Lately, not so much.

Lately, most of what I’ve got going on is personal, and with these being sent to so many people—some of whom have only recently signed up to hear from me and have no context for the personal stuff, and others who are really only interested in book related news—it doesn’t seem right to clutter inboxes with what should probably just stay in a private journal anyway.

The personal bits I do share tend to end up in the Taylor Stevens Fan Club group on Facebook, or in the first few minutes of chitchat on weekly episodes of the Taylor Stevens Show podcast, or in longer form on Patreon.

But seeing as how we’re about to close out the first quarter of 2021 I thought it might be nice to pop in and say hi and just sort of let you know how I’m doing and how everything else—including the writing—is going.


The year thus far has been its own little mini rollercoaster with something new to (retrospectively) laugh about showing up nearly every other week, but it's also been so different—in so many good ways—from the upheaval of last year which started in January with selling my house and disposing of nearly fifteen years of accumulated stuff, which coincided with getting the youngest child through the last semester of high school (which also happened to run concurrent with the pandemic and the chaotic switch to online learning), and getting said child on into college, and getting the eldest child independent, during which time we moved the entire household TWICE—thrice if you count moving the oldest into their own place—and, mixed up in all of that was a book launch for LIARS' LEGACY and the writing and editing contributions to Serial Box’s Marvel’s BLACK WIDOW: BAD BLOOD, which dragged on all the way into May, and all of this was taking place during a period where I was unable to function at full mental capacity. 

It was a lot. A LOT.

Then, somewhere around September, it was over. Done.

Not the issues with poor mental function or the pandemic, obviously, but as far as the upheaval and chaos went, it was as if someone flipped a switch and just shut all the stress off. One day to the next there were no more emergencies, no more series of cascading events that had to be attended to, no more deadlines, no more juggling too many balls and trying to figure out how to get everything to fall into place.

For the first time in so long I couldn’t remember I could just stop moving.

It took a few weeks to catch my breath but by mid-October it felt as if the broken brain had come back online enough that it was safe to attempt “doing words” again. I was still struggling tremendously with brain fog and finding ways to convert the jumble in my head into something that made sense on the page, but I also felt that if I didn’t force my mind to do the hard work, even when it seemed incapable, that the writing muscles would atrophy and I might never get them back. And so I set off to work on THE FULCRUM (Munroe #6) in what was by that time maybe the seventh or eighth attempt to write what I'd started way back before THE MASK was published.

I’ll talk more about how that’s been going in just a bit.

As far as life itself went, at the end of that upheaval rainbow was a pot of downsizing gold that slashed obligations and living expenses low enough that (with enormous heartfelt thanks to the Patrons who’ve made it possible to even dream of such a thing) I would be able to take time to heal and hopefully be able to focus on writing long term without the desperate panic of needing to secure another publishing contract just to make ends meet.

This downsizing move took me outside the city to where there’s elbow room between neighbors.

I started spending more time outdoors with my hands in the dirt and began to learn how to—literally—stop and smell the roses. For the first time I was able to enjoy the chickens and the goats in more than just passing, and I got a little gaggle of goslings and raised them into geese (and then got more goslings, and more, but those are different stories). I did “handy” things that involved power tools, and finished out a storage room by taking it from bare studs up to enamel paint. I pulled fences and fixed fences, trimmed trees, turned organic matter into compost, grew a vegetable garden, and spent a lot of late afternoons just mowing grass. All of this played a role in bringing my brain back and giving me space to reconnect with and rekindle creativity that had felt truly dead.

The holiday season arrived and I took guilt-free time off to enjoy it and by the time January rolled around the words had begun to flow again—okay, maybe they were a trickle—but I was struggling less and was having more days wherein I could get the words on the page to match what I was trying to say. And although in reality I was still mentally limping along, in comparison to what it had been, I felt like I was queen of the world totally kicking ass.

Then came February and hahahaha. Oh boy.

Every other week since has seemed to bring a story-worthy event.

It started with coming home from a long day trip to find my mama goat in distressed labor, back legs paralyzed and unable to deliver her baby due to it being in a butt-first (frank breach) position and I—the city girl with no goat delivering experience—had no choice but to stick my hands up in there and get that sorted out. [This story in all its gory glory, as well as the breath-holding follow-ups as we waited to see if mom and baby would make it, is all on Patreon.]

And then there was that time the whole of Texas froze over, and for two weeks entire days were consumed with hauling wood for the fireplace, and keeping baby goat and baby geese alive, and all the other animals sheltered, fed, and watered through ice, snow, 3F temperatures and rolling blackouts, and then dealing with the aftermath (and a nearly four-figure electric bill) when it all thawed out. [This is also recounted in real-time narrative form on Patreon].

And that time that I, an innocent bystander minding my own business, got snagged with someone else’s fishhook and had to go to the ER to get it cut out. [Photos in the Facebook group].

And that time straight line winds blew a forty-foot tree over onto the house, and uprooted the ground-anchored 8 x 12 greenhouse and turned it into a (salvageable and reassemble-able) mess of polyethylene fabric and metal.

And that time the internet connection got severed by the neighbor’s backhoe.

And that time that the auger hit an unmarked water line.

Lots of adventures!


Throughout all of this I’ve been butt-in-chair, writing, putting in the hours and doing the work whether my brain worked or not. Not the insane crazy sixteen-hour-days like it was before, more like seven or eight hour days. And, unlike in times past where I would drive myself hard late into the early morning, refusing to stop until I’d reached whatever that day’s goal might be or it got so late I had no choice but to pack it in, I now stop before the sun sets and go outside, or turn my attention to something else that needs doing. Lots of times I spend the last hour or two of the evening giving my brain a vacation by doing jigsaw puzzles or reading books, which is something I haven’t had a chance to do for years.

When I started again on THE FULCRUM in October I tried picking back up where I’d last left off, but I couldn’t do it. I would read the words—words I had written, that I even remembered writing—and find myself completely lost. I knew what the plot line was supposed to be and where it needed to go but I couldn’t grasp how what I was reading on the page tied into the whole. It was all just kind of this babble-babble noise of words that made sense grammatically on a sentence by sentence basis, but for which I couldn't find context or continuity. The only thing I could do was go back to the beginning yet again and try to work my way forward from there.

At first it was maddening, spending hours to get through already written paragraphs, taking a month to finish an already strongly written chapter, spending every day increasingly frustrated with how impossible it felt to make words do what I wanted them to do. I’d get so angry with myself because it wasn’t supposed to be this hard or take this long. But, gradually, with time, it began to get easier.

Not easy, just easier.

The further I got into the existing material the more I understood what the story needed to do and how the existing material tied together, and the more I understood, and the better my brain began to function, the more I grasped the level of rewriting and restructuring I needed to do to take the story where it should go. A lot of old material got cut, a lot of new material got added, and while the work didn’t go any faster on a per page basis, it was faster on the whole because the further I got into it the more thinking, writing, splicing, and shuffling I needed to do to get through each page.

Now, all these months later, I’ve just about reached the end of the previous draft material—maybe a third of the book, give or take—and am staring at that same spot I couldn’t make sense of way back then, and I'm fully wrapped up in it, feeling the heartbeat, and preparing to push into new story territory for the first time after YEARS of trying and failing to make it happen.

I still struggle for words. I still write very slowly. I may possibly always continue to struggle in this way, but if this journey of bringing my brain back online and rediscovering the joy of writing has taught me anything it’s that progress is very much a two steps forward one step back type of process and I’m learning to be okay with that. I expect I’ll have setbacks, that I’ll experience doubt and frustration, and that I’ll never be able to write as quickly as I want to. But to have reached a place where I believe I can do it—that I can figure it out—that I am capable of reaching the end is monumental.

THAT’S where I’m at in the writing process of writing the next book.

I have no idea when it will be finished and even less idea what will happen after it’s finished. I know that the odds of finding a publisher willing to take on a new volume in an old (not to mention cancelled) series are slim to none but, honestly, I can’t even think about that right now. In the moment, getting to the next chapter is as far into the future as I can manage.

We’ll cross the rest of those bridges when we reach them.


In December last year I announced finally fulfilling the multiyear dream of turning THE VESSEL (Munroe #3.5), previously only available in eBook and digital audio, into a real life, hold-in-your-hands hardcover edition.

As I wrote at the time, the hardcover edition is a reader and fan exclusive. The only way to get it is directly from me. I asked anyone who wanted a copy to please email me so I could send instructions on how to go about getting it.

If you wrote and never heard back, I can only assume the internet ate my response and incredibly sorry for that. If you still do want a copy, please let me know so I can email again and hopefully we can get that sorted out.

It’s also possible (but I really hope this didn’t happen) that you ordered/ paid for a copy and are still patiently waiting to receive it. If this happened it means something went horribly wrong. Please let me know so I can try to figure out where your copy went!

And, lastly, it’s possible you missed that announcement and are only just hearing about it now and are hoping it’s not too late. If so, send me an email with the subject “THE VESSEL” and I’ll get back to you with information on how to place an order.

I currently have 25 copies left and they are available on a first come, first serve basis.

Making THE VESSEL available in hardcover required sorting out a few technical issues for online ordering and since I was doing that anyway I also figured out how to accommodate requests for autographed hardcover editions of some of the Munroe titles while I was at it.

Making autographed hardcover editions available direct from me was something I could not do in the past out of respect for book stores.