the inside out.
You are probably starting to see how it’s hard for me to give an update on my writing progress without mentioning the mental health experiences I’ve had for the past three years. They are inextricably connected.
What happened when my book went out of print earlier this year severed me, once and for all, from the pain and fear associated with publishing. As I started working on my own edition of The Alchemy of Letting Go, I got excited about the prospect of putting my writing out there on my own terms. The more I worked on that book, the more I was excited to work on my cozy library fantasy book as well. For the first time in a long time, I felt positive about writing, and my brain wasn’t trying to make me avoid it anymore.
That’s where I am now, in a place where I feel energized, motivated, and excited to really dig in to noveling. That’s not to say there won’t be challenges or fears ahead–I know that indie publishing isn’t a magic success button, just like medication isn’t a magic anxiety pill. But for the first time in many years, I feel energized and excited about the work itself. And isn’t that what it’s all about?
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