I woke this morning to a stern note in my calendar. Publish new blog, it said. Written there on the first Saturday of March by my optimistic past self at the very end of December, when everything was fresh and possible on the pristine pages of another paper calendar. Yes, I’m aware that’s an antique, analog thing to do in our digital world. I also wear a watch that’s set to analog time, complete with a big hand and a little hand that sweep around the face, and handwrite notes in a notebook when I need to learn something. All learned behaviors from a different era, I suppose. They live on through me and all the rest of us who didn’t grow up with computers.

There are many stern notes scattered through the twelve months of my optimistic paper calendar, ranging from a trip to Washington DC to my “well-woman” doctor check-up all the way in December. Then there’s the writing deadlines. Finish book five, another note for March says. Purchase covers for books five, six, and seven in the Greenwood series. Set up Christy Winn books in libraries was one I had for February*. Set up a promo stack for my Tales of Darkwood books and get those into libraries as well**.

Normally, I love having those benchmarks penciled in and take joy in checking them off as accomplished, but for the past month they’ve been an uncomfortable pressure, especially the ones having to do with writing. When hopeful Stacey put them in the calendar way back in late December, she didn’t know how badly a January ice storm and subsequent auto accident would reframe everything. That happy author was assuming life would bumble along as it had been, that she would have the daily bandwidth to weave new stories from nothing. How droll, how innocent that person was.

I’ll tell you one thing, straight up. I’m done with experiencing crappy events that build resilience. I think I’m quite resilient already, thanks very much, no more lessons, please. Between you and me, I don’t know that being resilient is worth the hype it gets.

Anyway, I was having a rough drive along I-20 through Louisiana at the end of January. A virulent ice storm had barreled through the weekend before, making driving anywhere challenging. I’d left Dallas early in the morning on what I’d anticipated to be a six or seven-hour drive to a hotel I’d set up in Jackson, Mississippi. Slowdowns and accidents had turned it into an eleven-hour drive, but I only had about an hour to go to make it there, so I was gritting it out, stubbornly driving through the dark. After all, there was a notation in my paper calendar that said I was staying at that hotel on that date. (I may be done with stubbornness, too.)

I was in the right lane, not driving fast, just steadily. Then a truck tire with the metal sticking up out of the center appeared in the headlights. I saw it, recognized it, and hit it in the space of about a second. The only thing I was able to do was attempt to straddle it, which I was told later probably saved me from a much worse outcome. My Subaru CrossTrek hit it with an incredibly loud thunk, we flew through the air and landed on all four tires. The airbags did not deploy, and smoke began pouring out of the engine. With the whole car shaking, no power steering, coasting on momentum alone, I managed to get up an off-ramp and glide through an intersection and into a space between a lit-up gas station and one that was not.

I turned off the car, but smoke was still billowing from the engine. I got out and pulled necessary things out of the car, even though part of me was thinking it might be a really stupid thing to do. (For those of you who don’t know, another of my resilience-building exercises involved a condo fire where we lost everything except our lives.) That losing-everything event was high in my consciousness as I grabbed my purse, computer bag, and suitcase out of the car and dragged them all to a safe distance. Up until that time, I’d been focused on doing the next right thing, but then I blanked and just started shaking. I had no idea what to do next except to wait for my car to burst into flames.

“Call 911,” someone shouted at me, breaking through my fog.

I did, and the dispatcher hung on with me as I described where I was, my brain becoming more and more disjointed. The police and a fire truck came quickly. Riding along with the fire chief that night was the fire chief’s wife, who took me in her arms and gave me a hug. She bundled me into the cab of the truck out of the cold. It was so kind and loving, and that’s how I was treated by the good people of Rayville, Louisiana for the rest of my time there. I was smart enough to hand her my phone so she and my husband could talk through what needed to happen next, as I wasn’t tracking well. She helped me call a tow company, and they came and took the car away .

Because of the ice storm, there was no electricity in most of the town, and no hotels available in a fifty-mile radius. But they had a warming station at the civic center, and she took me there to the big auditorium, where others had taken shelter. I was given a cot and blankets. There were snacks and water available, and a bathroom. Lying in that echoing space, with some cops nearby to be sure we were safe, the other people impacted by the storm and I tried to get some rest. I kept my coat and hat on and just shook as the residual adrenaline moved through my body.

The next morning, my husband managed to find a car rental place twenty miles away, and a hotel room another thirty miles away from that. The cops on duty gave me coffee, then the Rayville sheriff stepped in and drove me first to get the rest of my things out of the CrossTrek, then to the car rental. My husband’s support and the kindness of the people were what carried me through those initial hours, that’s for sure. It turned out the hotel didn’t have a room, but the woman at the front desk finagled one for me. Eventually, the mechanic where my car was told me he wasn’t going to be able to do anything with the car since the town was still without electricity, so I took two more days and drove home. It was harrowing, and another snowstorm hit as I was doing it, but I made it back to Virginia. Resilient and stubborn, right?

But resilience and stubbornness only get you so far. Ever since I hit that tire, I’ve had a hard time fulfilling the demands that past Stacey set up for me to accomplish. I have PTSD, which I find both annoying and embarrassing on a deep level. I wasn’t hurt at all in the accident, so I don’t feel like I should have it, that I didn’t earn it, but there evidently isn’t a choice in the matter. You either have it, or you don’t, and you have to work through the sucker to get to the other side.

Anyway, aside from being reluctant to drive at night and jumpy around trucks, where I once wrote 3k words a day, now I’m lucky to hit 2k, usually less. Some days I can’t find my inner storyteller at all. I’ve been gritting it out and typing black words onto the blank pages, but on many days I simply erase what I did the day before and have to start over. It’s a new, uncomfortable space to inhabit, and it’s been going on for over a month. Luckily, I have a very sympathetic publisher, and I’m ahead of my big deadlines for this series, or it would all be much worse.

I have to admit, when I read the words “publish new blog” in today’s calendar space, I wanted to do anything else than write this blog and share with you that I’m struggling. Erasing those words from the calendar was an option. Yet, to do so is letting myself down, and I don’t want to do that either. It’s piling insult on to injury, and I think maybe optimistic Stacey has had quite enough of that, too.

So, here it is. I’d like to think it’s a positive thing that I got this done, and will publish a blog as dictated by the woman I used to be. I’d like to find her again.

*I haven’t made much progress on this one yet. Christy Winn is the name I use to distinguish my sweet, small-town romances from my much darker post-apocalyptic and twisted fairytale books to appease the Amazon algorithms. To get them into libraries takes several steps. I bought my own ISBNs and have the copyrights (both expensive!), and have the books in the right format. I’ve gone so far as to set up an account with Draft2Digital to distribute them, but I still have to upload the manuscripts and the covers for each one, then price them correctly, which I’m still in the dark about. Once I find the elusive bandwidth to do those things, I’ll be reaching out to ask you to request them from your local library. I’ve always wanted my books in libraries.

**A promo stack involves paying for formal newsletters that go to potential readers who’ve indicated they like reading twisted fairytales. It costs between $200 and $800 for a day or so of advertising, depending on how many you join. As I’ve not yet ventured in to doing very expensive Facebook ads, and abandoned Amazon ads, it’s really the only way new readers can find my work, aside from word of mouth, or my monthly newsletters where I join with other authors to highlight each other’s books. I’ll manage it, eventually. No one said being an author was easy, and being found in the latest slurry of mundane AI-generated works has made it even harder. Did you know some “authors” are turning out thirty “books” a week using AI prompts and AI-generated covers? That’s a lotta noise, but I don’t think it’s going away anytime soon.