If the online platform I use to send these emails is correct—and it feels a bit like it's having a good laugh at my expense—it’s been three years since I sent out an actual god-honest NEWSIE.

Surprise! I’m still here.

Perhaps a bigger surprise, considering it’s been four years and counting since I’ve had a book published, is that I am still writing. It’s just that in all this time I haven’t actually finished a book. Well, no. That isn’t correct. I have both written and finished a book, just not a work of fiction.

I’m messing this all up. I should probably start at the beginning.

If you’ve been with me for a while, you might remember that toward the end of 2019 I sent out a novella of a NEWSIE explaining the struggle I was having with getting words onto the page and how not okay I was both cognitively and emotionally. In that update I walked through the reasons for making the difficult decision to step away from the publishing world. This decision was no small thing. Writing fiction is the only income-earning skill I have and I didn’t know at the time—and honestly still don’t—if this decision would cost me my writing career essentially ending my ability to provide for myself.

But I had no choice.

If you weren’t with me at the time or don’t remember that email, you can find the meat of it here: https://www.patreon.com/posts/29977811

In an attempt to heal and regain the lost cognitive function I downsized and de-stressed. This involved selling my house, getting my youngest through the final year of high school, and helping my newly adult children fly the nest. I was so deep in mental clouding at the time that I don’t remember much of that period and am hazy on the timeline, but I believe by the time the dust finally settled we were in 2021.

Having shed most other obligations and responsibilities the majority of my time and focus went into finishing THE FULCRUM (Munroe #6). But whatever had broken in my brain in 2019 remained broken. I showed up at my desk. I put in the hours. But getting words onto the page and then making those words make sense was a daily hell. This same dysfunction affected everything else as well. There were days my brain was so blitzed and my body so depleted I couldn’t get out of bed. And days I lost the ability to speak. It’s truly difficult to describe how bad it was.

Somehow, and I’m still not sure how, in spite of all this I did manage to make forward progress on THE FULCRUM. I posted drafts of each new chapter to Patreon as I finished writing them. But the act of thinking, and then converting thoughts into words, and making those words make sense—in any form, but especially in writing—was so time consuming and cognitively draining that I no longer had it in me to do anything more than that. The NEWSIES stopped, social media interaction slowed to a trickle, and Patreon posts became more and more spread out and sporadic.

It wasn’t that I didn’t want to, I simply couldn’t.

And when it came to NEWSIES like these, specifically, I also had nothing to say—nothing to offer: no new books, no new events, no forward momentum. Nothing 

but day after day after day of putting in the hours with nothing to show for the time. I internalized the belief that all of this was the result of some moral failure on my part: I was weak, lazy, making excuses for myself, must not really want it, didn’t deserve what I’d already managed to accomplish. Had I actually written, it would have been the same thing over and over: hey guys, I’m trying, but I’m still broken.

That entire period was deeply psychologically and emotionally devastating.

Then, at the tail end of 2022, a series of events led to discovering that the dysfunction that had robbed me of the ability to write and so much else had an organic cause. Among other things my brain wasn’t getting enough oxygen and this was being driven by a chronic illness that I’d apparently been living with and pushing past for decades.

The diagnosis explained so much.

 
What it didn’t do was provide treatment or relief. That’s because this is a poorly recognized and under researched condition for which there is no known cure. But just knowing that the crippling dysfunction had a reason and that this reason had a name gave me hope.

At the beginning of 2023 I opened a blank document, put fingers to keyboard, and set out to explain what I’d learned about this illness and how it connected to my inability to get words on the page. I hadn’t intended to make a big deal of it. I thought it might take a couple of weeks—a month at most—to say what needed to be said, which at the beginning was very little. But as I wrote I researched for accuracy, and as I researched I learned, and as I learned I fell deeper into the medical literature, and through this process of writing, researching, and explaining I found answers. It took one year, eight months, and two-hundred thousand words to finish but in the process I figured out what I needed to do to heal my body and bring my brain back online.

If, at the beginning of all of this, someone had told me that medical research would consume the next nearly two years of my life and that, as a result, everything else would fall away in neglect, I never would have opened that document. And that would have been a shame. Because had I not spent these past nearly two years swimming in medical research, I would also still be swallowed by the fog and still be unable to create. This story of finding my way to healing is the most meaningful thing I ever have and likely ever will write.

My goal is to make it available for free download via its own website.

It will be a few more months at least before that site is up and running. When it is ready I will let you know where to find it. In the meantime my work on it is mostly done, and now I stand at another crossroads and have to decide where I go from here and what I do now. You can read that discussion here, if you are so inclined: https://www.patreon.com/posts/113015938

I make no promises that regular NEWSIES will return any time soon but it seemed fitting that on the nearly three-year anniversary of dropping off the map I stop back in to say hello, wish you a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, tell you what’s been going on, and let you know that I’m still here.

And as a NEWSIE isn’t really a NEWSIE without a GOODIE giveaway, let’s do that too!

GOODIES: This month there are twelve books in the giveaway pile. If you’d like to be entered to win, simply respond to this email with the subject “GOODIE GIVEAWAY.” If your email program likes to be difficult and won’t let you change the subject, just put GOODIE GIVEAWAY in the reply and I will make sure it gets to the right place.

The 2nd, 8th, 16th, 20th, 27th, 34th, 45th, 52nd, 60th, 73rd, 81st, and 99th readers to respond will be prize winners this month. I read every single email that comes in but due to the volume, I’m ONLY able to respond to the 2nd, 8th, 16th, 20th, 27th, 34th, 45th, 52nd, 60th, 73rd, 81st, and 99th respondents. If you email and don’t hear back, it’s not because I’m ignoring you, it’s because, due to time and volume, I just can’t.

[Standard buzzkill disclaimer for all giveaways and offers of free books: Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Limited to U.S. addresses. I am not responsible for lost or misrouted emails, interrupted or unavailable network or server connections, other computer or technical failures, or post office mishandling.]

Wishing you a wonderful New Year full of promise!

--Taylor