Life Updates & a Special Announcement

As you may or may not have noticed, I haven’t been blogging much this year. I always want to be posting on this site, but sometimes life gets in the way, and I have to remind myself that the blog will always be here. So far, 2022 has proven to be- by a country mile- the busiest year of my life. When I came back to London after spending Christmas with my family, I wasn’t feeling so hot. I was reading through all of the things I had to do for the spring semester, and I just thought “I can’t see me actually doing this”. I was miserable those first couple weeks back. But when I got my head sorted out, mostly under the realization that I had only two options- total success or absolute failure- then I started to make a game plan.

I made a “Master List” of every assignment deadline for the spring semester. I also included the deadlines I had for my freelance copywriting job too. Rather than deleting each bullet point from the sticky note, I decided instead to opt for the lovely strikethrough line, imagining how deliciously satisfying it would be to eventually look back on that list and see all of them crossed out. As of yesterday, I somehow found myself face to face with that very image- and striking through the last deadline was indeed delicious. Naturally, I am still adding to it whenever my boss sends me the next month’s content deadline, and I still have my dissertation to complete before I graduate, but as far as the spring semester is concerned, I’ve completed it.

I was able to handle my workload better than I did in the first semester, but between my assignments, my job, and my social life, I just haven’t had any time for blogging. There’s also something else I’ve been working on that’s taken up a lot of my time…

*drumroll*

I have a book coming out! This August I will be releasing a collection of short stories, some of which have already been published and some of which are brand new. The stories are all interlinked and explore the theme of human connection throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. These are all stories about young people and the defining, often troubled, relationships in their lives. Some of these relationships are longstanding familial ties, others are fleeting but intense, and some are digital in nature. My idea is to capture the significance these relationships have on the course of our lives in a book focused on interconnectedness.

I will be undertaking much of the production work myself- typesetting, copy-editing, design, and marketing- although I do have some key partners I am very excited to work with this summer. There is a chance that all this work my further impact my blogging, but it is my hope that I will still be able to do a few posts here and there. What I can promise is that I will be posting updates here. So if you are interested in the book’s progress, be sure to check either this site or my Instagram throughout the summer! I will have more news to reveal- and other blog posts- coming very soon.