did they really notice you were gone?

I disconnected from my marketing platforms for the month of July.

After over a year spent working in a corporate job, then taking care of my little guy full time,

building and launching my first big writer’s resource (the workbook),

plotting, drafting, and revising my fifth novel, querying that novel, signing with a dream agent in less than two weeks, doing another round of revisions, moving into my first publisher submissions process,

launching my second writer’s resource (the branding guide),

and immediately starting 20,000 words into my next book . . .

I was beyond exhausted.

I’ve hardly had a moment to catch my breath, and when I finally decided that July 2026 was a good time to step back a little, we found ourselves packing the house, then packing a truck, and then moving states.

It’s only been a few weeks.

I’ve felt a little disconnected from both the writing community and my manuscripts during that time—

The stories and ideas in the back of my mind, begging to be on the page.

I have always loved writing because it feels like treasure hunting. I spend time writing each journal entry or Substack article or scene in my manuscript, and most of the time I’m either piling on or clearing away figurative dirt.

Then the words suddenly come together and I’m writing something I’ve always felt but couldn’t yet articulate, something shiny and special buried within everything else.

One of those lines from my 2025 novel echoes in my head even now, admitting a fear I’d buried so deeply for so long:

Those moments make it all worth it, and those moments are why I’ve always wanted to be a writer. It’s cathartic in some ways, but more so it’s opening my eyes to the ways in which I see the world and the optimism I dare to pull from it. These hidden treasures require work to unearth, work that no data-trained artificial program can do for me, and that work delivers comprehension I cling to.

It is a treasure to know oneself, and there’s no better way to go about finding the hidden pieces of you than through writing.

After all, the only thing better than discovering the hidden treasures for yourself is sharing them with someone who understands. I write to make sense of my own mind, but I publish in the hopes I’ll connect with others who have felt the same way.

There is a restless, carnal desire to find community and belonging. That has not changed in thousands of years, even as our social landscapes evolve.

Modern writers are well aware of how invasive and exhaustive online marketing can be. The daily grind to get up and post something, share the book, share the announcement, build the mailing list . . . it’s an endless task list.

Stepping away and opting for an inconsistent approach feeds the fear that we will be forgotten, that the ‘algorithm’ (and in larger part, the ‘world’) will stop seeing what we create because we’ve stopped following the rules.

But the algorithm is not the world. The platforms, the trends, the views, the shares, the codes and the data are not synonymous to the people in our corner.

The target audience of every writer is a living, breathing person who cannot optimize perfectly no matter how hard they try. Instead, the target audience gets up every day and lives inconsistently. They are messy and inefficient, emotional and rash, impulsive and forgetful and passionate.

I’m quite certain they’ll be just fine if you need to step away. A quiet notification bar doesn’t mean you’ve been rendered irrelevant.

Writing and publishing is a marathon career with plenty opportunity to connect with readers about the things that matter to us. We are also permitted space to take care of real-life logistics (which this fiction writer is grateful for), and to take care of the creativity that drove us to this work in the first place.

If you’ve been looking for permission to silence your phone, here it is. You will not be forgotten, and your work will not be made worthless.

Thanks for reading my words On Paper & Light this week! Your support means the world. Drop any questions in the comments and I’ll pop by your inbox again soon.

Tìoraidh,