May Writing Update

You know what sucks? Mental health struggles getting in the way of my writing plans! Things were starting to improve at the end of April, but then the medication I was on started to block my creativity. I think this was due to the emotional blunting it caused — great for dealing with depression, not so great when it comes to actually feeling what my characters are in order to write them (check out my Aphantasia article if you want to know what I mean by that).

What I have decided instead is that, if I can’t actually write the story, I can do things that need to be done around the story. Things that only need a little creativity and lean more heavily on logic or just evaluating things.

One of my to-do items was to work out what the monsters are in this world. So far I’ve just been calling them “demons” and haven’t gone any deeper than that, other than that they are strongest at night, they are repelled by a technological barrier, they feed on magic, and that when they’re defeated, they leave behind a “core” that is used as both fuel and underground currency (think cryptocoin). That’s all great and important, but when I actually come to turning my skeleton draft into true prose, I’m going to need to know what they look like and how they fight. So I started working on the Bestiary. Pintrest is great for that; I just search for monster concept art, and there are so many fantastic designs for inspiration, and if something looks a bit familiar, I just check if it’s from folklore or from an actual IP. If it’s from folklore, I can use it; if it’s from IP, I can’t. I was actually inspired by this to have the bestiary be a part of the story itself, so I need to go back to book 1 and seed it in.

Another thing that’s been fun and is probably more procrastination than an actual to-do, is creating character theme music. Orchestral music has always been really beneficial to my creativity in the past. It evokes moods and feelings in a way nothing else does, and since there’re no lyrics (beyond some wordless chanting usually), my mind is able to focus on my own writing, worldbuilding, and plot knots without distraction.

But no matter how good a piece of music might be, it’s never quite right for exactly what I want it for. Even in Salt and Ice, where I have a full playlist of songs they use and discuss, none of them were perfect and the reader would have to imagine what they might sound like cut down to the required lengths. My husband has been playing with creating AI music, and it was pretty impressive, so I decided to give it a go. After all, it’s not like I’ll ever be able to afford to commission a musician to create custom music, and I have no musical talent or education.

It was surprisingly good! Not perfect by any means, and nowhere near what a live orchestra sounds like, but a pretty good approximation. Don’t worry musicians, your job is safe! But for us poor writers, it’s definitely a great way to use it and get in the mood.

I’m mostly using these songs for myself at the moment, since I’ll listen to the character’s theme song for who I am about to start writing in order to get in the mood. But I also made sure to create them with a commercial license because I’m thinking they could be a fun incentive to encourage people to buy from me directly. Yes, all my books will always be wide, you can buy them anywhere, but if you buy from my website (or in person), then I’ll include the theme songs for the POV characters in that book. Those songs won’t be available in any other way other than as a free add-on when buying direct. That’s a long way away right now, but it’s something I’ve been thinking about.

My social media cut down has also been going well. I no longer check social media at all in the mornings and I also have an app called Screen Zen that I set up to only allow each social media app 30minutes per day, then it locks the app. Of course, it’s not perfect, it’s not like it’ll stop me accessing the website on my computer if I really want or need to, but it’s completely stopped the doom scrolling while still allowing me a little bit of access to check notifications or if I get really overwhelmed and need to focus on something else. I’m definitely going to keep going with this. In the future I’ll probably batch schedule some social media posts, but right now I’m enjoying my time away from it.

Finally, I wanted to share a little breakthrough I had the other day, all about the character Garrett. In my Legacy of Ash and Smoke series, Garrett is a commoner who has risen to the rank of the personal bodyguard to the crown prince and is the foster brother of another nobleman, Everett. In his role of bodyguard and throughout the series up until this point, he has experienced a number of failures. I won’t be going into detail, of course — spoilers — but suffice to say that he takes all of these failures very personally and carries a lot of guilt because of it.

Garrett is a POV character in Book 3. Up until this point, I had no trouble with him. He was a brash, in your face, but still caring Enneagram 8w9 character (see my Enneagram seris for details). But now I had to get inside his head. His guilt was obvious, thanks to these failures, but I was having trouble reconciling that with the rest of his personality. And then, while chatting with Claude about him to get a prompt for his theme song (which is still eluding me, btw! Nothing seems just perfect yet), it occurred to me. I was going about it all wrong. Yes, he has a lot of guilt, but that’s only the surface level. WHY was he guilty? Sure, he failed, but why was he seeing those events as a personal failure? Then it hit me: He has imposter syndrome.

Garrett was a commoner who fell in with nobility after just “doing what anyone would do” when he stepped in to protect Everett, not knowing who he was. He received a job as a royal guard, a position that was generally impossible to progress in without the right family and connections, which he definitely didn’t have. And then, despite all that, he was selected to be the personal bodyguard of the crown prince, the one person after his father responsible for their society’s entire magic and economic system. Of course he would be feeling imposter syndrome! The guilt, the anger, the overdoing everything, all of that is just a symptom of his imposter syndrome.

And us writers, we are all intimately familiar with imposter syndrome!

I wish I could say that this breakthrough was all I needed to now write up a storm and fly through the drafting process, but that would be a lie. Has it helped? Definitely! (And it was fun to finally crack that puzzle). But I am still dealing with depression, changing medications and all the side effects that go along with it, while trying to keep going at work when all I want to do is hide in my room or maybe emerge to play some computer.

Things aren’t perfect, and I honestly debated whether I should share these details with the whole world (or at least whoever actually enjoys reading these updates, hi! You’re awesome!). But then I thought back to when my depression first surfaced. When I identified myself as a writer who couldn’t write. When I had all but given up on my dreams of becoming an author because I was unlucky enough to be born with a brain that wouldn’t cooperate. I googled so much about writing, depression, writing with depression, how to write through medication, and so on, and all the results were so surface-level as to be useless. I didn’t feel seen. I felt talked at, at the most, and invisible at the worst.

I gave up.

I have to admit, I’ve felt like giving up again in the last two months. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go. I did it, damn it! I published a damn book! It was supposed to be plenty of sales, press releases, and getting the next one written and published in six months! And even that was being gentle; 6 months is way kinder than the monthly schedule I see successful authors online keeping.

Instead, it’s been 6 months now since Salt and Ice was finished. Half a year ago, I was sending out ARC copies, full of hopes and dreams of them all writing reviews to prove my validity. And now I have about 60,000 words of a skeleton draft of two books with no set end in sight, and still more on my “to add” list to go back and edit.

So I think, if I could go back in time and tell myself something back when I was a writer who couldn’t write, it would be that you’ll get there. It won’t be at the same pace as everyone else. It won’t even be on a schedule you want. But if you keep pushing away at it, even a paragraph a day will become a book eventually. Who cares if you don’t live the same life as those on YouTube and Instagram? That’s not your life, and that life would probably break you anyway. Some people thrive under pressure. I do for very short periods, and then I break. I don’t want to break again. I want a sustainable writing life. I’m not even calling it a career now, because that implies I’m making enough money off it to live on and that’s not something I can control. But I do want writing to be in my life, to be an important facet that I hold dear.

So that’s what I’m leaning into in the second half of 2026.

A sustainable, enjoyable writing life.

How’s your writing going? Let me know in the comments!

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