Discussing Medieval Midwives While Flashing Strangers on Zoom
When ambition collides with reality
This isn’t one of those newsletters where an idea lands in my twitching fingers and I can’t wait to iron it out.
This month my fingers feel frostbitten. Dog-bitten. Like they’ve been dead for twenty years.
It’s fine. I’ve never been someone who waits for inspiration anyway. When it comes, everything rights itself in the world. It feels like magic, but it’s unreliable. I can’t afford to wait for something that may or may not show up.
Besides, consistency is its own kind of magic. You show up for the work, and over time, the work begins to meet you there. On a homestead, you tend the chickens, and eventually they give you eggs. What you neglect goes feral.
That being said, if this month has a theme, it’s not magic but hard work. Showing up for the chores while stubbing your toes and throwing out your back at every turn. Piles of laundry. A broken dryer. -30 degrees outside, so the clothes freeze stiff on the line and you haul them in to drape over every surface until the house looks abandoned.
And here I am, wondering how this space became my little nook for overly dramatic extended metaphors.
The truth is, I’m building something beyond my current capacity—and resenting the strain.
What would it take to sustain creativity without constant burnout?
Maybe it’s a certain amount of copies sold. Maybe it’s recognition. Maybe it’s buying groceries with book money.
But honestly, if I hit whatever number or milestone I imagine, I’d probably still push myself into burnout. That’s what I’ve trained my brain to do.
So. What have I actually been doing?
I submitted the final edits for the next Oracle deck. I can’t share much until May, but you’ll be the first to know. I can tell you that I’m deeply excited. Giada Rose’s artwork is luminous. I wrote the guidebook in under three months. For me, that meant 4 a.m. wake-ups every day. Kind of a brutal deadline, but fully worth it. Giada kept painting for months after. We pitched something slightly unusual, both in theme and content (there’s a fiction component!), and I’m dying to see how it lands.
Giada and I have also had an idea for an illustrated children’s book for years. We finally started this month. We’re both Waldorf moms, drawn to the gentle, nature-centered magic of early 20th-century illustrators like Elsa Beskow and Sibylle von Olfers.
As I drafted, two problems emerged:
The children’s book market today isn’t early-1900s Europe (shocking).
Shifting from adult novels to picture books isn’t as seamless as I imagined.
I read the first draft aloud to my family. We sat by the wood stove and I got to say “Come gather round the fire while I tell ye a tale.” (one lifelong goal: accomplished.) Two sentences in, my husband asked gently, “This is for ages 3–5?”
It was not for ages 3–5.
It is, decidedly, for ages 8–12.
So now it’s becoming the full-length middle-grade novel that I never planned to write.
As for the actual 3–5 book? I rewrote it. Then rewrote it again. I think it’s finally landing in the right age range.
I’ve also been posting complete and utter tomfoolery on Instagram again, which may or may not be reaching Oracle deck users with a fondness for folklore and feminine wisdom.
In other news, I joined a weekly Zoom writing group. We share 2,000 words and critique. I’m running my adult selkie novel through it. At this pace it’ll take a year to get through the manuscript, but I’m not in a rush. Querying has been… unsuccessful so far. My skin is thicker now than when I first started sending manuscripts out to agents, but I’d be lying if I said I don’t spiral just a little with every rejection. So I’m happy to pause that whole rollercoaster and comb through this manuscript slowly with others.
Downside: meetings are right at my children’s bedtime.
During the last two-hour call, I had my two-year-old in my lap pulling up my shirt to nurse every five minutes. That is, when she wasn’t flicking the lights on and off. Picture me discussing magical medieval selkie midwives with two men in their late 60s and 70s while occasionally flashing them.
Chaos.
I also pitched another nonfiction project to the publisher who puts out my Oracle decks. Still waiting. Historically, these things take months. Again, no rush on my end.
If you feel stressed reading how many tangled, untied threads I’m juggling…welcome to my brain. I’m deciding whether to focus next on the middle-grade novel or finish the final book of my selkie trilogy.
At the same time, I’m questioning everything. Last night I lay awake wondering what I would do if I stopped writing.
I’ve put all my eggs in this basket. It’s always felt like I had these eggs and they had to go somewhere, so why not this basket? Where else do you put eggs? They have to get from coop to kitchen somehow.
But in the middle of that spiral, my older daughter got sick in her bed. I changed sheets. Showered her off. The baby woke and the chickens crowed and somehow the whole homestead was under the very false impression that it was already morning. Then the sun eventually rose and the day just continued.
More laundry!
I’m still here. Still writing. Still mothering. Still hauling frozen clothes inside. Still putting eggs in baskets. It’s hard, and I’m still choosing it. I don’t know if it’s delusion or ambition under pressure.
I only know I’m not done yet.
I’ll leave you with a short excerpt from the middle-grade draft. This scene follows a nine-year old girl named Elowen and her new friend Lira, a selkie girl in search of her lost sealskin. Let me know if you have any guesses about the location or time period! It’s still early—the names will change, probably most of it will—but this is the vibe:
As the sun moves westward, they cross over milky beaches bordering grasslands freckled with wildflowers. The grassy fringes feel alive, and Elowen reasons that the wind might have blown the sealskin into a hollow or burrow within. They search thoroughly before moving on, crossing next over black, rocky headlands. The island grows more rugged and windswept with every step. Doubt creeps into Elowen’s mind, but Lira stands tall and sure, remarkably graceful on the legs she does not typically depend on for such long journeys.
“The sea remembers this path,” she says, pointing to the tip of the island. Waves splash against rocky ledges where seabirds have built their colonies. The water here warns, risky yet thrilling.
Lira runs ahead, bare feet swift over black rock. Elowen straightens her shoulders and runs after. Lira stands at the brink where the island ends and the sea begins, hair whipping in the wind’s current like seaweed. Otherwise, she is still, as if she’s been there for minutes, not seconds. Centuries.
Elowen has never wandered this far. The sea churns. Gannets wheel overhead. This place feels raw, powerful, alive, and unforgiving.
Without a word, Lira strips to her shift, linen pale as foam against the dark cliffs.
Panic grips Elowen. “Wait!” she calls. “You cannot. The waves are too strong—”
But Lira’s feet have already broken the water’s skin. It swallows her ankles, then knees, then waist. Elowen sucks in a breath, but it catches in her throat as Lira dives.
Elowen counts her breaths—one, then two. Yet the surface stays empty, only white foam and the roaring song of the sea. Panic rises sharp and double-edged. She is afraid for Lira—and equally afraid of losing her. What if this is the moment she finds her skin and never returns?
She kicks off her boots, wiggles out of her wool dress, then scrambles down the slick rocks. One more breath. She thinks about how she is a broken thread in the tapestry of her island. But broken threads can be tied—
And she dives.
Until next month,
Hadas
P.S. For those interested in what I’ve published already…
A deck in the vein of Women who Run with the Wolves, Folklore Oracle explores the rich symbolism within folk wisdom, mythology, custom and superstition, acknowledging each symbol as a key to unlock the hidden pieces of the psyche.
Spooky season isn’t over yet. My novel Dove in an Iron Cauldron captures the spirit of the Victorian era in America and the haunting choices that shape us in a sweeping tale of love, redemption, and the supernatural.
It’s a winter read, through and through. Get it while it’s cold!
Lovely Hadas. It’s amazing all that you are doing in the midst of chaos. The world will thaw and winter will end. I love the children’s book. I recently read an article about the intentional dumbing down of children’s books and how it reduced intelligent language, so maybe your going to find a way to push that back to more normal while still reaching the audience of todays children.
I'm always inspired by your dedication to your craft and creativity, dear Hadas. I think weaving magic is what you were born to do ✨