Time Turns Elastic: Writing Book 2 While Life Happened

It's been a while.

I started this blog intending to maintain a regular publishing schedule, stay on top of social media, and do all the things indie authors are supposed to do to build a platform. Having grown corporate blog audiences for Microsoft and AWS, I felt pretty confident that I’d be able to do the same for my own books.

As it turns out, it’s a lot easier to manage a corporate blog with a gaggle of tech expert authors clamoring to get their names published on official corporate web properties than it is to be a one-woman show, while also being a wife, mom, and corporate worker bee.

When you’re creating content for your own projects, life has a tendency to get in the way. Your priorities can shift in unexpected ways. Sometimes, you just don’t feel it, and if you don’t feel it, you can’t force it.

What Happened (The Real Story)

January 2023 began with being laid off from AWS. The rumor mill surrounding that upheaval was that anyone who had relocated beyond the boundaries of being able to return to the office (because that mandate was in the works) was on the chopping block. I had secured approval to move back to New England and keep my job before Covid even hit, but none of that mattered to my corporate overlords. To them, I was just a number who was now living 2 hours away from the closest corporate office.

From then on was a tumultuous series of false starts as I sought to find a new role that didn’t violate the non-compete agreement I had signed upon hire 6 years prior, which extended to 18 months after my departure. In short, I was bouncing through the kind of chaos that makes sitting down to write feel impossible.

But here's what I learned: time is elastic. It stretches and compresses depending on what you're trying to hold. Sometimes, the only way through is to keep writing anyway.

Being Gen X: Suck It Up, Buttercup

Reinventing yourself in your late 40s while also being the primary breadwinner for your family is exhausting on good days, mentally debilitating on bad ones. The bandwidth required just to stay afloat left barely anything for creative work. Writing felt like one more thing I was failing at.

So, I stopped trying. I told myself I'd get back to it when things settled down, but here’s the thing about waiting for optimal writing conditions: They never come.

There's always going to be a demanding job, a financial crisis, a family obligation, something that makes creative work feel like a luxury you can't afford. If you wait for the perfect moment—the cleared schedule, the financial stability, the mental peace—you'll never write another word.

I didn't have some dramatic epiphany. I just got tired of waiting.

In April of 2024, I started stealing time from the faulty plan.

A friend put up a Facebook post seeking a dog sitter while she and her family took a vacation to Europe. Being unemployed and looking for an opportunity to get some writing done, I volunteered. I spent that week doing nothing but playing with her dogs and working on getting Book 2 started.

The dog part was easy. The writing part was a slog.

Writing The Strangest of Places had been effortless. The words just flowed to the point where I couldn’t wait to get another chance to work on it; I didn’t want to lose momentum. Writing the as yet unnamed second book was more difficult. I knew I had more to say about Autumn’s story, but I didn’t want it to be quite as memoir-ish as the first book had been.

Where the ratio of true to fiction in my debut novel was probably about 80:20, I wanted the second book to be more evenly balanced, or perhaps even lopsided on the fiction side. Having to invent characters, plot points, and crises is a lot more challenging than just fictionalizing what actually happened.

After that dog sitting week was up, all I had to show for it was about a chapter and a half.

Though I was proud of having gotten started, I was disappointed with how little I had gotten done, but I was determined to keep at it. This time my problem wasn’t losing momentum, it was establishing it. I stopped thinking of writing as something I'd do when I had time and started treating it like something I made time for.

It was messy. Some days I managed 200 words. Some weeks I wrote nothing, but I kept at it until New Year’s Eve in December of 2024, when I finished Chapter 6 and then everything changed.

You Just Have to Trust the Process

I don’t know what happened, exactly, but it seemed I had reached some kind of critical turning point in the progression of my writer’s block, because once Chapter 6 was done, the flood gates opened and I was right back to feeling that urgency and obsession, where I didn’t want to stop writing because the momentum was back, and I didn’t want to lose it again.

In January of 2025, I typed the last sentence of Book 2, which I now knew would be called A Nightfall of Diamonds, in keeping with the Grateful Dead lyrics reference I had established with the first book.

Much to my surprise, the flood gates were still open. I found myself tossing and turning at night, trying to ignore the pull back to the computer to continue the story with Book 3…but that’s another story that I’ll save for another post.

What Book 2 Is About (Without Spoilers)

A Nightfall of Diamonds picks up where The Strangest of Places left off. Autumn's still navigating the Phish scene, still figuring out who she is, still carrying the weight of everything that shaped her, but now the stakes are higher and the relationships are more complicated.

If Book 1 was about discovering a community and finding your people, Book 2 is about what happens when you realize your people aren't perfect—and neither are you. It's about loyalty and betrayal, about the difference between the family you're born into and the family you choose, about whether love is enough when a discordant note sours the composition.

The chapter playlist has been a work in progress, both as I was writing and even still today, as I’m putting the finishing touches on working with my editor to improve the first draft. If all goes according to plan, it'll be out in early 2026.

How I Actually Made Time to Write

For anyone else trying to write while working full-time, raising kids, managing a household, surviving capitalism—here's what worked for me:

1. I lowered my expectations

I didn't need to write 2,000 words a day. I just needed to write something. Some days that was 50 words. Some days it was a single sentence that unlocked the next scene.

2. I used dead time

Waiting for a meeting to start? Opening paragraph. Lunch break? Dialogue. Can't sleep at 2 a.m.? Chapter revision. I stopped waiting for "writing time" and started grabbing whatever minutes appeared.

3. I gave myself permission to revise.

First drafts are supposed to be messy, but I found that light editing helped me feel accomplished when new words weren't flowing. Sometimes going back to polish a completed chapter was as productive as drafting new scenes.

4. I protected the work

I didn't talk about it much. I didn't post updates, or make promises about when it would be done. I just quietly kept working. For me, less pressure meant more progress.

5. I remembered why I started

On the days when it felt pointless, when I wanted to quit, I went back and read reviews from readers who loved The Strangest of Places. They wanted to know what happened next. That was enough to keep going.

What's Next

I'm deep in revisions now, working with my editor to tighten the manuscript, fix plot holes, make sure every chapter earns its place. The process is slow, but it's happening.

When the book is ready, you'll be the first to know. If you want updates, make sure you're following the blog and/or my social channels.

In the meantime, I'm committed to showing up here more often. Not with filler posts like some of them used to be, but with actual substance—behind-the-scenes writing updates, more posts in the "Autumn's Playlist" series, thoughts on craft, and (of course) the occasional music nerd tangent.

Thanks for sticking around during the quiet years. Time turned elastic, but I'm back.

And Autumn's story isn't finished yet.