We’re nearing the end of September and we’re finally entering Fall proper, even if we have to drag it out from wherever it was hiding kicking and screaming.
September hasn’t been a great month for me mentally. I mean 2025 as a whole hasn’t been great for a lot of people and I recognize that so many people have it like a gazillion times worse that I will ever have. I’m not going for a gold medal in the Suffering Olympics here. This is me simply verbalizing my feelings and those feelings are that I’ve been in a bad headspace for a while.
At a macro-level, the world at large is just… uuuuugggghhhhhhhhnnnnn. It’s literally exhausting to wake up in the morning and know that by the time I come back to bed that evening, the world will be a little more, well, shittier in some way or another.
On a personal level, I’m flailing creatively. I don’t think I’ve truly ever adapted to my new routine because of my career change 5 months ago. Before that happened, I was hybrid 40/60 WFH (2 days at office, 3 at home). Most days I would have like 90 minutes to 2 hours of extra personal time to spend as I wished (a portion of which I spent writing/rewriting/revising/editing). I was done at 4PM and was able to get things like the dishes and dinner prep done before my spouse came home and still had time to unwind, and I could even keep on top of things like laundry during the day.
But now, even though I’m still getting up at the same time every day, I’m getting home almost two hours later, and then my spouse and I need to do all the things I used to have already done before they would’ve come home. In short, I’ve lost a lot of the free time I used to have and the already reduced chunk I have now is further eaten away by simply trying to keep a household running like a normal adult. Furthermore, as I have less time, I feel like I need to maximize what I can do in the time I do have, which has never been conducive for creativity for me. I need to properly unwind and clear my head of work before tackling creative efforts and thus, when I force myself to sit down and write, I struggle to the point where I find myself resenting having to sit there.
And honestly, I’m not even sure what I want to write about right now. One of the reasons I wrote Tales of a Stranger Sister was because I wanted to create something positive and affirming. I wanted to make something to mirror the world I want. Right now? I feel angry and tired, pretty much all the time. I don’t feel like creating something affirming and beautiful, but rather I want to take all that anger and exhaustion to create something visceral and ugly and throw it at the world as hard as I can for being so damned shitty right now.
Ultimately, I don’t think I want to release something like that because I honestly don’t want to add more ugliness to the world that is already overflowing with it. So, this might be a situation when I need to spend time putting something brutal on paper, just so I can get it out of me. Then I can shut it away in a drawer somewhere, never to be seen by another’s eyes. A literary purge of the soul, if you will. Hopefully, after doing that, I can find the focus to create something better and more positive.
There are a couple other factors that are contributing to my current mood of blergh. I must admit that my novel’s disappointingly underwhelming performance during the Narratess sale was a blow to the ol’ ego. Was I expecting to sell hundreds or thousands of copies? Well, no, but I was expecting to do a little better than it did for a three-day event that was supposed to cater to readers seeking out indie and self-published works. That feeling of disappointment was then further magnified as September has come and gone and I’m looking to pitch my first zero sales/zero reads month despite going wide almost a month ago.
Lastly, I need to address how returning to social media has been impacting me and my mood. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that I was finally able to write a novel after truly quitting Twitter in 2022. It was not a healthy place for me mentally and cutting out 2+ hours a day of doom scrolling and snark dunking did wonders for me both creatively and focus-wise, as well as emotionally.
That said, now that I have a novel that I’m trying to sell to the world, there are very little options one has to get the word out and promote it that don’t involve throwing disproportionate sums of money at an algorithm and hoping it sticks to someone’s attention enough to generate a click and a sale. So, I rejoined social media somewhat by creating accounts on Reddit and Bluesky and have been trying to use them to both promote my work and rejoin the online community as a whole. Unfortunately, I once again find myself falling into the same bad habits on Bluesky that made Twitter such an awful place for my particular brain.
So, what’s this all mean in the grand scheme of things? Probably not much to anyone outside of me and my immediate family. Blog post like these tend to serve more as form of talk therapy for me than useful news to anyone actually interested in my book or my (hopefully) next one.
I had hoped to use this fall to get a first draft of my next novel written and spend the beginning of 2026 revising it for my alpha and beta readers. As the calendar turns to October, I look at what I’ve managed to get done so far and that plan seems… Unlikely.
Time for a new plan.
First, it’s time to adjust my routine, so when I sit down to write in the evening, I’m actually ready, and more importantly, willing to do so. Second, I need to purge some of this anger and frustration from my brain, so it looks like for the immediate future I’ll be doing some exploratory writing of those feelings to clear out that distracting rubble blocking better things inside my brain from coming out.
Lastly, it’s time to step back somewhat from social media. Not completely because I still need to use it as a tool to promote my work, but I need to better recognize the bad habits I’m falling back into because of it. That means better curating my feed and muting/unfollowing those who mostly post content that feeds into my bad headspace and habits, and also no longer using the explore tabs because that’s where I really get in trouble as that it has become a major source of “Hey, get a load of this asshole and the horrible thing(s) they did/are doing!” content, which only further feeds my righteous indignation about… well, everything.
With that all said, I do actually have one final bit of actual book-related news. Tales of a Stranger Sister and my spouse’s amazing books, The Healers series and How I Became a Therapist in Another World Omnibus 1 will be part of the Promise Press’ two-day Cozy The Day Away Sale on October 11th and 12th!
Now, while I hesitate to call my book “cozy” out right, it is at least in the same neighborhood as books that are. The nice thing about CTDA is they offer a category for Cozy-Adjacent books like Tales, Healers’, and Therapist for the readers who dig the vibe but don’t mind a difficult feelings and themes with their tea and magic. The ebook of Tales of a Stranger Sister will be 99ยข (or the closest international equivalent) in all online stores that weekend (and if you happened to have bought my book during that sale and have subsequently visited my site because of it, hello from the past!)
Okay, time to get off the floor, dust myself off, and get back to it. And by it, I mean writing. Also, life. Mostly that second one.
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