As a writer, I know how narrative is supposed to work. It’s hard not to wish for a simple narrative structure when it comes to my writing career.

The inciting incident: Finishing that novel in the fall of 2024.

The gathering tension: Revising, revising, and revising some more. Sending out those first newborn queries.

But then … is there a climax coming? The triumph of a yes?

Don’t I have enough content now to roll up into a montage of “working toward getting representation?”

If you’ve made it this far in life without realizing that life never unfolds in a convenient and predictable narrative, you’ve probably been reading the wrong kinds of books.

I started writing “Dreams We Had,” a novel about sisterhood, forgiveness and what we owe to each other, in 2024, shortly after moving to an apartment on an old farm road in rural New Hampshire.

I spent many early morning and late nights at the kitchen table that was my parents’ in their first apartment and my grandparents’ in theirs, writing by the gold light of a single bulb.

By Christmastime I had started revising, editing and rearranging. That’s gone on for the past year. I continue to make changes (improvements, I hope!) even as I write and rewrite query letters and send them out into the world with a prayer for good luck.

Last summer, I had a manuscript that I was happy with and started querying it seriously. While that was taking up a lot of time and effort, it didn’t feel like writing.

So as often happens in the wake of a long-term prose project, I found myself drawn back to poetry.

I did some new writing, but for the most part I turned my attention to the poems I had written in and around working on the novel for that first year I was in New Hampshire.

Those poems have an internal synchrony that I worked to accentuate and harness to put together a cohesive chapbook of about 12-30 poems. When I felt it was ready, I submitted that project to a few different contests and publications.

It hasn’t found a good fit yet, but I hope it will. For some reason it feels less urgent than the prose, maybe because for me poetry has always been a little bit more for myself.

By the fall, I was ready to jump back into the world of prose again, and I had an image I hadn’t been able to get out of my head that was demanding to be written down.

My process with “Dreams We Had” was slow and methodical. Before I wrote the first words of the first draft, I had pages and pages of information about the characters, the plot, the voice and the themes.

The manuscript I started in the fall came differently. It started with Rachmaninoff’s Variations on a Theme by Paganini, a picture of a concert master in the moment before the nod that starts the music, and my battered copy of A Seperate Peace.

Those three things lived in my head so long before I started writing that when I finally it was all just there.

Elements of the story came to me on walks with the dog, in the shower, at work, at the grocery story, and I hurried to get them down.

It’s the first thing I’ve ever written start to finish, without any circling back or jumping around. Initially, I wrote the wrong ending.

I gave the two protagonists a kind, gentle conclusion that answered the central question of the novel and told the reader exactly how things turned out for everyone.

I knew it was wrong. And more than that, it was a betrayal of the rest of the novel. If the rest of it was going to matter and be taken seriously, it couldn’t end like that.

So I rewrote it, with an ending as painful and inconclusive as the first had been gentle and tidy.

Such is the way of the world that this version is more honest and more true.

That brings me to now. I’m a few months into revising that second manuscript and have sent out a few select queries about it.

It often feels that I’ve accomplished nothing in the past year, because I haven’t hit the milestone I was hoping for: representation by an agent.

But as I look back, I see and am grateful for the work that I put into both manuscripts, the poetry chapbook, and the other one-off projects I’ve found time for.

The writing life is not a sprint.

I’m especially grateful for the generous publications that were home to my work over the past 18 months, including The Northwest Review and Poetry Society of NH’s Touchstone in the fall of 2024, The Heartland Review and Greensboro Review in the spring of 2025, and Trace Fossils Review in fall 2025.

Each of those was a reminder of the purpose of the writing life: the strengthening of souls by the sharing of words.