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.

You can write a million words and still not improve. Repetition builds comfort. Deliberate practice builds skill. The difference is what you choose to pay attention to.

Creative work is increasingly public. We share updates, track metrics, and celebrate milestones. But being seen doing the work is not the same as getting better at it. On the difference between performance and practice, and why the deepest growth often happens offstage.

Rowanswood began as both refuge and rebellion: a cozy fantasy village where older women are not side characters, but the heart of the adventure. This reflection explores Crones, later-life magic, myth, reinvention, and why the most interesting chapter is never presumed to be over.

Finished the manuscript? Congratulations — and welcome to the next challenge. In this first Adventures in Self-Publishing essay, I explore the shift from writer to publisher, the reader-facing decisions that follow, and why self-publishing is more than pressing upload and hoping for the best.

At first glance indie publishing looks overwhelming. My advice is not to look at the whole thing at once. That way madness lies. Break it down into individual pieces, work through them one at a time and celebrate ticking them off on the master document.