This is the expression of a woman who only now realized the word “just” appears 347 times in her manuscript.

Somewhere around April 2014, the grayness of my life began to lift. At the time, I was being dragged underwater by the riptide of a depression I’d only just begun to address with a therapist, drowned by anxiety I didn’t even recognize as a problem until two years later.

Nevertheless, I began writing fiction for the first time that month. I sat at my keyboard, desperate for relief from all my troublesome thoughts. For a blissful moment when my mind could occupy itself with someone else’s life, rather than my own.

I wrote with no expectation of publication. No knowledge of how or how well I’d write. No sense of what kinds of stories suited my unknown talents (or lack thereof). And holy shit, I wrote quickly. In the space of a month or two, I completed a 90,000-word rom-com set in modern-day Colonial Williamsburg, one which featured plenty of sex and banter, but lacked—sadly—a plot. Shortly thereafter, two novellas (later published as Broken Resolutions and Ready to Fall) were sitting on my hard drive. Together, those novellas took me two and a half weeks to write.

It was easy. It was all so damn easy and joyful. I had no clue about the flaws in my writing (many and varied, as it turned out), and no expectation of a writing career. No pressure, internal or external, other than the drive to dismiss the worries crowding my head.

Because it seemed like the thing to do, though, I started querying and submitting. Then came a contract, which felt like a blessing at the time. (And I should add that I remain grateful to the publishers and agents who wanted those two novellas. I appreciate their faith in a complete newbie.) Someone wanted to buy my books! Six of my books, in fact, four of them still unwritten! How marvelous!

I signed my contracts. I dropped all those other weird stories I’d been plotting without any thought as to my career trajectory or the opinions of potential readers. And I buckled down to write the books in my contract, the next books in what became the Lovestruck Librarians series.

That’s when things started going wonky. Not at first, not when I had months and months in reserve before my first deadlines. Not when I could write books set in a different world, a different time period, between my contracted books.

But once I started running up against my deadlines, once I could no longer write “palate cleanser” books between books I had to write, once my working life became an endless series of Lovestruck Librarians books, Lovestruck Librarians blog posts, Lovestruck Librarians developmental edits and copy edits and page proofs, and—of course—Lovestruck Librarians promo and marketing, that swift writing pace so praised by my then-agent and then-editor began to falter.

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