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Writing Is Like Spring

Spring is a season of setbacks and waiting, with snow still arriving in April and trees barely budding, no matter how often we look to them, expecting more. Yet, like with writing, the days add up, and inevitably we’ll have to reach true warm weather and the familiar explosion of green.

I have, happily, reached the point where I have a complete first draft of my latest novel, and I’m onto revising. Every time that I work, a little more progress adds up, progress that I can actually see by… Continue reading

Various Journals

I first began keeping a journal in seventh grade for an assignment in my Humanities class, and I’ve kept one pretty regularly ever since. These days, I have four journals that all serve different purposes.

  1. My nightly journal is a paper Sierra Club weekly calendar with fairly small spaces, just enough to write five lines of prose in small script. I use it to reflect back on the events of the day and any highlights. It gives me a sense of completion and personal significance, like my day mattered to… Continue reading

A Bit of Honesty about the Uncertain Path

Let me share a little secret with you. I don’t always know what I’m doing. I lack reliable systems for writing a novel or growing as an artist or taking my work to the next level. A proper path, pattern or school doesn’t exist for writers like me. I’m stuck with training myself.

What I do is get up each morning and keep working, and sometimes, it really doesn’t get me anywhere. I recently abandoned a novel I’d been working on for half a year because I simply could not… Continue reading

Writing Space Within

The labyrinth at Hammonasset State Park, January 2018

I came upon a haiku I wrote while I was working on the Birthmarked trilogy, and it felt like a message to myself across time. It exactly captures the sense of my mind opening up with new space while I’m writing, and the doubleness I feel when my characters come alive.

Why I Write

Where Gaia calls one
side of me to the other
the wasteland opens

Dream Season

Every night lately, I wake from dreams. In one, I flew over a cliff of falling water as wide as half a planet. Once a lady with a red lantern floated up with a silver balloon into an evening sky of planes and missed her ride. Last night, I sank in a collapsing hole of sand before strangers pulled me free.

The dreams linger into my daylight and hover at the edge of my imagination as if expecting me to do something with them. I have no idea what that… Continue reading

Snow Day

After the wind blew snow sideways past our windows all day yesterday, we have clean white drifts today. I’m shoveling in spurts, sipping cocoa, and thankful for a warm furnace.

Working at home feels different when I know other people have snow day vacations from school and normal jobs. On one hand, I like sensing that other people are in the houses in my neighborhood even if I don’t see them or call them up, like we’re all hunkered down together. On the other hand, I feel like I deserve… Continue reading

 

Ari & Milo, my serial novel, is now up on Wattpad! I drew illustrations to go with each chapter, and best of all, it’s free! Because of problematic themes, this novel is for mature readers age 17+.

Caragh's Latest Favorite Reads

The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society
Every Day
The Dog Stars
The Reinvention of Edison Thomas
The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie
The Fault in Our Stars
Two of a Kind
Until It Hurts to Stop


Caragh's books »

Audio Books

The audio books of BIRTHMARKED, PRIZED, PROMISED, and THE VAULT OF DREAMERS have been released by Tantor Audio. They're available through Tantor, Barnes & Noble, Amazon, and Audible.com.
Book Trailer for Promised