Hey, lovelies! It’s been awhile, hasn’t it? Pretty sure my last post was in June… yikes! I apologize for the unscheduled ghosting, I seriously didn’t mean to desert this blog. If I’m being honest, I felt really overwhelmed with life, and this place took the backseat. I’ve popped around to other blogs, commenting and such, but I’ve missed interacting with all of you amazing people!

As the title of this post suggests, I’m (hopefully) back! I’ve realized just how much I miss being around the blogosphere, and how important my blog is to me. But as I’ve been gone, I’ve been thinking of how I can improve my content, so some changes are coming soon!

But before we get into those announcements, allow me to share some updates on what I’ve been working on!

Updates

I believe when we last spoke, I was working on that fantasy spin-off of my novella, As Sure As The Snow Falls? The one with the horse trainer and the unicorn? I honestly don’t remember how much I shared about it. I had started writing it in June, and continued chipping away at it until September. Very soon I found that it was incredibly difficult to write for two reasons:

1. It was a fantasy, and therefore required much more world building than I had planned for or wanted to do.
2. The POV character was a man, and… I am not. In short, his voice sounded gay.

*ahem*

However, while I was writing, I got so excited about it. I mean, a horse trainer MMC and a clever runaway FMC? It was everything I wanted to read and more. As such, it was the first novel I openly started sharing with my coworkers. Why? I have no idea. I can’t even remember how it came up. I just remember telling one person about my idea, and then suddenly, the whole place knew I write. 

In a way, this was a blessing. My writing has always been something I was so insecure about. I always thought it was something cringy, something people do when they’re too old to play pretend but can’t seem to let go of the crazy ideas in their heads. This also contributed to why I left my blog in the dust. I always thought, what if someone I know in real life found out I have a blog? What would they think?

Spoiler alert— what they think doesn’t matter.

All of my friends were really supportive. They want to read what I write (which is a whole ‘nother scary thing) and they want to know what I’m working on.

So this project was what I first shared with them.

As I stated above, there were a couple… issues with this one. So in September, I put the project on the back burner, claiming I’d come back to it when I had the mental energy. 

However, in August, I had the sudden inspiration to try a contemporary romance. Crazy, right? Pretty much my whole writing career, I’ve focused on fantasy or sci-fi. Basically anything that doesn’t occur in our world. But I wanted to try something that didn’t require an insane amount of planning beforehand. Something I could sit down and write without hours of world building. 

So I tried out an idea I had thought of a while ago: a contemporary western YA romance between a livestock-showing girl and a rodeo cowboy.

Somehow, I managed to write it in less than four months. 

Y’all, I finished a first draft of a novel.

I’ve never done that before. Of course, I finished As Sure As The Snow Falls, but that was only 17k. This project turned out to be over 40k. 

Three things factored into my motivation to finish.

1. I used the 2025 Inktober prompts for chapter inspiration, and that made the outlining process a thousand times simpler.
2. I participated in The Young Writer’s Workshop’s Crazy Writing Month in October (which totally lived up to it’s name— the amount of times I wrote over 1k a day and stayed up until midnight was insane).
3. I posted every chapter on The Young Writer’s Workshop, and I had some amazing fangirls cheering me and my character’s on.

It’s safe to say that I’ve found my genre. I adored the process of writing this romance, and seeing my characters fall in love was a surreal experience. I guess I’m a contemporary author now? Who would have thought!

Finishing that project gave me the confidence to start a new, more ambitious one. I’m keeping most of the details under wraps for now (but if you’re on YWW, it’s becoming a snippet series!), but I can’t wait to share it with you all.

So that’s the updates! Now on to the announcements…

Announcements

During my long break, I’ve realized that there is so much I could be doing, that I didn’t know I could do until now. So there are going to be a few changes coming soon!

1. I’m changing the focus of this blog to bookish content and all things reading! You can expect less things writing and more things reading! (Still want writing updates? Stay tuned for a very special announcement coming soon…)
2. I’m going to attempt to change the look of the blog. WordPress is incredibly difficult to work with, but I shall conquer it! *brandishes sword*
3. I want to try posting some more faith content! So stay tuned for more posts like that!
4. I’ve been tagged for a few tag challenges, which I may or may not do, depending. So if you tagged me for something and I haven’t posted about it, don’t take it personally! I’m hoping to pull together a more cohesive brand here on this blog.

I… think that’s it for now, but if I’ve forgotten anything, I’ll come back and edit this post!

I’m so happy to be back! How have you all been doing? I’ve missed you!