Clearing Away the Dust

Considering it’s been over a month since the last time I wrote a blog post, I’m feeling a little out of practice here, but I’m back now (and hopefully with more consistent uploads)! Since there’s so much I want to cover and catch you all up on, this post is going to be a bit more structured than my previous ones. Bear with me.

What have we missed?

Last month, April, was indeed a busy time. I set a personal writing challenge of writing 500 words per day to help me finish the first draft of my WIP, The Hunter, the Hunted. I cut it quite close, but I did manage to finish the first draft on the last day of the month! Amidst all of that, I was planning and preparing for my first public author signing at Bibliobar, a local indie bookstore nestled on the idyllic brick roads of downtown Plano; my friends welcomed me into their book club, which piled a few new additions to my ever-growing TBR; and I watched Pride & Prejudice (for the first time!) on the big screen with some friends to celebrate the movie’s 20th anniversary.

Honestly, the whole month flew by, and it’s only now in mid-May that I feel like time is catching up to me again. Or maybe it’s more that I’m slowing down enough to appreciate the time I do have.

Instagram is where I’m most active, but due to the nature of the app, I don’t often get to talk in length about what I’ve been up to behind the scenes. I never got to tell you how exhilarating yet entangling it felt to be elbows-deep into another first draft—which is now finished and undergoing its first round of revisions. I never got to tell you why I chose to divert from the Stormbringer Saga for my second book. And I never got to tell you how liminal it feels to be a published author—to have my dreams literally come true—while life continues as it always has, unchanged, almost entirely unaffected.

The simple reason for all of this is that I’m not a very organized person. Drafting my next book took highest priority, and so much was happening around the same time that it felt like to pause and reflect on it all would be to lose that precious momentum I’d found. I keep a regular journal for dumping all my thoughts, as well as a bullet journal to keep track of daily/monthly goings-on, and as you can see by the picture below, I’m really trying to stay on top of things in the coming months.

Bullet journaling isn’t for everyone, I know, and clearly it takes quite a bit of time and page space to decide how I want to format everything. I had a couple extra pages at the end of my current journal, so I had some space to fiddle around with it. I like that it’s entirely customizable to my needs; it's perfect for keeping track of all the different aspects of my life. In theory, writing down all my little goals—like cranking out weekly blog posts—will ensure that these things are not ignored or forgotten. It makes it a more tangible goal if I can see it, rather than just pushing away another nagging thought. And of course, telling my audience (even if there are only five of you who read this) that I want to be more on top of my goals adds another layer of accountability.

(Feel free to gently pester me if you notice that I’m not staying true to my word—I do check my DMs often.)

What is this new duology? What about the Stormbringer Saga?

This is a question I’ve been anticipating ever since I first began hinting at my WIP. After Unraveled was published, I fully intended to jump right into its sequel to ensure that my readers didn’t forget about this cherished thing that I had put so much effort and time into. But each time I sat down to write the second installment of the Stormbringer Saga, my thoughts drifted. I felt disconnected from the characters; found their world dry—which was utterly jarring, considering I constructed this whole thing with so much love and passion and drive.

It was an unsettling time, realizing that my creativity was flowing toward a different project—one I thought I’d abandoned altogether. There was a period of push-and-pull at the start of the year in which I tried to train my thoughts to fix solely on the Stormbringer Saga, but something had changed. It took me a long time before I finally realized that I simply needed a break.

Published in early 2025, Unraveled was a work in progress starting in the summer of 2019, when I was freshly twenty years old with a wild, far-fetched dream. You do the math. Up until recently, all of my time has been dedicated to one book. One series. Granted, that is time I cherish and wouldn’t change for the world—but it does warrant a bit of a step back. One of my greatest fears is reaching a point where writing feels like a chore, where I fall out of love with the mere craft and act of it and start cranking out book after book for someone else’s sake, or just because it’ll earn me a bit of extra cash. I love my first book, and I’m proud of what I’ve created—but I also need this break so as not to lose my love for it.

The book I’m writing now is not an entirely new idea. I actually wrote and submitted a very rushed, very underwritten draft of it as a short story in January 2024. It was rejected (for good reason), but in December, it sort of commandeered my creative flow, and now, I finally get to share the first look at what I’ve been working on.

This was a world I had only briefly explored; I had the faintest ideas of who the main characters were. But poking deeper, learning more—it was like falling down a rabbit hole. I fleshed out the plot, nosed my way into the characters’ heads, explored their world through their eyes. What I found was an unexpected love story that fits nicely into two books. But, in typical “me” fashion, I’ve gotta put my own twist on it: This is a tragic love story, so don’t go into it thinking you’ll get a happily-ever-after wrapped in a shiny little bow.

I don’t really have an explanation as to why I’m willingly steering my characters toward tragedy because even in the pared down, short version of their story, they didn’t get a happy ending. Maybe it’s the “bird’s eye view” I enjoy as the author that allows me to see them objectively. These two lovers may care deeply for one another, but circumstances beyond their control prove too powerful even for love to overcome.

To me, that’s more than just a fictional tragedy. That’s realistic. And it’s something I feel we don’t see often in the blooming age of romantasy and power couples who, due to their genre alone, are almost automatically guaranteed a happily-ever-after. (That’s not to bash on these tropes or genres at all; believe me, I’m as much a fan of a couple that endures as anyone else. It’s just not the kind of story my characters have to tell.)

The Hunter, the Hunted is helping me break into new territory. Romance is not a genre I thought I’d ever write for, but there is familiarity and ease in writing fantasy again. The fictional world acting as a backdrop helps drive the characters’ motives, which creates conflict, which subsequently moves the plot forward. It’s not so different from writing high stakes, epic fantasy.

Closing Thoughts

Firstly, if you made it this far, you have my thanks for enduring such a dense, overdue update of what I’ve been up to. If I keep up with posting on a weekly basis, I’m certain that future posts won’t be as long.

Looking ahead, there’s a lot I’m looking forward to. I have a tentative goal of finishing this first round of revisions and the second draft of The Hunter, the Hunted by the end of summer; my second short story, Nebulous, comes out next month in “Unconventional Love,” an anthology by Dragon Bone Publishing; and I received a piece of news this week that I can’t yet talk about but that I assure you is nothing but positive.

That’s all for now—thanks for reading!