If You Can’t Walk, Crawl – 2020 and 2021 in Retrospect

We’ve heard all the jokes about the decade that is 2020 and 2021 combined, so I’m not even going to start. But on a personal level, damn, these last two years. The world fell apart while I was going through my tradpub debut launch (a whole series launch), and if I had any expectations about how my life should go, I would have been devastated.

I tend to always expect the worst, to be honest, so of course my constant reaction to everything falling sideways was simple panic and resigned laughter. Of COURSE a pandemic on a global scale was going to happen when something I’ve been dreaming of for most of my life finally came to pass. (Mind you, most of us 2020 debuts feel the same way). Watching the slow, rising momentum of my debut book release come to a screeching, cliff-sized drop around the time lockdowns began was painful. A second reprint two weeks after launch right before most of the continent, including book stores, shut down… The thought of what could’ve been, what should’ve been…just floating there in the ether. It felt like all the hard work of 2019, all the excitement we were able to conjure for the book (Editors’ Pick! Blurbs! Lists!), was for nothing.

I remember thinking “On the bright side, there’s no need to prove yourself anymore since everything turned to shit.” But also, “Now you’ll never be able to prove yourself.” Then I picked myself up from that and wrote yet another book, exactly about those thoughts. To watch your dreams fly and then fade on the horizon, leaving you behind, is…well. It’s not the most painful thing in the world, but it’s close. It’s like going back to the young girl you used to be and telling her you did your best and you’re sorry, but everything she ever wanted was never meant to be hers. The world isn’t ours to control. It does its thing and we’re all just dragged along for the ride.

Fucking Covid, seriously.

So I wrote that book, and then I rewrote a different book like two or three times plus revisions because my agent is Hannah Bowman and This Is a Thing We All Do For Her, and then I wrote two more complete books and started two others and planned all these self-pub launches because productivity, to me, is the best solution to chasing those anxieties away. And I remind myself, with each step, that I’ve never soared through life. Never. I made it this far just by crawling.

Now the year is almost over. I’ve lost people who are dear to me, and embarking on another new adventure. I don’t know what the future holds, and I guess it’s up to me to be okay with that uncertainty. The books will still be written, one way or another. At the very least, it’s the one thing I know I can do.