November and December are always disruptive months for me. I host family for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, there are several birthdays in-between, then all the other stuff that comes as part of the holiday season, and this all collides with the end-of-year paperwork and recordkeeping that comes from being your own employer, your own accountant, and your own HR team.

 
Some authors have an amazing ability to sit down no matter what, no matter where and carve out a few hours here and there in which they’re able to create regardless of what all else is going on. Lord how I wish I was one of them. For me to get words onto the page I need routine and solitude and silence—and usually several days of it before anything worthwhile starts showing up. I’ve never managed to get much if any writing done during the last two months of the year, not even back when I was still on the book-a-year hamster wheel, and have learned to plan accordingly.

But this year the disruption kicked off an entire month early.

This year, the universe, under the mistaken impression that I did not already have enough animals, expenses, or chaos in my life, decided that what I needed most right now was a sick and dying kitten. So that’s what it sent me.

If you’re in the Taylor Stevens Fan Club Facebook group then you’ve been following the story from the start and have already gotten all the photos and videos. And if you’re with me on Patreon you’ve gotten the gist and know where to find the rest. So, all I’ll say on it here is that I didn’t go looking for this kitten. I didn’t want this kitten. I tried to get out of any responsibility for this kitten. When I saw her she was cold and floppy and I thought she was already dead, but then I picked her up and she made the tiniest sound and to walk away then was to choose to just let her die. I couldn’t make myself do that. And that’s how operation kitten rescue began.

She was around four-weeks-old but only weighed six ounces and was the size of a ten-day-old kitten. She was dehydrated, malnourished, had eye infections, a respiratory infection, and was infested with ring worm. If you’ve never had to manage a kitten fungal infection while preventing the spread of said fungus to other cats in the house, imagine the work that goes into eradicating and preventing the spread of scabies or lice in a human household and combine that with babysitting a sick toddler and you get the idea. Anyway, her name is Puck. She’s a cream tabby. She is now nearly twelve-weeks-old healthy, thriving, finally out of kitten jail (aka quarantine), and lying on my chest purring as I type this. 

But the point here is disruption, all of which drove an early nail into the coffin of end-of-year productivity and meant that I did not—as I had so desperately wanted—finish writing THE FULCRUM (Munroe #6) before the year closed out.

WRITING STUFF: I have honestly lost count of the times I have returned to and then had to set down THE FULCRUM. I started writing it in 2014, shortly after finishing THE MASK—before THE MASK was even published—but then the Munroe series got cancelled and I had to find something else to sell to keep the lights on. That’s how we got the Jack & Jill books. Within those years were a number of gaps during which I’d return to THE FULCRUM and try to pick up where I left off. I’d make a little progress here and there, but being under contract for other works meant it was a side project at best. By the time I was finally able to give it my full attention again my brain was so broken it took hours just to make a paragraph make sense.

A lot has happened in the twelve years since I drafted its first outline. I’m a different person. The world is a different place. The country in which the story is set is now mired in a war that didn’t exist back then. The only remaining constant is that this final volume in Munroe’s story continues to be my white whale.

 
In any case, THE FULCRUM is where the bulk of my focus has gone. Over these past many months I have slogged through roughly forty thousand words of madness that were put down during the brain break years—conflicting plotlines, scenes that didn’t belong, multiple instances of the same scene sketched multiple times in different ways in different parts of the story, character ideas that sometimes made sense and sometimes didn’t—cleaning, rewriting, replotting, forcing chaos into order while trying to figure out what I was thinking when I originally sketched those sections out, and where all of it was headed, and how it was originally meant to tie together in the first place until I hit the story cliff in which, one page to the next, there were no more notes and nothing more to work with. From there I began crafting forward from scratch, not so much writing as word vomiting in an attempt to fill in the enormous blank space where the whole last part of the story should have been, while puzzling through how to make it all come together. That's where I was at when the kitten showed up to utterly disrupt my routine and quiet.

Next year. It has to be next year. If I’m still not finished with this book by the end of next year, I think that’ll be the universe’s way of telling me I had a good storytelling run and now it’s over. We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it.

Even though I didn’t finish THE FULCRUM, I did finish other things. This was the year www.walkingthroughfog.com went live. If you didn’t catch it in April’s update, WALKNG THROUGH FOG is the story of how I learned that the broken brain was being driven by a lifelong chronic illness that was causing (amongst many other things) not enough oxygen to reach my brain. It’s a puzzle-solving quest through the medical literature that documents the discoveries and experimentation that allowed me to fix the unfixable and is as close to a memoir as I’ll ever get to writing. You can download it free from the website. 

I'd also love to one day have WALKING THROUGH FOG formatted for digital reading devices such as the Kindle to make it accessible to wider audience. To do that, the book first needs to be copyedited, and for that we need a copyeditor willing to tackle the project as a labor of love. If you or anyone you know might be up to the task, please, please let me know!

 
OTHER STUFF: It’s been a while since the Taylor Stevens Show podcast went on hiatus. I didn’t expect the hiatus to last as long as it has but it so happened that we hit pause right as I was learning what was wrong with my brain and at that point the quest for healing took priority over everything else. And just like that two years went by. I do still hope to bring the show back but have to finish writing a certain story first and there’s no guarantee when that will be. In the meantime, those striving toward cleaner, better writing can find every video tutorial, every podcast episode, and even a searchable database all in one place at www.hackthecraft.com

GOODIES: This month there are twelve books in the giveaway pile. If you’d like to be entered to win, simply respond to this email with the subject “GOODIE GIVEAWAY.” If your email program likes to be difficult and won’t let you change the subject, just put GOODIE GIVEAWAY in the reply and I will make sure it gets to the right place. The 4th, 15th, 27th, 38th, 43rd, 54th, 67th, 72nd, 79th, 86th, 91st, and 100th readers to respond will be prize winners this month. I read every single email that comes in but due to the volume, I’m ONLY able to respond to the 4th, 15th, 27th, 38th, 43rd, 54th, 67th, 72nd, 79th, 86th, 91st, and 100th. If you email and don’t hear back, it’s not because I’m ignoring you, it’s because, due to time and volume, I just can’t.

[Standard buzzkill disclaimer for all giveaways and offers of free books: Void where prohibited or restricted by law. Limited to U.S. addresses. I am not responsible for lost or misrouted emails, interrupted or unavailable network or server connections, other computer or technical failures, or post office mishandling.]

Wishing you a wonderful holiday season and a fantastic 2026!

With love,
Taylor