The Season of Maintenance

I’m in maintenance mode: with my post-holiday health and diet, with my 9-to-5 as an accountant during tax season, and the big one: my own writing—

My husband and I are renovating an entire house, which means my days are currently filled with demolition dust, Home Depot runs, contractor texts, budget spreadsheets, and the sudden realization that I have very strong opinions about light switches. My body hurts in places I didn’t know could hurt. My brain feels like it’s constantly toggling between this is fine and why did we do this?

Very neatly organized in my day planner are the things that keep the house from falling apart—literally and figuratively. What’s not neatly organized are the writing things. The novels-in-progress. The shiny new ideas. The big creative swings.

And for once, I’m letting that be okay.

Not Every Season Is for Growth

There are seasons for building—new projects, new drafts, big momentum.
And then there are seasons for maintenance.

Maintenance isn’t sexy. It doesn’t come with milestones or applause. No one congratulates you for—in my case—installing a toilet, or removing old carpet staples from hardwood floors. You don’t get to point to it and say, Look what I made. You just get to keep going.

Writing careers are like that, too. They aren’t linear, no matter how much we want them to be. Some seasons are about producing. Others are about preserving—your energy, your sanity, your relationship to the work.

Right now, I’m preserving. BIG TIME.

What Maintenance Looks Like (Spoiler: It’s Not Glamorous)

Maintenance looks like reading instead of drafting.
Thinking instead of outlining.
Some days it’s easier to send out more queries—yes, I just said that—than to sit down and pick up where I last left my WIP.

It looks like knowing I don’t have the bandwidth to sit with a complicated fictional world after eight hours of physical labor and decision fatigue—and choosing not to beat myself up about it.

Renovation Brain Is Real

I’ve learned that renovation brain is very similar to revision brain. You start with optimism. Then you uncover something structural you weren’t expecting. Then you wonder if you should just burn the whole thing down and start over.

But you don’t. You fix what needs fixing. You reinforce what matters. You make peace with what can wait.

You learn, quickly, that not everything can be done at once—and that doing things in the wrong order creates more problems than it solves.

A Different Kind of Creative

I’ve missed writing. I won’t pretend I haven’t. I miss the quiet, the sentences, the feeling of moving something forward on the page.

But I don’t feel like I’ve stopped being creative.

Lately, my creativity shows up in different ways—choosing finishes, sketching layouts, imagining how rooms will feel once the dust settles. I forgot, somewhere along the way, that I have more than one creative channel. That creativity doesn’t only live at my desk.

Designing a space requires vision, patience, restraint, and a tolerance for mistakes—all things writing has taught me. It’s not the same muscle, exactly, but it’s adjacent. And it’s surprisingly satisfying to remember that the instinct to make something livable, coherent, and intentional applies to more than just stories.

So while I’m not writing right now, I’m still making choices. I’m still shaping something. And that counts, too.

This Still Counts

I think, as writers, we are especially hard on ourselves during maintenance seasons. If we’re not drafting, we tell ourselves we’re falling behind. If we’re not producing, we assume we’re failing.

But maintenance is how things last.

It’s how houses stay standing.
It’s how careers stay sustainable.
It’s how people don’t burn out entirely.

I’ll get back to my WIPs. I know I will. For now, I’m just keeping the lights on—literally and creatively.

And that’s enough.

— E