Falling in love…with writing again: Part One

Sometimes a major life change can disrupt your creativity. But I am proof that you can come out on the other side.

My romance writer origin story goes as follows: Writing was one of my favorite things to do growing up. In high school and college it really heated up, but I would say that a lot of my stuff fell into the Fantasy/Sci Fi/PNR categories. In a previous post I mentioned how my former students (Who are now in college and are writing their own projects!) caught me working on something and motivated me to query. My debut was Romantasy before it was really a thing…I’ll be honest, it was pretty mid in hindsight, I probably should have cut like 20,000 words from the story, but got to start somewhere?

After that I wrote a four book YA Sci Fi Series that was my absolute baby before my son was born. Unfortunately, this was definitely a passion project and was very niche (Imagine the Hunger Games but in teams). I went indie in the middle of it. I did no marketing, I barely put anything into the series money wise, but those who read it, loved it.

Enter 2022/2023, where I finally took a course to hopefully be more successful in my self publishing ventures and I decided that I was going to write an eight book YA Dystopian series. I had it planned out and generally outlined, but then things in my real life started to get very, very messy. My mental health took a major dip, I added a character that was based on a real person and it changed the plot, I moved in with my parents and their internet was horrible. I tried writing something by hand a few times while I lived with them, but nothing ever stuck. There was actually a point where I wondered if maybe writing was a coping mechanism in my life and I wasn’t going to need it anymore. I was sort of at peace with it.

Fall of 2024, I had a long block of time at work and on that particular day I had the urge to write. So I sat down and I started working and a few months later, I’d written and self edited a YA Epic Fantasy. I ultimately decided not to pursue that genre, but after nearly two years of nothing…it felt so good to write THE END on something.

If you’ve read this far, I’m sure you are wondering where Contemporary Romance fits into all of this. Well back in 2017/2018 I started a book that I was convinced would never see the light of day. I won’t go into the specifics, but I worked at a grocery store at the time, and I felt it was going to be too obvious where I pulled my inspiration from. I’d write a scene here, a poem for a love letter here, and put it away. When we were in lockdown in 2020 I finally finished it. Sent a few chapters to a pen pal. I considered publishing it with my old pen name but so many people were like DON’T GENRE HOP (which in hindsight is very good advice) that I just kept it in my Google Drive.

This has gotten long, so I will tell you more in another post!

Artemis!