Writing Sticky & Sweet

This story ended up being quite hard for me to write even though I’d seen the small kernel for the idea in my mind from the very beginning. Turns out, it’s actually pretty hard to write about spring/summer activities when you’re dealing with wintertime cold weather, illnesses, and on top of all that, depression.

A family member I help take care of became very sick in December, about two weeks before Christmas. We were going along okay, trying different things to help him get well, but nothing was working. Then, when the doctors gave him something different, a bit stronger, it looked like that was going to work.

And it did.

For a day.

He fell ill again. And again.

At some point, something inside me just…broke. Has that ever happened to you? I don’t know that that same broken feeling would’ve happened had I been able to go outside where it was warm, or gotten him outside where it was warm. We had an unusually cold winter for our area for the second year in a row and it added to the helpless feeling I had.

So a combination of less light, colder than usual weather, and dealing with an illness I could do nothing to make better all added up to leave me feeling helpless and broken. Depression set in and I needed to write a story that was fun, lighthearted, and about spring and summer love.

The first time I wrote the story, that’s not what I wrote. Luckily, I found that out, but that meant I had to rewrite it. But I still didn’t have the story right. So I had to rewrite it again. And the deadline came and went, and I was rewriting it a third time.

Luckily, the Naughty Literati editors are a group of amazing women. During edits, I rewrote portions again, but I didn’t have to rewrite the whole entire thing. And as more sunshine appeared, the weather began finally warming up, and surgery on my loved one began allowing him to finally heal, I was in a much better place mentally.

It was hard writing Sticky & Sweet, but not once did I ever consider throwing in the towel. My readers are too important to me to just give up. Y’all are the ones who kept me going, who kept me wanting to make the story better, even if my mind struggled to do so. Readers are very powerful motivators for writers and I thank you all so much for your support of what we write.

I write, not only for my own enjoyment, but for y’all’s entertainment as well. When you read Sticky & Sweet, you’ll have to let me know if it makes you want ice cream as much as it made the members of my writing group want ice cream. They sent me ice cream emojis every time they read another version of the story. Yum!!