writing life

A year after publishing The Chic Crone, I’ve learned that writing isn’t just about finishing a book—it’s about continuing through mistakes, discouragement, and uncertainty, and building something meaningful one imperfect step at a time.

For a long time, I treated my sales dashboard as a measure of how well I was doing—not just as an author, but as a person. A good day meant progress. A slow day meant doubt. It took stepping back to realise I was watching results instead of building the work that creates them.

Most readers only ever see the finished book — the cover reveal, the launch announcement, the polished novel sitting beautifully on a shelf. What they don’t see is the enormous iceberg beneath it: the revisions, technical problems, newsletters, graphics, scheduling, emotional resilience, and hundreds of small invisible tasks required to build a creative career over time.

What if the way we pursue success matters just as much as the result itself? Tonya Leigh defines elegant success as “achieving a desired result in the simplest and most effective way possible”. It isn’t about abandoning ambition or lowering standards. It’s about removing unnecessary struggle from the process.

Publishing loves a schedule. Stories, inconveniently, are less obedient. I wrote about delayed books, creative burnout, and the guiding principles helping me protect the work, the wonder, and my sanity.