Chasing Fireflies: The View From Rock Bottom

I haven’t written a blog for over three months because I’ve been too busy chasing fireflies: ideas, and feelings, and revelations, and experiences that have flitted across my inner landscape, glowing bright in the darkness. I’ve had to catch them—quick!—before they disappeared. It’s not often you see the same firefly twice.

In May I got back from YallWest, weary. It’d been a tough six months. Nothing I’d produced (two romance novels, one fantasy novel, an impassioned pitch, and over fifty thousand words of other stories) was working. For the first time since I sold my debut novel in the summer of 2012 I was coming up dry. I experienced the horror of turning in a book that I knew wasn’t working because I was on deadline and that was all I had. Ideas weren’t sticking around long enough for me to flesh them out, I suddenly forgot how to plot, how to develop authentic, rounded characters. Worse, there wasn’t anything I was burning to write. And everything on the page was unreadable.

I was empty.

This emptiness manifested itself in my life in various ways. Depression, my lifelong companion, decided to rear its ugly head. Of course. My Brooklyn apartment and the entirety of New York City started getting on my nerves more than usual: there wasn’t space to breathe, to think, to grow. I’d go to cafes to write and just sit there, lost in a horrible labyrinth of plots that were…