A little backstory, if you will indulge me (I know, I know): I grew up writing with my cousin and best friend, Avi. I didn’t know anything else. It never occurred to me to be afraid, because how could something so fun that I did with one of my favorite people in the world be scary? So I wrote, and I wrote, and I wrote. And the more I wrote, the more I built my skills. They were never GREAT, but they were something. They were mine.

As a twenty-something I wrote my first complete book, which never achieved escape velocity and ended up shelved. I was not disheartened. It was an aroace space opera. Maybe it was too niche. I wrote a second book, Ace of Hearts, a new adult ace romance during NaNoWriMo circa…2018 or so, and in rapid succession wrote another book, The Endless Sea Between Us, in the spring of 2019. I pitched in Twitter pitch parties (remember those?). I queried Ace of Hearts unsuccessfully. I got told there wasn’t a market for it, or that I needed to tone down some key elements of the story, make it more romantic and remove the central familial conflict, or make my ace main character “compromise” for the sake of her allo love interest. I told myself I was done, I would just send one more email, a shot in the dark. I sent the email, with the manuscript attached, and quickly forgot about it, assuming it would be just another rejection. But a few months later, I got my yes.

I published with a fantastic little indie press, and everything changed.

People started perceiving me. People started having OPINIONS about not just my stories, but the experiences they represented. My experiences of being an ace person. I learned the hard way that reviews are for readers, not for authors. While I treasure the ones who got what I was going for, it really shook my confidence that so many people said that Ace of Hearts was unrealistic because they could not conceive of a world where an allo partner would wholly accept their ace lover.

If they had told me it was too short, or all the characters sounded too similar, or any other craft criticism, it would have been different and I probably would have agreed with them on most of it, because I am aware my writing has a long way to go technically. But being told the existence of people like me was unrealistic was Not Great. I was afraid to write again.

So I didn’t.

And the longer I didn’t write, the harder it got to start again. I stopped watering my creative garden, and when you do not nurture something, it will not flourish. It’s easy to tell yourself that it’s dead, that you should just pave over it and turn that space into something practical. But I harbored hope in my heart that someday I could tend my garden, that there would be stories in my heart again.

Years passed. The pandemic happened, I switched jobs—twice!—and my creative support network became tenuous because That Jerk took over Twitter and ruined it, and that was where all my writer friends lived. In the great exodus, I was only able to find a fraction of my writing friends on other platforms. Some, understandably, just quit social media. Some changed their handles and I lost them that way. I am profoundly lucky that I have found my way back to so many of them. (Of you, most likely.)

In 2025, I had a medical procedure (this is relevant, I promise). I was told that I HAD to have someone in the waiting room during the entire procedure, and I realized that all my friends lived states or countries or continents away. I am an arospec ace single person. If it wasn’t for my mother being willing to sit in the waiting room for me, I wouldn’t have been able to have that procedure. And I thought, “what if someone put out an ad on their town’s subreddit for a one-day emergency contact, and it blossomed into friendship.” My short story Emergency Contact was born.

It was the first thing I had written in years. And sharing it with alpha readers and beta readers, and eventually a trusted editor, was really, really hard for me. But guess what? No one flat-out hated it. None of my fears came to pass. As a matter of fact, a lot of people even liked it.

I planted one seed. I watered it. I nurtured it. I let other people tend it, too, because their expertise could help it grow. And like the irises in my back yard, the creativity spread. After years of thinking I’d never have a story idea again, I had another.

I engaged with it. I talked about it. I started rebuilding my support network on Threads and BlueSky, which I hadn’t really been active on since the fall of Twitter. (Musk, I hope your socks are uncomfortably wet inside your shoes and you step on one thousand Legos, barefoot.)

And today, I had another. It’s just a seed or a bulb or a cutting. It’s not a story yet. But I intend to water it and see what grows.

I struggle a lot with what I call inertia—the tendency to keep doing what I’m doing. It makes it hard to go to bed (because I tend to want to stay awake) but hard to get up in the mornings (because I tend to want to stay asleep). It makes changing gears and doing things really difficult. And I let fear stop me from writing, and then that inertia carried me for years. Not writing led to more fear led to more refusal to write. But being brave and taking that first step back in started the ball rolling, and I can feel myself coming awake after years of fear keeping me immobile.

I continue to be scared out of my mind. I know I will still be judged, and still be found lacking, and some people will hate my stories not because they’re bad, necessarily (though some of them inevitably will be—you have to make bad art now to learn how to make better art), but because not every story works for every reader, and that is okay. (But if you do hate it, I am begging you NOT to tag me in the comments. Comment publicly, that’s fine, but do NOT draw my attention to it. Pretty please.)

So. Anyway. That was my big vulnerable post about how things will grow only if you nurture them, and that one positive thing often leads to another.

What am I working on?

Glad you asked.

A lovely friend in my crafting discord posted a jokey screencap about Heated Ravelry, a play on Heated Rivalry, being about fiber artists. And I thought—what do rival fiber artists look like? I added some ingredients that were sure to make this a fun story for me specifically to tell. What if an established yarn shop owner, uptight and grouchy and spreadsheet-and-data obsessed and—of course—biromantic asexual, was forced to work together on a yarn crawl with the charismatic and infuriating owner of the new yarn shop in town, a coffee and yarn bar that runs on vibes and whims.

Meet Wound Up, my current WIP.

If you want to keep tabs on my unhinged posting, I am on Threads at lucymason2177, BlueSky at lucymason217, and Instagram at lucymasonwrites. Thanks for reading and don’t forget to support your local libraries :)