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I’ve been working on this book for so many years that it feels a little unreal that it’s almost a real book! It’s been two years since I’ve published my last novel — my longest gap in almost a decade — so getting to reveal the cover is extra sweet!
The young adult psychological suspense manuscript I’ve talked about FOR YEARS — mostly on social media — is going to be a book! I first wrote The Other Me in 2018-19, polished it again in 2022, and it can be in your hands in February 2025.
Around my 48th birthday, I got the idea to compete in a triathlon before I turned 50. I talked to a couple friends who regularly compete in them, and we agreed we’d start training together. Then time slipped away, I lost my nerve, and I hoped they didn’t remember that conversation. Cut to the beginning of 2024, aka the beginning of the end of my first half of the century, I got the bug again. But this time the friend I talked to about competing was in my weekly ice skating class (oh yeah, I did that for six months!) so there was no escaping my declaration to attempt a triathlon before my 50th birthday.
Creativity often comes in bursts, and the more you cultivate it, the longer the burst lasts. After not writing for half of 2023, I created a month-long challenge for myself to get back into writing. Each day I wrote roughly 250 words. I tried genres I don’t typically write in, styles atypical to my own, all in the hope that I’d wake up that part of me who loves words.
When I first started writing almost 15 years ago, I was part of a group that shared a flash fiction prompt, and we would all write a piece inspired by a word. I used to really enjoy them, and even got a couple published. Since I didn’t want to come up with 31 words for myself for this challenge, I decided to base it off the alphabet. And rather than write flash fiction, which is 1000 words or less, I decided to do micro fiction, which is only a few hundred words.
Sharing my story is cathartic. But less selfishly, I’ve learned talking about my loss has made others feel less alone. As most anyone who’s suffered a loss knows, there’s a camaraderie in shared grief. But not everyone is comfortable blasting intimate details of their life on the internet. Not everyone has people with whom they can confide. Not everyone feels the love and support I did after losing my babies. So I’ll keep yammering about what I went through for as long as it makes others feel less isolated.
As you all know by now, I’m not a fan of New Year’s resolutions, but this year I kind of sort of have a few. I’m not calling them resolutions because then my weirdo brain will skitter away and any chance I had of succeeding will disappear faster than the eight dozen cutout Christmas cookies I made.
At fifteen, the school motto — Nihil Sine Labore (nothing without labor) — was just one more thing that terrified me about moving away from home and into a dorm. By the time I was eighteen, I understood that the phrase meant you had to work to succeed, but it still struck me as something added to the school crest to make them seem fancy. Thirty years later, I have a better understanding of what the founders of my school were trying to teach us.
Being part of the children’s literature community, I feel like I’m more aware of these sensitivities. I think it’s because the words we choose and how we tell stories impacts young minds that are still forming how they view the world. Many of my writing friends do not write YA, and I’ve learned that a lot of these shifts in language have not trickled up to “adult” books. Which is why I’m writing about this.
When I chose brave as my word of the year, I had no idea what I was getting into. In my new year’s post, I said I was going to let the word guide me, but I did not foresee the path I’m currently stumbling along.