Happy July everyone! I can’t believe the year is already halfway over. And happy 250th to all my fellow Americans reading this 🇺🇸 🥳🦅

I wanted to pop in and give another update on what I’m up to, specifically about my writing (side note: my editing has been going well! Sign up for my newsletter if you want monthly updates about that).

Obviously I haven’t been publishing blog posts very often lately, and those of you on my newsletter know that I haven’t worked on my YA novel in a while. I’d hoped to work on more fiction over the summer, but with starting a publishing internship and also just feeling really tired of the IDEA of writing right now, I decided to formally take a break from both fiction and nonfiction writing.

It’s not that I’m rethinking everything I’ve built the past couple years; I still hope to publish books someday and I still love to write, but during the past year or so when I’ve been posting less on my blog and working on short fiction rather than my novel, it’s been really easy for me to feel like I’m falling behind or that I’m less of a writer because I’m not going as fast or putting out as much as some of my writer friends. Telling myself (and you guys) that I’m taking a break from writing in general will hopefully help me take some of that pressure off of myself.

I want to spend this summer learning more about publishing, growing my editing business, spending time with friends, and just reading books to enjoy reading books, not to read in my genre or look up agents or study authors’ writing voice. I’ve learned so much through The Honors Academy and The Young Writer’s Workshop, but it really feels like there’s tornadoes of information and expectations swirling around my head at any given time, and I’d like some time to quiet that noise (and to stop pressuring myself to be headed for publication already).

Like I always say, I’m not completely swearing off posting 😂 if I have a rare day when I can type up a whole post that I like, you’ll get a random notification in your email that I posted on whatever topic I wrote about! I have multiple posts sitting in my drafts right now, so maybe those will end up posted sometime soon. But this is just me telling you not to expect weekly or monthly posts (which is honestly kind of redundant because it’s been like that for months now lol).