Hello everyone! I hope you’re having a happy springtime. Here in Toronto, the weather has been so up and down. One minute, it’s so cold that I need to pull out my winter coat. The next, I’m wearing shorts and sandals. I wonder when I’ll be able to officially turn off my heating for more than a few days.

But I’m loving the sunshine and the extra hours in the day regardless. It does wonders for my motivation.

Last we spoke, I had just released two novels. In case you missed it, here are the buy links!

Buy I KNEW HIM at your favourite retailer: https://books2read.com/u/mKnx8P

Buy I KNEW HIM on itch.io: https://adeniverville.itch.io/i-knew-him

Buy BE TRUE at your favourite retailer: https://books2read.com/u/mYwKnW

Buy BE TRUE on itch.io: https://adeniverville.itch.io/be-true

So…what’s next??

So much of my energy has been in working on releasing these novels. Now that they’re out into the world, I really don’t know what to do with myself. This has resulted in me thinking long and hard about my career thus far and what I want in the future. I realized that I don’t really have a clear plan, now that these releases are done. Ideally, I would want to re-release We Go Together, but I have no concept of the “after.”

I’ve started a few drafts, but I’ll be honest and say I’m not really feeling them. Maybe I could push through and write a good book, but I think there’s a deeper issue at work than just motivation.

I made a YouTube video (I’m back at making them!) to summarize how I’ve been feeling and I have some more thoughts since I posted the video, which I’ll add here.

Feel free to watch the video below. But if not, I also wrote down the key points, as well as some additional thoughts I have.

For a long time now, I've felt like I needed to make a shift with my writing. Part of me felt like I was over the "teen angst" I tend to write about, so I considered trying to write a book with adult main characters. Some of my ideas would probably work better with slightly older protagonists, anyhow. But I could never settle on one thing. I’d get new YA ideas and wonder if I wanted to write one more, then I’d think it would be better to freshen things up and do something new. I could never find an answer.

But I think my problem isn't YA. It's the contemporary genre as a whole.

For more context, as I’ve talked about before, I used to write fantasy as a kid. I loved Lord of the Rings, Narnia, and Tamora Pierce. I read Enchanted Forest Chronicles and as many Gail Carson Levine books that I could find. When I got a bit older, I was introduced to Twilight and paranormal/urban fantasy. Eventually, I became more interested in real life and read contemporary novels. I Knew Him became the first book I finished that was "good" by younger me's standards.

As time went on, I read and wrote more contemporary. I sometimes read fantasy books, but my chief interest was contemporary romance.

But then, when I had a massive writing slump around 2020, I was also in a reading slump. I tried to read some new YA contemporary releases and just couldn't get into them. Picking them up felt like a chore. I barely read 2 books some years. So I decided to just read whatever struck my fancy. Reading something was better than nothing, and it would help my writing too. I ended up reading a lot of fantasy as a result, along with memoirs and a couple contemporary books that had been on my list for a while.

But as a writer, I do think it's important to read a lot within your genre. It's important to read widely, but you have to be able to boost your fellow writers and contribute to the "ecosystem" by buying/borrowing books written by your peers. And it’s also important to be aware of current trends of the genre, even if you don’t intend to follow them. And I just couldn't do any of that.

It didn't help when promoting my books that I didn't know what to say about them. I couldn't compare them to recent releases for "comp titles" and when I did author interviews, I felt weird talking about fantasy books as my current or favourite recent reads. And I also felt like maybe my books were coming across as old or unrelatable, because I wasn't keeping up with current popular styles.

All in all, I was just feeling like I didn't belong in this space anymore. And I think I'm ready to accept that maybe I don't. I loved writing these books and I'm proud of what I've done, but maybe it wasn't meant to be a forever thing. Back when I was young, trying to write the next Lord of the Rings, I couldn't write characters well. I couldn't build a world. Writing books set in our current world, where certain things are already determined help me hone the character aspect of things. That's something I can take with me into the next stage of my career.

I think another aspect involved in all this is community. I feel very isolated right now writing my YA contemporary books. I went to a writing group recently where everyone was writing sci fi or fantasy. When I went to an author conference, I met only 3 other YA writers, and I was the only one writing YA contemporary. I post about my writing on Bluesky and get hardly any response besides bots, and it seems the community in general skews more heavily towards speculative fiction. My mutuals from back when I started publishing moved on to writing romance with adult protagonists or they've switched genres completely. I'm sure there's a vibrant YA contemporary community out there somewhere, but I just haven't been able to find them. And I think if I were still really passionate about this genre, these things wouldn't bother me. But they do, and I can’t just keep writing in spite of it all like I have before.

I'm not sure what the future holds. Maybe I'll start writing under a pen name and leave my real name for things like poetry or the odd contemporary novel. Maybe I’ll just hop to different genres under my real name when I want to. But all I know is I should write what I feel passionate about right now. If that passion burns out and I go back to what I was doing before, maybe that's fine. A lot of kidlit authors I used to read did a whole range of genres. I don't need to just stick to one thing.

I’ve started to work on a fantasy story that has been haunting me for years. We’ll see where it goes, but I’m having fun so far. I hope I can get to the finish line this time, which I could never get to when I was younger. If I do release it under a different name, I will definitely keep you all informed!

As for We Go Together, I would like to edit and re-release it. However, I’m not sure if now is the time to do it. I have complicated feelings about this book. It sold poorly, and I took it really hard back then. I’m not sure if I can do it all over again, or if it’s worth my effort and time at the moment. I worry working on it will bring back those old feelings of inadequacy and disappointment, and I’ll get back into the slump I was once in.

I think for now, I shouldn’t force it. If I feel compelled to start the edits, I will. But I won’t expect it of myself. I’d rather write my fantasy story and see where it takes me for now. Maybe next month I’ll talk more about it in this newsletter!

Thanks for reading, and sticking with me as always! I hope you’ll stay for the next chapter.

My Links

Facebook | Instagram | Ko-Fi | Website| Bluesky