May 2025: Surprise bluebells & writing breaks
On cycles of work, refilling the well, and gardening. So much gardening...also, there's a wildflower of the month now, because why not?
Hello, and happy May! Everything in Michigan is waking up and turning green; our spring ephemerals have already bloomed and are beginning to fade. (My Virginia bluebells were in full bloom when I started this newsletter, and now they’ve dropped most of their petals!) I have been happily off deadline, poking at my WIP, gardening obsessively, and somehow, my wedding is next month!
Grab a cup of something tasty, find a cozy spot, and let’s catch up.
What’s in this newsletter?
Thoughts on (reluctantly) learning your own writing patterns and
resisting them with stupid mortal futilityaccepting themWriting updates
Publishing updates
Garden update & wildflower of the month (I know)
What I’ve loved lately
Peaks And Valleys – Or, What Do You Mean I Am Not a Creative Content Robot That Sometimes Needs “Rest”, Whatever That Is?
A funny thing about being several books in is that I can identify patterns when they pop up, but I still do my very best to fight them.
This winter, I drafted the sequel to I Killed The King and finished the draft of Milo & The Monstrous Betwixt and revised and queried my adult project (Zelda Book) and changed agents and planned a giant wedding. So casual! So relaxing! So chill!
So did I go into April prepared to rest and let my brain recover?
Of course not! Instead, I fell into the Becca Is A Workaholic Fool cycle.
Here’s what how this cycle typically goes for me:
I am on deadline for a long time, sometimes months, sometimes over a year, and this is fine, but also my family misses me and my office is a mess and I do start to eventually come apart at the seams.
I tell myself (for some stupid reason?) that when I’m off deadline, I’ll just Continue This Pace! Amazing! Wow, I’m so productive!
I get off deadline, the universe laughs at me, I try to immediately leap into a WIP, and spend a good week or two banging my head on the wall and hating everything about the project.
I am eventually drawn into a detour (a hobby, a trip, a new project, etc), spend another week or so doing this hobby/trip/task not fully enjoying it and beating myself up for not writing, before something wonderful happens: I Give Up!
I accept that no work will be done. I commit to art of the Dilly Dally. I am not an author. I am a gardener/baker/soup inventor/professional walker. Books? I’ve never read a book in my life. I don’t even know what words are. But would you like to smell this bee balm I’m transplanting?
I get very obsessive about this distraction and my fiance politely inquires if I’m going to get any writing done or if we need a new financial plan.
I wake up in a cold sweat / fall out of the shower / stumble in the middle of a walk / drop a trowel while gardening / insert being startled out of my mindless task here and blurt “OH THAT’S WHAT THE PLOT NEEDS!” and suddenly writing is fun again.
This has happened so many times in my career I can point to the books that have been born or reshaped by periods of dilly dally. June of 2023 was my famous “melt month” where, after leaving my dayjob to write full time, I did nothing but play Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, and suddenly, I had everything I needed Zelda Book, a story whose puzzle pieces I’ve been kicking around since 2017 but couldn’t find the right picture for.
Or last spring, when staring with wonder and confusion at the green parakeets that have taken up residence in Paris somehow clicked in place a vital, missing piece for Milo & The Monstrous Betwixt. Prior to any of that, sustaining my brain injury and not being able to read or write for months was a weird but effective forced break that made me figure out everything that wasn’t working in The Ones We Burn. (I can’t say I recommend the brain injury though. Just plant a garden instead.)
On and on, the cycle spins: I work too much, I melt, and the melting breathes new life into the work. Which is all to say, after the winter I had, I promptly collapsed and spent a lot of April outside.
To say I’ve been gardening a lot is an understatement. I think this may be the first time I went into May with birkenstock tan lines. I didn’t even know I could get tan lines during a Michigan April! I’ve been converting all of our garden beds to native gardens, which requires me to continue removing all the invasive species that have taken up residence. I’m also going for my Master Rain Gardener certification while I put a rain garden in our backyard (Becca be so for real what are you doing) and I’ve read, researched, and thought so much about plants I had a genuine dream about spice bushes the other day.
And wouldn’t you know it? After letting myself fall into this fully for like, two weeks, one day, when I was methodically removing probably the 1000th bulb of invasive star of bethelhem from our garden beds, the major change needed for my adult book popped into my head out of nowhere. And when I kept gardening instead of running inside (I was covered in too much dirt to get on the computer) and I found myself admiring that the scent of bee balm is so strong it wafts off the roots when you transplanted it, the last, giant piece I needed for the main character snapped into place.
This certainly isn’t unique to me. Many an author will tell you about having their “oh, duh!” moment while in the shower, on a walk, knitting, gardening, working out or doing some other mindless, pleasant task. I think there’s something to be said for letting your brain rest and your subconscious spin in the background. Many of the best things in my books have arrived not from me staring stubbornly at a screen when I’m burned out and tired, but from a balanced practice of writing regularly and also giving my brain time to rest.
And yet I fight it every time! Because when things fall out of balance, it’s harder to swing from the extreme of Intense Deadline Writing All Day Every Day to not writing at all. I’m getting better about recognizing it, and working with it – but so far, working on what could hopefully be Book 10, I still put up my foolish, mortal fight until inevitably, I go play in the dirt and my tired brain rewards me for it.
Writing Updates
Look at how short this section is! A miracle! A first! Buy the lottery ticket while still can, folks!
All of April and May were dedicated to slowly working on Zelda book. After working on contracted for work so long, it’s both frightening and thrilling to have a WIP that’s completely mine. I get to move a little slower, be a little more particular, and actually have time to think. I’ve been doing a lot of playing in the dirt lately and unsurprisingly, my work has benefited from and been shaped by this this. I am deep in revision and I love it. I’m hopeful that someday, I’ll have a chance to share more on this one!
Publishing Updates
I’ve got a book out in four months, which doesn’t feel quite real! In September, I Killed The King will publish, my co-written Knives Out Fantasy! I also got ARCs recently — they’re beautiful!! — so stay tuned for a giveaway. I only received a handful, but I’m hopeful to give away at least one copy via this newsletter and one on social media.
King is currently available for preorder! It’s also up on Netgalley and Edelweiss, for those of you that love an ARC, but do know that we’ve made some tiny changes and fixed some typos between the ARC and the final! You can preorder King wherever books are sold, but if you want a signed copy, Sidetrack is the place to go!
What’s Growing On?
And here’s where we go off the track, and I fully embrace my latest Special Interest. While we’re in the season of things blooming and growing, I’m going to share garden updates, because it’s my disorganized and infrequently-sent author newsletter whose format is constantly changing, dang it!
So…I’ve planted a lot of the things this month. I started making a list and it got too long, because I’ve put in 46 different species of native plants over these last few months and counting! Here are some highlights. :)
Bonus: the giant patch of invasive orange daylilies I murdered.
It’s such a joy to see my garden slowly come together, and I can’t wait to see what it will look like in a few years once the plants have filled in. Some of these plants I got from fellow gardeners; a few I started from seed, so they’re much smaller. Many I’ve acquired as plugs or as established clumps someone has split for a local garden club sale. I kind of love the idea that many of plants in my garden originated from someone else, whether it’s my new spicebushes that were rescued by a garden club from a construction site, the bee balm from my neighbor, or the purple coneflowers from my friend Melissa.
Which brings me to…
Wildflower of the Month
For my very first Wildflower of the Month pick, I have to go with my favorite surprise from this spring: Virginia Bluebells (Mertensia virginica), which appeared out of nowhere in my shade garden!
Not to be confused with Spanish bluebells or English bluebells, both of which are invasive here in Michigan, Virginia Bluebells are a spring ephemeral that act as one of the first early food sources for bumblebee queens emerging from hibernation — and they were a total surprise in my garden this year!
The place they’re growing was totally dominated by invasive lily of the valley last spring, which I spent the entire spring (and summer…and fall…) clearing. It honestly feels a little bit like a miracle a threatened, gorgeous native spring flower popping up out of nowhere.
Virginia bluebells are native to much of the northeastern US and Canada, although they’re notably rarer in Michigan and Canada, and are actually considered a threatened species in Michigan, which I means will be protecting these flowers with my life!
What I’ve Loved Lately
Reading: Unsurprisingly, most of my reading has been about gardening. In the last month, I read and loved Nature’s Best Hope by Doug Tallamy, Bringing Nature Home by Doug Tallamy, The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan, and No Waste Organic Gardening by Shawna Coronado, Deathless by Catherynne Valente, and Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins. (Unsurprisingly, I read Sunrise in like, a day. Suzanne remains a master of her craft. No notes.)
If anyone is even a tiny bit curious about native gardening or why our ecosystems are in the state they are, I highly, highly recommend Nature’s Best Hope! It’s incredible, very accessible, and both the physical book and audio version are lovely. (Also, if anyone has book recommendations for my current and intense native plant kick, I will gladly take them!)
Watching: I’ve been outside so much that I haven’t spent a lot of time in front of a screen, but I saw Sinners recently and adored it. I also finally saw the 2005 Pride & Prejudice and understood, immediately, why everyone loves it so much!That’s it for this month! This newsletter came a little late, but I’m hoping to resume the early-month mailings, as feasible. June is going to be a very busy month for me, but it’s one of those good-stress months.
That’s it for this month! You can expect a much shorter update in June, since May is already halfway over. This next month and a half is going to be a bit of whirlwind for me, but I keep reminding myself it’s all good stress.
Whether you’ve got a busy June coming up or long days of restful nothing, I hope you take a chance to get outside, breathe some fresh air, and dig in the dirt. Don’t forget to say hello to the bees!
Until next month,
Becca