Hello, lovely readers.
Like the TL;DR says… I’m taking a short little hiatus, just through the end of March.
I don’t like doing this. In fact, please know that I absolutely hate doing this. I promised you guys a serial chapter every Friday and rotating bits of other content every Wednesday, and I don’t like randomly shuffling off commitments.
The truth is that I’ve been struggling a lot with my mental health lately.
It’s been a perfect maelstrom of stress, tension over multiple aspects of my husband’s job, difficulty with some aspects of homeschooling, the political stuff I was trying to ignore but snuck in anyway, and a disappointment over a trip we had to change last minute. I thought I was managing it all right, but the chronic illnesses that don’t allow my body to handle stress well finally struck and kicked me straight into a bad mental spiral.
I try to work with a good, 2-3 month buffer of things queued up through my newsletter, so normally I can handle chronic flare-ups with only a little hiccup or two. However, I just never got there with Knights. Since December is always a rest month for me, what I should have done was to push the Knights launch to February and used January to gear up and get that buffer. (Lesson learned!) At one point, when things were just starting to look a little dicey, I had built up a three-week buffer.
That three-week buffer is now gone, and for the last two weeks I’ve been operating on a week-by-week basis. This wouldn’t be so difficult, even when I’m struggling, if it hadn’t also coincided with a portion of the story that I’m needing to drastically add/rewrite, instead of simply applying edits.
And so, the hiatus.
It’s not just publishing that I’m taking a hiatus from. I’ve chopped back our homeschooling to basics and dropped food prep/housework to the minimum. I’m making sure I have time to sleep and gently exercise. I have a conference coming up at the end of the month, and I’d very much like to not be rambling around in a brain fog (or push myself to sickness and exhaustion). I think this will allow me to prioritize my health and give me time to build back up a buffer of chapters, as well as catch up with other things on my to-do list (work on Glamour Dust stories for this year, and finally get Glamour Dust season 1 published in ebook and start work on the audiobook.)
So, I hope you’ll be patient with me. I hope to return to my regular publishing schedule in April refreshed and with a lower stress level. <3
You need to take care of you! We’ll be here when you are able to return!
Sending hugs. As someone with an autoimmune disorder I know it all too well.