Catching up after a few months off

So, I’ve been gone for a while.

Between holiday travel, my day job starting back up, and dealing with the roller coaster that it is to have a nearly two year old running around, I haven’t been active on my Substack. Surprise, surprise, I let myself spread out too thin and I only have two arms and one brain with maybe three hours in the day to get everything done.

But it wasn’t just that. I also had some grief I needed to address and suffice to say, I am back to normal if normal was a treadmill that was slowly increasing speed and moving into an incline.

Don’t worry, I am ok. Tired, but ok.

Funny enough, I have been doing a lot of writing. Writing during my time of grieving has been a way for me to process everything going on and all the emotions I was feeling. I wrote a poem for the first time in ages and it was like a tightly sewn-up seam was coming undone and out flowed poem after poem, story after story.

I submitted a children’s story to a small publishing house back at the beginning of March and also submitted my art portfolio to an illustrator competition. I’ve been writing nearly every day trying to keep up with the ideas that seem to be exploding out of me. Plus, I’m currently in the beginning stages of writing a draft for a middle school book, something I thought I would never be interested in writing but here I am, excited to write it.

Somehow, through my grief, I have come out with more clarity to my stories than ever before. Now, I wouldn’t ever want to go through what I went through ever again, but through the pain I have been able to find my voice again in my writing.

I’ve also been drawing just about every day. I’ve been trying to improve my children’s book illustrations along with trying to find my style. When I started my Piper stories back in 2022, I couldn’t afford to pay an illustrator so I opted to draw the illustrations myself. I wasn’t good with digital art, which is what I use for my books, and I really struggled with body proportions and shadows. Now, I almost exclusively illustrate my own stories so I have hopefully improved during that time.

I might not be posting as much as I would like to, but I just wanted to come on here and shout from the rooftops of my very small Substack that I am constantly writing and illustrating and it’s been incredible.

Thank you for reading. <3