šæ The Grove Journals #41
On Talking into an Empty Room ā And Learning to Tell the Difference Between Silence and No One Being There
On shipping a book with an infected tooth, watching my backlist prove something real, and finally asking the question Iād been avoiding for a year.
I want to tell you about things that happened in the same seven days, because I donāt think either one makes full sense without the other.
The first thing: I finished the final review and uploaded Forged in Ruin to Amazon and Draft2Digital this week. On a day when the right side of my jaw looked like I was smuggling a plum in my cheek. On a week when I was counting cans of cat food compared to number of days because the money for a big new tech project hadnāt landed yet, on a month when a big chunk of the budget had gone to doctors and meds/antibiotics instead.
I want to be honest that I almost didnāt tell you that part, because it feels like the kind of thing youāre supposed to have already solved by the time youāre brave enough to write about it publicly. But this whole newsletter has always been about showing the real shape of a life/author career rebuild, not the tidied-up version, so: thatās the shape. A launch and a scarcity and a swollen jaw, all stacked on top of each other, and the book still shipped anyway.
The second thing happened a few days later, and itās smaller, and it took me longer to actually look at (and it still hurts my eyes to look at too closely).
My backlist had its best week in months. The read-through road Iāve been quietly building for over a year on one of my pen names ā the thing where each book is supposed to hand the reader to the next one ā actually worked. In the real world. While I wasnāt looking. While I was mostly thinking about my tooth.
I sat with that for a minute, because itās a strange kind of proof. Nobody emailed me to say āhey, I read your books back to back, thanks.ā I just found it in a spreadsheet, days later, doing the unglamorous data-review part of my Sunday ritual. But itās real. People somewhere, cared enough about the story to keep going. Thatās not nothing. Thatās actually the whole point of everything Iāve been building.
And thatās the thing that cracked something else open for me, because Iād been sitting on a much heavier question for a while, about a completely different corner of my work ā and I finally let myself actually look at it instead of stepping around it again.
Iāve been running Authors Mojo, in one form or another, for almost ten years. Teaching calls. A little academy. Lifetime memberships I sold years ago for what feels, now, like almost nothing. And for a long time, I told myself a story about it that felt generous and warm: that the people in that space were close friends, that Iād go out of my way for them, that the relationship was mutual in the way real friendship is.
This week, I looked at the actual data instead of the story. Views in the teens and twenties. Zero new subscribers on any post, five weeks running on a new writer-teaching-centered blog series, on a deliberate pivot I tried in good faith. Two people ā out of a list thatās been with me for years ā who still show up when the call isnāt an āofficialā teaching session anymore, just a hangout. And some of the people Iād quietly called friends in my head, the ones active on Substack every single day, liking and sharing other things? Not mine. Not once, in about six months, that I can find.
I want to be really careful here, because this is NOT a āwhy donāt people appreciate meā letter, and I donāt want it to land like one. This is something closer to: I assigned a depth of relationship that, when I actually checked, wasnāt reciprocal ā and the checking itself is the growth, not the disappointment. I spent over a decade mostly a hermit, by my own choice, healing from things that needed healing. It makes complete sense that I might have overweighted the connections I did have, because there werenāt many, and I wanted them to mean to them what they meant to me. Thatās not a character flaw. Thatās just what happens to a person who spent a long time alone and finally let a few people in.
But wanting something to be true doesnāt make the data say something different. And the data, this week, was very clear, in the same clean, sharp way that Ace of Swords energy tends to be clear when it finally lands: I have spent, conservatively, over a year writing something like a thousand+ words a day into a room that mostly isnāt there.
I havenāt made a final decision about all of it yet. Iām sitting with it for another week on purpose, because ten years of anything deserves a closing thatās chosen, not a closing that happens out of exhaustion in the middle of a hard week recovering from an infected tooth that almost spilled over into something worse.
But I wanted to tell you the shape of the question, because I think a lot of you know exactly what it feels like to keep showing up for something, faithfully, past the point where the evidence stopped supporting the hope.
š The rest of this letter ā the actual numbers behind both halves of this week, the invoice that finally āproved my worthā in dollars instead of just theory, and a journaling exercise on telling the difference between a quiet room and an empty one ā is below, for paid subscribers.
