Still here. Still Writing. (Just Barely)

Hey Everyone,

I owe you all an explanation for my long silence, and I’m not going to dress it up with pretty words. The truth is that since my last post in December, I’ve had a third death in my immediate family. Three losses in under a year. Three times sitting with the impossible weight of it, the admin, the grief, and the particular cruelty of having to function when your whole world keeps reshuffling itself into a shape you don’t recognize. Two of those deaths were my parents, who were also my best friends, and I’m still shell shocked.

It has been, to put it plainly, harrowing.

I want you to know, despite all that, I have been writing. In the gaps between everything — in doctors’ waiting rooms, in the small hours when I’ve been up because of insomnia and anxiety, in the brief windows where my brain agreed to cooperate — I’ve been scribbling. There are bits of a long essay-style blog about meeting ghosts in Prague (yes, really. It deserves its own post because it was wild). There are pages of Gio’s story. There are chunks of a novella about Alexis as a Turkish Corsair (and how Magicians ties in with Order of Anubis) that I’m genuinely very excited about, and there are notes and scenes for the next two books in ‘The Order of Anubis.’

None of it is finished. None of it is ready to share yet. And I’ve had to make peace with that.

Grief and emotional burnout are not productivity killers you can simply push through with enough coffee and stubbornness. Believe me, I have tried. The exhaustion is bone-deep. The brain fog has been so thick some days that I’ll lose a word mid-sentence, or read the same paragraph four times and retain absolutely nothing. For my AuDHD brain, which already runs on a slightly chaotic operating system at the best of times, this past year has been genuinely destabilizing. All my systems and routines have gone to absolute shit and I’m having to build new ones again.

Instead of forcing words that weren’t ready to come, I’ve been doing what I always do when I can’t write forward — I learn sideways. I’ve been picking up new tools and skills to help me manage the fog and keep my hands busy when my brain won’t play nice. I’ve also been getting deeper into cover design, which has been equal parts humbling and incredibly satisfying. And I’ve been reading (proper, delicious, obsessive research reading) about chaos magic, the history of kitchen witchery, and the Knights of Malta, which means stories are absolutely brewing somewhere in the ether sludge, whether I invited it or not.

Now, for the other thing I need to tell you: I’m leaving Instagram.

I’ve been wrestling with this decision for a while, but my mental health simply cannot carry it anymore. It’s become a place that costs more than it gives — too noisy, too negative, too much performance for too little genuine connection. I’ve never really liked social media (though I did try with Insta), and I’m not interested in the dance for the algorithms and the pay-us-money-to-show-your-posts-to-your-own-followers game right now. I’m in survival mode, and Instagram doesn’t make surviving easier. It just makes me more tired.

What I am interested in is this blog. The longer conversations. The space to actually say something rather than caption something in the hope someone might see it. I used to ghostwrite blogs back in the heady days of 2013, and I miss it. I also plan on serializing my Alexis novella here once it’s in good shape.

If you want to keep up with what I’m doing, this is where you’ll find me. If you really just want an email when I release something, follow me over on Amazon.

I’m really committed to finishing the things that are already half-alive: the projects in piles of notes, the stories that have been waiting for me to come back to them.

They’ve been very patient. I intend to reward that and will hopefully have some novels completed and ready for you in the second half of the year.

Thank you, as always, for being here. For reading. For not needing me to be okay when I’m not.

Ames x