I have been asked before: What does it feel like to be a writer?

I’ve always been a bit puzzled about how to answer, not because I didn’t have one, but because I wasn’t sure that my answer would be useful since it felt so specific to me:

It feels very human to be a writer—human as in stripped bare, sometimes joyous and tender, sometimes raw like an exposed nerve. When I am fully writing, it feels like a watered-down world suddenly grows bright, saturated with color.

When I was living in New York with my bestie, the same one who took this picture, she met the man who would eventually become her husband and the father of her child. The relationship was right but grew very quickly intense, as in full of feels. Once, when we were discussing it, I said, “Sometimes, when you’re with the right person, you feel more of everything—more joy, more rage, more EVERYTHING. Your life together is more than your lives would have been separate.”

A year later, that was precisely how I felt about writing when I left New York to make a go of publishing a novel, with nothing more than a little red notebook of ideas that would eventually become the Ever Afters series.

I was twenty-three, and I’d wanted to be a writer for as long as I could remember. I knew I could do the work: I’d completed seven practice manuscripts, and I’d worked inside publishing long enough to recognize that I had a shot. It was a leap, but one long in the making.

I was elated. I was also terrified. I felt everything at once, and most of all, I felt alive.

(This was incidentally where certain lines from OF GIANTS & ICE were born, such as: “...the beginning of your story...won’t be much like you think it’ll be. It’s always more terrifying and more awesome than you can ever imagine.”)

Starting to write a book is always a leap, no matter what the circumstances. It may not feel “good” as in pleasant or serene. It may instead feel “good” as in right and emotionally full.

It is intense, yes, but it is also more than what you would have experienced if you hadn’t taken the leap.

I feel that again now.

Part of it is 2020 itself. Part of it is that I gave up my apartment at the end of last month. I lived there for precisely four and a half years, and I packed up within a week, handing over the keys last Wednesday. By Thursday afternoon, I was two hours away, in the NC mountains. It felt like a completely different world, and I almost felt like a completely different person.

It was intense. I walked alongside fear and doubt like any other human (and still do sometimes).

But like leaving New York to go write the Ever Afters, this change also felt right, like a watered-down world suddenly grew bright, saturated with color. This picture is of me, earlier today, at the top of the mountain, captured by my bestie Angela just as I started writing this message.

Of course, I’m not giving you a perfect example. Not everyone will be able to move right now. Not everyone will be starting a new book.

But there may be some leap waiting for you.

Or maybe you’ve already made the leap, and mid-air, it doesn’t feel like you expected. Not quite as pleasant perhaps—maybe even intense.

That’s okay. It might mean that you’re just making your life more than what it was before.