"Where Are You? And I'm So Sorry."
May 23, 2026
Since becoming an agented author (YAY!) I have not been around as much. But, to be fair, I wasn't the most active author out there, easily a year before either. But, for those following me, especially fellow indie authors wondering if getting an agent is all it's cracked up to be, I wanted to take a moment to give y'all an update. It's not necessarily an update worth sharing, but I'd like to provide a bit more context on my current whereabouts to the (maybe three) people who've been wondering.
First for the Bookish Update:
Yes! I currently have a book on submission. It's a marriage in crisis literary fiction novel that, while the feedback from publishers has been very positive with comments like "the writing was solid," "it's clear that Shawn has a solid writing talent," and "I can see the careful work and creativity that has gone into this material," this manuscript still hasn't found its forever home. And you know what, that's okay. This story is quietly romantic, thoughtful, and intentionally designed for readers hoping to find a relatable and uplifting story they can sink their teeth into. A story and characters that they can see their own reflections in. I understand that a lot of the time, fiction is designed to feel like an escape. Romance, especially the spicy kind, is huge right now, and that's hard to compete with. BUT I know that in time this story will find the right fit.
The thing about traditional publishing is you have to be patient. Like, really patient. As someone who used to self-publish whenever she finished a book, reveling in the instant gratification of seeing a book come to life, it can be hard to wrap my buzzing brain around that. Luckily, this time around, I've had way more patience than in my previous attempts at traditional publication, and I understand and respect the process.
In my time of waiting, I've written a new manuscript. It's a story I'm really excited about. It's a rewrite of my first ever (never published) novel. A story about what it really means to see and be seen in a world fixated on the surface level. It's my absolute favorite story so far, and I think it's likely to be a favorite among my readers. I am working on edits and hope to submit this manuscript by the fall.
I even have my next story idea lined up. It's a crime thriller, which is something I've never written before, and it's taken a lot of planning and mapping out, and will likely require the most intention to really land the story. This is a story that has been in the works for years. I was too intimidated to start until recently. With edits still in full swing for my current manuscript, however, I'm only a prologue into this one with pages and pages of notes.
And Now For the Life Update:
I've said before on my Instagram page that I'm currently in school for my bachelor's in Psychology. Are you even a writer if you're not fascinated with how the mind works?! Anyway...I am set to complete my final course towards my bachelor's in February, graduating in May of 2027. From there, my plan is to enroll in a Master's program for Education, specifically English. Yes... after a wild ride of trying not to fight God's plan for my life, I've come to realize that this is where my journey has been taking me all along.
I have been working part-time as a substitute teacher at the local high school and applied to, and was hired for, an instructional assistant position for the fall. All in preparation to become a high school English teacher (hopefully!) the following year. Needless to say, my time has been divided quite a bit between working, motherhood, college courses, and writing (in the spare time I manage to find). So, yes, I'm still writing. No, I have no plans to STOP writing. But, things are moving more slowly these days, and I haven't been able to post on social media much because I don't have many real updates to share, nor do I have "book news" fresh enough for the presses. I imagine when things start moving, it will feel like a tornado of action and energy, but I'm excited for the whirlwind when it comes. In the meantime, I'm quite enjoying the calm before the storm.
Final Thoughts:
I feel very blessed in this life to be a creative. It's fun and exciting to create characters and take them on journeys of self-discovery, love, and perseverance. I love that I can share those stories with other people who need to hear the words I was so compelled to write. It's not always easy waiting in that space between. Balancing my creative work and what I've been called to do hasn't been easy either. But I'm learning and growing in ways I wouldn't have otherwise. I'm grateful for the opportunity to grow in this way and to share that growth with you.
What This Year Taught Me As a Writer
December 1, 2025
This year, above all else, I’ve come to realize that I used to have rather narrow goals for myself. As a teenager, I was quite pessimistic. I believed that planning for the worst would prevent disappointment and setting low expectations would prevent the feeling of failure. I thought this was a wise approach to life. However, after realizing that wasn’t the case, I believed I had expanded my potential. For a long time, my dream has been to make authorship a more official part of my story. This year, I was fortunate enough to take the first significant step towards making that a reality by signing with a literary agent. What I hadn’t considered is that I had so much more to offer the world. I had more to learn. I had more to strive for.
This year, in addition to seriously perusing traditional representation as an author, I began taking college courses again in pursuit of a Bachelor’s degree in Psychology.
What Now?
November 13, 2025
The question I’ve been asked the most since getting agent representation and going on submission with publishers has been, “What now?!” Well, the short answer is, “Now I wait.”
The literary industry is BUSY. It’s a living breathing thing. Agents and publishers alike wake up every day to dozens of new emails in their inbox. More inquiries, more submissions, follow-ups, full manuscripts. Piles and piles of material to read through and consider. The best thing I can do right now is to sit tight and practice what I’ve been learning how to hone since starting this traditional publication journey, patience. And the thing is, knowing I’ve got someone in my corner to represent me definitely makes that wait a whole heck of a lot easier! Now I have someone who believes in my story telling ability and in my current manuscript who ALSO knows the industry and how best to market this novel to publishers.
Just as agents are all looking to be moved, inspired, and wowed by a manuscript that fell into their lap at just the right time and written in a way that speaks to them, editors at publishing houses are looking for the same. The first batch of editors my agent has submitted to may be looking for something different to represent, and that’s okay. The next batch may have better luck. Some people respond right away to let the agent know they’ve received the submission, a far greater number only reply when they have the chance to read the submission in full. Typically you can expect to hear back from editors in 6-8 weeks. So many individual and unique circumstances come into play when considering the submission timeline and that’s not even factoring in the holiday season. We are going into a very slow season for the industry, for the world even. I for one am having to shift my focus to plan for things like family visits, holidays, and my kids school vacation schedules. It goes without saying the same is true for publishing houses and editors.
So, what am I doing in the meantimes? Well, while I love writing and certainly intend to start drafting my next outlined novel soon, I’m mostly focused on my family, my school schedule, substitute teaching, and just, well, life! Authorship sort of falls into the same category of “hurry up and wait” that the military life does. Luckily for me, I’m well versed in that way of life and I’m happy to hang in there while I await feedback.
Something worth mentioning, and I’m not sure if this is the standard for lit agencies, but my agent has created a spreadsheet for my submissions that she’s shared with me so that I can check in on where things are at. She does this with all her authors and it’s honestly the absolute best. I don’t have to bug her to stay informed. This definitely helps ease my mind and help me to not feel in the dark while I wait.
Anyway, I expect to start drafting my next manuscript in the new year, but for now I’m just hanging out and enjoying where I’m at. It took so long to get here, I really just want to revel in it a bit while I await feedback. Fingers crossed this manuscript sparks interest with publishers. It’s one I believe the world would absolutely benefit from reading.
What I’m Currently Working on and Why It Matters
October 29, 2025
I can’t speak too much on my current manuscript just yet, as it’s on submission with publisher right now, but I wanted to take a minute to tease what I can because this story is deeply rooted in truth. Not just my truth, but the truth of marriage. The truth of motherhood. The truth of love in the trenches of those truths. I sought out a lot of insight from fellow mom friends before beginning this project to determine what were the most important elements to include in this story. The goal was for it to feel relatable to as many spouses and parents as possible. And I believe I’ve accomplished that.
Here are a few of my main reasons for why I decided to write this story and why I believe it matters.
The World’s Unrealistic Standards for Mothers:
Real talk, it is actually NOT possible to have it all or do it all: in general, but especially as a mother. To become a parent, and more specifically, a mother, you are choosing to make very specific sacrifices and I truly believe these things need to be talked about because they’re true whether we acknowledge them or not. And, to be clear, sacrifices aren’t a BAD thing, but they’re hard. It’s HARD to put certain goals or dreams on hold while you focus on raising your kids. It’s HARD to learn to love your body again after kids, especially if you weren’t the best at loving it before. It’s HARD to find the energy for ourselves and our marriages when we’ve got little ones running around.
All of this is only made harder by the fact that our society seems to HIGHLY under value the role of mothers. This goes for all moms, by the way. Working, stay-at-home, single, small business owning. All mothers have a very unique value in their home and unique challenges on top of that depending on their own personal situation.
I was eager to create a story that acted as a reminder that being a mom is hard enough. Being the soft place your family lands is a full-time job. And, while not all mothers have the ability or desire to make it their ONLY full-time job, that doesn’t minimize how big and important the job is across the board.
In short, this story is a love letter to mothers.
I Wanted to Romanticize Marriage Because, Guess What, It IS Romantic:
In most love stories marriage only ever makes it to the epilogue. If you’re lucky the story is told as flashbacks from an aging couple’s fond memories of how their love story began. But in general, you’re usually watching the main characters meet and fall in love for the first time or all over again after being reunited. Rarey if ever are you reading about an established married couple. Not as a love story anyway. Unfortunately, I worry this “keep the marriage in the epilogue” trend can end up sending a very harmful—though unintentional—message that married love isn’t interesting enough to make it past the epilogue . But that’s just not true.
This book is my “marriage after the epilogue” story. It’s about an aged, familiar, and in need of repair kind of love, that—despite all of those things—isn’t even close to being hopeless.
What I Craved More of in Fiction:
I’ve always said, I write what I want to read and that continues to be true with this project. Put simply, there’s just not enough marriage in-crisis stories out there. Or, at least, I’ve struggled to find them. Sure, there are novels about failing marriages or finding love after divorce. There are books about infidelity and self-discovery. There are even novels that I’ve read and loved about marriage in crisis. But what I haven’t found yet—and am always open to book recs of—is marriage in-crisis with young children. Mothers and wives who love and value those roles, but have somehow lost themselves within them.
I wanted to tell a really authentic story that felt familiar, like talking to a close friend and finding hope in those relatable struggles we all face from time to time within marriage and family.
An Escape That Feels Like Self-Discovery:
I’ve read so many books about a character who travels somewhere beautiful and exotic and finds herself along the way. “P.S. I Love You” “Under the Tuscan Sun,” and “Eat, Pray, Love” come to mind. Upon turning the final page, however, I always found myself yearning for a similar feeling. I wanted to have such an experience. I wanted to find myself. But by the time I read any of these books I was married already and had “missed my window” to escape to some far off place to learn who I was on some Italian or Irish countryside. And that’s not a bad thing, but it left me thinking, what kind of book can mothers and wives read that will leave them feeling excited about a tangible opportunity to discover themselves as well as their marriage again?
That was the aim of this story. While the characters are fictional, their struggles are ordinary enough to be relatable to most and for good reason. I wanted readers to feel inspired to take the lessons they read about in this novel and apply them to their own marriages and motherhood. Additionally, the “escape” in this story is, dare I say, attainable. While the story, characters, and locations are all specific, I wanted to leave plenty of room for readers to design their own interpretation of the story so that they can easily apply what they read to their own life.
Whenever I write a new book, I always try to picture what its role in my collection of stories will be. Some are meant to heal or inspire. All of them are meant to touch my readers deeply. I think if this story had a job, it would be to turn readers’s eyes onto their own life and marriage or what their view of marriage is and see hope where maybe it had faded away and excitement where boredom threatens to unravel the beauty that’s been there all along.
My Rocky Road to Authorship
October 28, 2025
So often you hear about the “natural writers” within the community. The “literary athletes” who have been writing since they could hold a pen. You hear about the raw talent and the avid readers who eventually, and inevitably, took to writing. But my story starts out in stark contrast to those of my peers who were “born to write.”
I was the kid who struggled to read and at times, even to speak. As a twin, I had my own language for the first five years of my life. If my sister could understand me, I didn’t care who else could. (In many ways, that’s still true.) I needed help with speech and I struggled academically. I was an average student who only got A’s in gym and art class. I was lucky to get a B in English and got C’s in most everything else.
It wasn’t until I got to college (Community College, mind you) that I started doing well in school. While I had a brief unit in middle school of creative writing that sparked unexpected interest in story-telling, it was fleeting. But in college I found a confidence in my writing abilities as I got one A paper in English after another. I’m honestly not sure where the shift happened and no one was more surprised than I was that I was getting passing grades on research papers, let alone A’s. I’m certain my writing was still weak, but I started to trust the rhythm that was my ability to weave words together.
When I started reading for fun—for the first time in my life—the urge to write my own stories followed quickly thereafter. It was a desire and a calling that felt awakened. It was during that time that I wrote my first full-length novel. My twin sister also took that time to explore novel writing and it was in this time that the origin story of my novel “Broken” was born of her hand.
A short time later in January of 2009, I got married to my high school sweetheart and hopped a plane to Germany to live with him. It was then, during my husband’s year-long deployment and my time living abroad, that my first official chapter of authorship began.
It goes without saying, with such poor grades throughout my formative years, that my ability to master the English language was still ROUGH at times. It wasn’t uncommon for me to combine tenses in a single paragraph, failing to see or fully grasp the difference between past and present tense narratives. Grammar was an even bigger challenge and my poor spelling ability reared its ugly head regularly. With those first few novels the stories were there, the intention but not necessarily the execution. They were unpolished fever dreams of good intentions and sub-par writing for a long time.
Back then, self-publishing was not viewed as a worthy route and was often criticized and looked down upon in the literary community. I didn’t have the resources or finances to get a manuscript edited and I BARELY knew what I was doing. So, I wrote anyway. From 2010 to 2013, I wrote and self-published 5 novels. While I’ve since unpublished these novels, it’s not due to shame, merely a desire to separate the seasons of my authorship.
I view those first five novels as my self-education in authorship and I cherish them all deeply. In fact, my latest novel “Healing in the Heartland” is a re-write of one of my earlier novels, “The Wanderer” and I’m open to doing more re-writes in the future. That’s the thing about writing I love so much. Once you create characters, they become real and everlasting. Once you breathe them into existence with your words, they can’t be unwritten even when a book is no longer in circulation.
All this to say, you may not be a “natural,” but that doesn’t mean you’re less deserving or capable of writing the stories written on your heart. The key is being willing to suck a little. Be willing to be bad at it. Get excited about tripping your way down the literary path and learning the hard way what to avoid, finding the way through the weeds if by chance or destiny, and not because the path was clear and plainly set out before you. Be willing to get lost and fall down as you test your wobbly legs and build muscles you never knew you had. Be willing to earn it, to fight for it.
You are no less deserving than the over-night sensations. You are no less deserving than the viral authors or the protégés within the industry. Your story has value and no one can tell it but you. So, be authentic, be honest, be brave in bringing your characters to life. Someone out there needs your stories.