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So, if you’ve been following my end-of-the-year writing wrap-up posts, I think we can all agree that I ended on a little bit of a downer at the end of 2025. Between the looming creative apocalypse that is genAI and my own personal odyssey of submission, I will readily admit that I came into 2026 floundering and a little hopeless about the prospects of my writing career.

So, I set my focus for 2026 to make myself slow down, search for balance, and re-center on my joy of the craft. My Fantasy Horror manuscript went on sub in February, and then I took to writing craft books. I was lucky enough to stumble upon Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, and it was honestly the perfect book that I needed to shove me out of my mental spiral.

Somewhere along the way, I’d gotten caught up in the idea of “author career success” defining the worth of my words. I’m sure if you’re reading this, that probably makes sense to you as well. But when my mind was slanted in that direction, all I could think of was the need for a manuscript to succeed on submission. But when that thought consumed me, every day without a new book deal felt like a failure. So to try to escape that negative mindset, I tried to shift my thinking to assume that all my submission would be failures. That way, I figured if I was perpetually prepared for the worst, then I could be inured against rejection.

Honestly, it was a step forward, but it was still kind of a hopeless mentality. It was only when Zen in the Art of Writing really reminded me that success, big or small, isn’t the point at all. But rather the joy and honesty of it. The point is to mine the originality of our own experience to more fully perceive the world around us.

And you might look at that, and think, “well, obviously, Hayley.” But knowing a thing and your bones knowing a thing are two different beasts entirely. Only when I’d accepted the inherent worth of my own words and the exercise of writing—two things that no rejection could ever steal from me—was I able to relax again. I felt free to write what I *needed* to write. To take my time. To soak it in. To enjoy creation and the truths it reveals to myself. To, as Ray Bradbury put it, get “busy loving and hating.”

Once solidly in this new headspace, I then felt weirdly confident. Because I knew, naturally, that I’ve survived hundreds of rejections, and that any matter of hundreds more would not blow my ship over. That I didn’t have to bow to the pressures of industry to burn my little free time to attempt to be a prolific social media marketer first. Because I’d re-found the “why” of my writing. And if we want to get into a Nietzsche quote here, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how,”—the  same goes for writing.

Some come what may of our ‘how’—rejections, genAI slop, traditional publishing follower-requirements—I have my ‘why.’ And if you’re a creative struggling with these same realities, I hope you’re able to take a moment to re-center yourself and your work as well. Highly recommend.

Thanks for reading!