Those of you who have been following me for a while know that I am a slow-but-steady writer. Since I began my publishing journey, I’ve written and published a book a year. When I mention this to my non-writing friends, they are astonished and never fail to ask “How do you find the time?” The truth of the matter is that time is not nearly as big a factor as finding the energy or bandwidth, particularly after an emotionally, mentally, or physically demanding day at work.

Truth be told, when it comes to being considered a successful writer these days, that kind of productivity is far too slow. There are people in the industry who produce a finished novel every 60 days. In order to gain traction with your audience, it seems like you have to write at least 3-4 books a year, something I will never do. If anything, my process is becoming even slower than before. There are a lot of reasons for this. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m 15 years older than when I started my publishing journey. I’ve worked very hard to make a name for myself as an author, and I’ve finally decided that I no longer have the energy to jump through all those hoops.

Not only do I no longer have the bandwidth to shake my little tambourine and chant my name for the masses, I barely have the energy or mental capacity to write. I’ve been working on my current WIP for a little over a year now, and I’m still nowhere close to finishing the first draft. Normally, I’d be ready to publish by now. Getting Covid this summer didn’t help. I kept a persistent low-grade fever for weeks, lost my sense of taste and smell, and worst of all, brain fog swept in to blanket every writing session with a gray mist of ‘what the heck were you thinking when you wrote this?’ each time I sat down at the keyboard. Fifteen years ago, blanking on words or struggling to capture the concept I had in mind was just a sign of fatigue and that it was time for a break. That I’d been running on fumes too long. Now I find myself wondering if my brain is turning to mush or is it the toll of the constant bombardment of daily bad news?

I’ve made a few decisions in this past year that I hope will help. I have stopped hoping that my writing pave the way for me to write full time. I’ve even stopped demanding it serve as a fallback retirement plan. It just needs to break even–to be an expensive hobby that (mostly) pays for itself. Accepting this level of “success” doesn’t mean I didn’t try hard enough or dream big enough. It simply means I can no longer keep trying to appease ever-changing algorithms, and dashing from platform to platform constantly spinning plates on sticks to keep entertaining my so-called audience.

That decision alone has meant I can spend less time on social media, which I hope will help with my regrettable tendency to doomscroll. The only reason I’m on social media is because everyone says I MUST maintain an author presence. Fine. I’ve decided that presence will be more of squatting on real estate than actually running a B&B at a financial loss. I’ve got better things to do with the short amount of time I have left on this planet than to make myself miserable because the things I’ve achieved aren’t “good enough.”

I’d been pushing myself to finish this current story by the end of this month. Today as a matter of fact. There are all kinds of theories as to the best time of year to publish–and if you only release one book a year, the final quarter isn’t it. January isn’t great either, unless you are writing a self-help or exercise book. But this story has gone from being something I thought was a cool idea to being a project I loathe working on. I don’t want to shelve it because I have too much time invested in it. I also fear if I quit at this point, I’m setting a bad precedent for myself–that I can just walk away whenever the going gets too hard. So now I’m looking at not publishing this WIP until maybe next spring, and the thought of missing my One Book A Year goal made me hyperventilate a bit.

But I’m unhappy with the story. It’s a new-to-me genre with a lot of worldbuilding and it stopped being fun a while ago. I’ll sit down to write a paragraph or two, writing and deleting the same sentence over and over again as I fail to put into words this big picture I have in my head.

The other day, I realized I no longer have to hold myself to a rigid schedule of write-publish-release. I’m allowed to publish whenever I want. The rules don’t matter.

I also realized what’s wrong with the story as it stands right now. I’ve erased all the real conflict and given the characters cartoon problems to deal with. I’ve softened the hero to the point of being ineffectual. I’ve strengthened the heroine to the point that she has no journey over the course of the story. I’ve diluted the relationships because I don’t want to deal with the emotions these character should be having. I’ve wrapped my story in a protective layer of cotton padding because I wish that my own elbows and knees were padded, and that I knew I always had a soft place to land in case of a fall.

I even gave the main character a mental block preventing her from experiencing her emotions because I must have subconsciously wished for the same. To be the strong, bad-ass heroine of my own story without doing any of the work to get there. This emotional shell around my characters–around the story as a whole–is self-preservation for me in a world I find depressing, discouraging, and terrifying right now.

But for the story to be its best, I need to take a nutcracker to that shell and break down to the meat of the characters. This little epiphany resulted in the first little spark of excitement I’ve had for this story in a while. So I will not publish before it is ready. I will take my time to make the story the best it can be. And I will put in the effort of making my characters work for their happiness.

It means there probably won’t be a McKenna/M.K. Dean release this year. But there will be one eventually. Because even though I am writing for me now, I’m also still writing for you. And I want you to enjoy the journey as well.