Sometimes it’s just hard

Nothing saps my creativity like stress. Distractions I can work through, I’m perfectly capable of squeezing in writing time around family stuff, but when things get stressful in a bad way? All of my ideas may as well dissolve into the ether.

To put it bluntly, February was a bad month for me.

I’d been working on a standalone fantasy unrelated to any of my other books, and making pretty good progress on it until everything decided to implode all at once. (If you’re a subscriber to my newsletter, I mentioned some of it in February’s edition.) And with that implosion, my creativity disintegrated faster than a sand castle struck by a tsunami. While writing often helps me process life events, sometimes I have to take a break—from everything.

So that’s what I did. Sometimes it’s just hard to keep going. Sometimes I need a break, and February forced one.

On the work side of things, I had three major lab investigations hit all at once. I’m the only microbiologist at my company, and when it’s micro-related (even through a contract testing facility), I get pulled in. We haven’t had any investigations in several years, so to have three at once (and all at different facilities), was unusual. I was stretched thin. I had to travel for some of it, and traveling solo is not my favorite thing. But I managed it okay.

On the personal front, I received some news from the doctor at the beginning of the month that had me freaked out, to say the least. When they say, “There’s a tumor,” it’s scary, even when they mitigate the statement with, “it’s very likely benign.” More testing was needed to confirm, and I couldn’t schedule it earlier than three weeks out. Waiting for news on that was the absolute worst.

Thankfully, it is benign, but I’ll need surgery to deal with it. That’s coming in May. I’ll be okay, now that I know what it is and how to proceed.

Around the same time, our cat got sick. She was eighteen years old, and even though I knew this time would eventually come, it broke my heart to see it. She was always so healthy, so full of life, and then… A couple days before I had to travel for work she took a turn. By the time I came home, we knew she wasn’t going to last much longer. The day after I got back, we called an in-home vet, and Magic departed for the great beyond. Thinking about it even two weeks later hurts my very soul. She was part of our lives since we moved in together, before we were even married. My husband took her loss just as hard as I did. She is missed, but never forgotten.

To say February was a perfect storm for stress-induced writer’s block is putting it mildly.

I’m doing better now, and I even did a final revision pass on Legend since then. I’m slowly getting back to the in-progress standalone too.

Here’s hoping the rest of 2024 is better.