Holiday Hiatus

This bonus post is going to be a quick one to share a head's-up about what's to come for the rest of the year.

There are still a few weeks left in 2022, but things are going to be wrapping up on the blog for the year a bit sooner than December 31.

This year, I will be taking a holiday hiatus.

I've been posting on Sundays most weeks since launching in 2018. With both Christmas and New Year's Day falling on Sundays, I'm taking it as a sign to step back. There seems to be a constant hustle and bustle coinciding with a focus on spending time with loved ones from late November on.

Having worked in retail during this time of year, I'm no stranger to the chaos—and that has made me more aware of how sparse my writing time has become. Much of my writing in 2022 happened in the breakroom at the day job, the vast majority of which was for the blog. Thirty minutes is hardly enough time to reorient yourself and continue a scene or edit more than a page or two, but it's enough time to draft a section of a post. I went months without touching my fiction simply because of my work schedule and other things happening on my side of the screen and coming back to it after so long was so much harder than I anticipated. Working mostly nights, and with the retail environment being as tense as it usually is, I felt burnt out when I got home after each shift. It wasn't exactly the best frame of mind to be critiquing my own writing and making significant changes.

The thing is, I left that job at the end of October. And in doing so, I've gradually reconnected with my writing.

My hope for 2023 is simply to rekindle my relationship with writing fiction and get back into a steadier routine. Easier said than done, I know.

But I think the first step is going to be giving myself an extended period of time to reconnect with my WIPs. While I won't be uploading for about two weeks, being as ahead of the game as I prefer to be means I'll have nearly a solid month to curl up with Bound to the Heart and get back into the groove with edits—and get me back on track with my overall writerly goals.

I'll still be posting my 2022 wrap-up post next Sunday, December 18th, but that will be my last post until January 8th.

So what's the plan for the weeks in between?

Things will be pretty quiet on the site. I'll be resharing some of my favorite posts from 2022 on social media along with sporadic updates about my writing.

But that's still a little bit down the road.

There's nothing remarkable to report otherwise. There's no exciting news to share or major developments in my writing or journey to being published.

But finally getting back to writing after all this time feels remarkable in itself.