In late 2024, I wrote a Substack post about how to fight burnout. Reading it now, all I can think is that I was a sweet summer child. Before the collapse of the United States, before I started booking myself for signings nearly every weekend in 2025, before I churned out two books and edited an anthology in a year.
In retrospect, I think I was leaning into my workaholism due to the stress from constantly worrying about the instability of this nation. But, surprise—workaholism is just another way to escape, to drown out the rest of the world. Eventually, you have to face the fears that are driving you ahead.
Don’t get me wrong—I still excel at time management. I am a person who rarely toots her own horn, but I know this is one of my stronger skills. In fact, I’m planning a webinar for librarians on this very topic. It’s more that if I schedule a writing session, I just don’t want to do it, and then I end up playing Puyo Puyo Tetris for an hour instead. Today, I was going to write, and then my cat laid down in my lap. And you don’t move a sleeping cat. So I watched My Strange Addiction for two hours.
I’ve done a lot of navel-gazing over the past few months, trying to plan out my next moves in my full-time job as well as my many freelance gigs. My mother suggested I take time off from writing to focus on my gut biome (long story). But I realized I’d much rather quit the day job than quit writing. Obviously, that’s not going to happen, but it convinced me that my passion lies here.
Yet I do need to take a step back. I need to be more choosy about which events I attend. I need to leave more weekends open for exploring with my family and lower my expectations for how much work I can produce in a given time period. I need free time to sit by the lake this summer, to read and watch my kids play.
So I’m sorry that I haven’t yet written about the new anthology, that I haven’t updated my Instagram, that I haven’t spent any time thinking about marketing or updating this Substack. That’s one aspect of time management I still need to figure out. Priorities. What are the right tasks to do at the right times? I am often good at that, but when burnout sneaks in, it puts a wrench in the system.
If you’ve read this far - thank you. Soon you’ll hear about some new releases from Duskbound, and I hope you’ll love them all.
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