It's good to be back!
Grief, I have learned, can crack your brain open like a nut. In September of 2025, my niece Kate died just two days after her 36th birthday. Since then, I have been compelled to write, and I do mean compelled. Joan Didion once said, “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.” This is it exactly, though I would describe it far less elegantly: I write, because if I don’t, my brain will leak out of my ears.
The writing I’m producing is both copious and eclectic: letters to my niece, journal entries, notes on a hundred topics I want to explore, and outlines of posts intended for social media. I have filled countless cards with notes of love and support to my distant sister, brother-in-law, nieces, and nephews, because I can’t be there to hug them. Then, a couple months ago, the fiction project I’ve been kicking around for years burst into multi-sensory life – characters showed up and started yakking at each other, usually when I was sitting at a red light or waiting in line at the grocery store. This has always been how I know I am up and running – it's as if a parallel world opens a portal, enabling me to observe its inhabitants. Honestly, it feels more like spying than writing, but that’s a topic for a later piece.
It has been almost 10 years since I was writing every day, aka living the writing life, and it feels like the very best of me has come back from the dead. Beloveds, this was NOT my plan. I finished my first trilogy in just over three years, and I fully intended to continue writing at least a book a year. I wanted to get a newsletter going, get involved in my local writing community, volunteer to teach writing workshops for teens (my people), and all the author things. Then...LIFE.
I don’t need to share a list. We all have one, and mine looks more or less like yours. We plan. Life laughs, lovingly, then brings us what we really need.
Our Kate’s death changed me in ways I am still working hard to understand and articulate. In my belief system, this is a karmic contract being played out between my niece and I. Kate had a contract with many of us, I believe, most especially with her mama. I can’t speak to my sister’s journey, though it is my privilege to walk this life by her side, to love her through every single step, to witness the terrible holiness of her grief. All I can truly do, though, is seek to understand the invitation issued to me, the offer to grow, because if there is one crystalline truth I have learned, it is that pain never shows up without a gift in its hands. Accepting those gifts is where the learning curve goes straight vertical.
As I write this, I am so aware that I’m not remotely the same person I was when I hit “publish” and sent my third book out into the world. Life since 2017 has been a series of brilliantly constructed lesson plans designed to teach me so much. Let me rephrase and emphasize: SO SO SO SO MUCH. I am still trying to compile a simplified list. That list would begin way back with, “What ‘unconditional love’ really is,” and the most recent item would be, “There are no words in the English language more bitter than, ‘I thought I’d have more time.’”
I’d like to invite you all to begin a new conversation. I have so much I need to write about. I need to write about Kate, how her death wrought in me a sea-change, transformed me into something richer, and yes, stranger. I need to write about the sacredness of human connection; the importance of paying attention to what we feel above all else; my belief (with supporting evidence) that the world is becoming ever more lovely each day, and so much more.
And at long last, I need to write about Casey, my beautiful son, the greatest teacher of my lifetime. For 32 years, I’ve kept a bushel over his light because I was afraid. It’s one thing to hear and process criticism of the fictional writing I’ve shared; it’s another thing entirely to endure slings and arrows aimed at the fragile, beating heart of me: my love for my son and my beliefs about what being the mom of such an extraordinary soul means. It is time and past to turn around and stare that fear down, time and past to give my voice to this astonishing journey, because Casey can’t. You won’t believe what he has taught me, beloveds. Prepare to be amazed!
Finally, I cannot wait to introduce you to a young man named Gabriel Michael Hallett, named for his grandfather and two archangels, which he has yet to forgive his mother for. When we meet him, he goes by the nickname Hawk, which was both a grandpa thing and a football thing in the time before the plague. He’s young, eternally optimistic when he has no reason to be, rash, doesn’t even know what he doesn’t know, and has a talent for walking straight into the shadows where angels fear to tread. I love him to pieces. His story begins on the last day of my last book, and I intend to release his adventures one short story at a time in the months ahead. My intent with this project is multipurpose: I am world-building between the end of my first trilogy and the beginning of my next planned trilogy, set 20+ years in the future, and I’m taking the next step in my study of the tarot – more on that subject in a later post as well. My main purpose, though, is to tell Hawk’s story, because he will not leave me be.
So here I go – once more into the breach! In the immortal words of my current musical obsession, KPop Demon Hunters (and do NOT dis this if you haven’t tried it, or you and I will suffer a serious disagreement. Easily my favorite movie of 2025):
“I broke into a million pieces, and I can't go back
But now I'm seeing all the beauty in the broken glass
The scars are part of me, darkness and harmony
My voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like...”
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EJAE, Audrey Nuna, Rei Ami, & KPop Demon Hunters Cast. (2025). What It Sounds Like [Song]. On KPop Demon Hunters (Soundtrack from the Netflix Film). Republic Records.