Why I'm slowing the f*ck down

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The question I get asked most often at events or chatting with others is: How do you manage it all? How do you write books so quickly and work a full-time job?

This question, always, gives me a sharp surge of discomfort—it brings out anxiety and shame and my acute imposter syndrome because I don’t manage any of it well, I’m a mess clawing my way through each day. So, in answer, I do what I do best, I run from my initial emotions and answer with a joke, looking the asker dead in the eyes and saying: Because I’m very mentally ill.

But the thing is, while it’s delivered as a joke, the answer is my bare-bones truth. I don’t like getting asked this question because it makes me reflect on how, as an author that has built a backlist of books with the message of self-care and honoring one’s needs when it comes to mental health, I am the last to follow my (and my characters’) advice.

I have busted my ass the past few years. September 6, 2023 will mark four book releases in one year. I’ve also had the immense privilege of traveling for events for those releases, while also working full-time and drafting other books on contract and being a jackass on social media in attempts at self-promotion. I sincerely hope this isn’t coming off as either a brag as a woe-is-me statement. It simply is. All of this was of my own creation. I have a publishing team that was ready to support a more accelerated release schedule because it’s what I wanted. Being anxious and ADHD and autistic, I have an extremely strong instant-gratification impulse. I wanted to write all the books and do all the events and master tiktok and instagram and blah blah blah. I sacrificed my nights and lunches and weekends and sleep and quality time with my fiancé and visits home to see my parents and taking a damn minute to enjoy this wonderful, tremendous thing I’d worked so long and hard to accomplish. I convinced myself that if I stopped hustling at a brutal pace, I’d lose everything I’d worked toward.

I rarely gave myself a moment to stop and rest, to look at this dream of being a published author that I had met. If I slowed down, I’d lose all momentum. I’d lose my creativity and my ability to finish writing a story and if I said no to an opportunity I’d never be asked again and if I didn’t come up with innovative and new ideas for content and build connections I’d immediately sink into irrelevance—do I even have relevance? oh god how do i become relevant? i need to learn all the algorithms and all the secrets and…

You get the idea.

And then, about a month before Tilly in Technicolor’s release, I had a cute little mental breakdown. I was stressed with work and panicking about my book coming out and trying to revise a story I knew in my gut wasn’t working but if I could just make the words behave I’d be able to mark it off my to-do list. Forget savoring a story and falling in love my characters and being excited for a book to reach readers. I was in full sprint mode to cross these huge, wonderful things, off my list. It affected my relationships too. I was depressed and combative and pushing away the people I love most by treating them like shit. I was in the parking lot of the pickle ball courts (new band name, I call it) mid-July sobbing because I had fried my brain by running it on empty for so long.

So, I did the only reasonable and rational thing an author can do: sent an unhinged email to my agent saying I’m a failure and I can’t keep up and the only solution is to stop writing forever and cancel my future contracts because there’s no way I can survive another year of this let alone another day.

My agent, God bless her, calmly and compassionately called me and offered me what is perhaps the best gift anyone has ever given me: the grace of time to rest.

We had a very long call, most of it her listening to my sniveling and sobbing, but we also talked about life and how hard it is and how painful it can be to create something as deeply personal as art and then have to turn around and sell it to others as a product. We talked about what rest actually looks like, and how I have a tendency to disguise work by slapping the term hobby on it. We talked about frustrations and fears and what my life might look like if I allowed myself time to actually recharge.

When the call was all said and done, I felt the most tremendous relief of my life.

My editor, similarly, offered me tremendous grace to slow the fuck down. I still had this fear that I would never write again. That I couldn’t fix my work in progress. That I was a failure for needing more time. My fingers itched to grab at the messy doc, to force my brain and my characters to do… honestly, anything, as long as it meant finishing the damn thing. But, for the most part, I resisted.

I realized how drastically my relationship to my writing has shifted since publishing. My debut, A Brush with Love, was the first thing I’ve ever done simply for the joy it brought me. My second book, Lizzie Blake, was a similar endeavor, a follow-up I wrote before having an agent or a book deal. Writing both of these stories made me happy and excited. I was indulgent with the plot and my time with the characters. I never thought anyone would read them and I was fine with that. They were for me and that was enough.

But getting published changes the dynamic between you and that Google Doc holding the landscape of a work in progress. When you know you’ll actually have people reading your book, your worst faith reviewer sits on your shoulder, judging every word you scrounge up the courage to write, draining your faith in your ability to actually write a book. Similarly, working on a project while a completed one starts circulating and you see reviews whether you want to or not, freezes you up, makes you question everything.

Is this new story too similar? To different? People liked xyz and my new book has abc… will they hate that? Oh god, people really don’t like this or that, does WIP have this or that? Does it work here? Am I destined to create the most hated sentences packaged as a book ever?

Whether the reviews you inevitably see are good or bad, they skew your relationship to a story that was once yours. Books stop belonging to the author when they're published, and it can be really hard to let the characters go, to know they aren’t a safe haven of pure creation that you have the ability to play with and tweak. I started to build up a shell around myself while I engaged with my writing. That saying goodbye, that giving them to the world and losing them as mine, is painful, and I tend to avoid pain. By the time I was working on what will be my sixth published book (the one I was revising at the center of my menty-b) I had started rushing my writing, holding myself back from the emotional investment of my characters to try and avoid that hurt of eventually letting them go, the sharp ache of knowing that, because readers are beautifully, wonderfully unique and art is subjective, this book my messy, complicated, sometimes selfish characters wouldn’t be liked by all, that I couldn’t protect them (and, by extension, myself) from judgement. If I avoided attaching my own feelings to it, that inevitable and natural course of publishing a book couldn’t hurt me, right?

Maybe. But that emotionless approach also led to burnout and depression and an inability to tell a story and this deep frustration that I couldn’t actually do this career that I wanted so badly that, just a few years ago, my bones ached with it.

But faced with this burnout and the crumbling of my ability to get any words on paper, I accepted the time offered to me by my agent and editor, and set that work in progress down.

I let it rest. I let it breathe. I focused on celebrating my book (tilly) that was coming out and the joy of creating a story of neurodivergent teens finding joy and love and fulfillment. And, in that rest and in that joy, I also started reading again. I read novellas and rom-coms and angsty romances. And, wouldn’t you know, in all of that time to recharge, to let my brain settle and enjoy instead of focusing on the labor of creating, new ideas started to flow through me. I had an epiphany for my work in progress that I jotted down and left to revisit and incorporate once I was sure I was ready. I felt emotions I’d been pushing away when I didn’t have time for them in my rush to get things done, I remembered the beauty of writing about love and what a tremendous privilege it is to have this as a career.

I fucking savored these new moments of quiet I was granting myself. And that changed everything.

I’m learning to embrace intentional slowness. It makes me uncomfortable most of the time, like I’m never doing enough, not earning my keep or my right to a spot at the table. But as the unadorned thrill of feeling things while I write—taking my time to daydream and learn my characters and their hurts and their wounds and their beauty and courage, being filled with the incomparable satisfaction of playing with words—becomes stronger and stronger, I’m remembering the wonder in taking time to create, to letting down my guard and loving something I create fully and freely. Because, when it’s all said and done, we have to write the books we want to read first and foremost. How can we expect others to connect with our work if we don’t connect with it first?

I won’t be publishing books as quickly as I have been. There will be breaks and lulls and I have to learn to find peace amidst my compulsion to work harder/faster/better. Life is long and I’m going to do my best not to rush the things that fulfill me.

There is no timeline we have to complete a piece of work. Some will be as fast as weeks and others years. Any amount of time is valid, as long as it doesn’t come at the sacrifice of the joy of doing it. If you’re like me, and need someone to grant you permission to rest, please consider this that directive! You’re allowed to rest that beautiful brain as long as you need.

All my love,

Mazey