A year ago today, I lost my original cover designer for The Purification Era.
This ignited a perfect storm of overwhelmingly stressful delays. Between hiring a cover designer who came highly recommended but ended up being a horrible fit, to edits that were far more extensive and draining than I had anticipated (basically stalling me in chapter 2/48), to a terrifying midnight trip to the ER, to my formatter needing the manuscript way sooner than I’d expected or could manage, to a culmination of realizing this series is not and really has never been YA…
I planned so many things. I adapted my plans many times — repeatedly “recalculated,” to steal a Razing term from the adorable Masrekah. ;) I fought through increasing stress and doubt and frustration and underlying panic and so much uncertainty — and kept a positive outlook, just kept pushing forward…
It wasn’t enough to get Razing out last year.
It also wasn’t enough to get Razing out this year.
Part of my brain still wants to view those delays with anger, irritation, blame. I want to beat myself up over not being smarter, stronger, better, whatever.
Part of me wants to shriek at God and demand to know what he’s doing, why he did this to me when I was so close, and is he trying to destroy my author career or what?!
But that part is suffocating under the weight of knowing that this is what I needed. This isn’t destruction. This isn’t the death of my author career.
It’s the redemption of it.
The restoration of it.
The resurrection of it.
God isn’t destroying what I’ve spent the last eight years building and the last nearly eighteen working toward. He isn’t wrecking my plans just because he can.
No, he is saving me from myself. He is protecting me.
His whispered “wait” is not punishment; it’s pruning and preservation — and a purposeful redirection into HIS plan (which is far better than mine).
He used the loss of my dear designer to change EVERYTHING.
As hard as this has been, as disappointed as I felt in myself, as much as I have hated letting my readers down…I am beyond thankful that God stopped me when he did. This journey has been rough, and there is SO much that has gone on behind the scenes that most people don’t know. I can’t even take in all the lessons he’s teaching me and things he’s showing me.
What I do know is this: If you had told me a year ago that I’d be sitting here today — having changed not only my covers but my branding, my genre/age range, my publication plans, my name, and my writing focus (that I’d not only have no Razing out but be preparing to focus on an entirely different story for a while) — I would have probably lost it.
Now, I can say that losing my designer was the moment the bottom dropped out. The moment that my house of cards began collapsing — only for me to fall a little bit and find that the foundation beneath me held steady through the storm.
So incredibly, beautifully, fiercely steady.
Every plan I made and remade and re-remade…shattered.
But I didn’t.
I’m thankful. Excited. Hopeful.
I can’t see where this is all going. I have no idea if any of this quiet, somewhat hidden work is going to be “worth it” in any clear-this-side-of-heaven way.
But step by step, he’ll lead me, and I will follow him all of my days.
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