How the Pandemic Led Me to Publishing My Next Book

'The Condemned' will publish Sept. 9, 2023

When it all hit, the writing stopped.

I’ve written my way through everything in life: love, heartbreak, homesickness, bullying, college graduation, moving out, identity confusion, medical crises, and more.

But I didn’t write my way through COVID.

For the first time in my life, strife didn’t inspire me; it hindered me. It drained me of all creative juices until I was squeezed out. Rather than writing, I’d play Seinfeld on my T.V. while using markers to color flowers in an adult coloring book.

You don’t need to hear about my COVID traumas, at least not yet, because you have your own. We all do. One day, we’ll share them more freely, but right now, it’s too soon.

However, COVID did play a part in the genesis of my new book publishing later this year, “The Condemned: A memoir told through selected early works of short stories, essays, and poetry.” And that’s why I’m writing today, because this is a story of triumph.

COVID triggered, perhaps, the longest writer’s block of my life. I had a few spurts of creative manias here and there—I did start my next novel, for example—but nothing lasted more than a few weeks.

These past six months, however, I felt the immense pressure of COVID begin to lighten, and I realized how much I missed writing. I wanted to finish my novel, dammit! I wanted to look forward to something again.

But after—well, all that—I needed help triggering my writing muscle. I therefore decided to look behind me, rather than forward. I allowed my brain to give into nostalgia, and I started going through thumb drives of old writings.

To my surprise, I discovered a vast plethora of stuff from the first twenty years of my formative life: poems from as early as high school, MySpace rants from my early twenties, short stories from my early thirties.

As I read everything, I realized many of these writings spanned what have now become historical events, like the Great Recession and September 11, as well as personal injustices like Antisemitism.  

I detected common themes and realized when combined, these short stories, essays, and poems revealed the larger story of my earlier self—a millennial coming of age through the 1990s and 2000s while navigating typical young adult issues exasperated by those very historical events I was living through.

Today, in my forty-first year, I decided to select and lightly edit the best essays, poems, and fictional short stories from that earlier period in my life—lasting between ages fifteen and thirty-five, respectively—and publish them in a collection that acts as a memoir.

One of the short stories I decided to publish is called, “The Condemned,” which I chose as the namesake of my book. “The Condemned” is the most autobiographical fiction story I’ve written to-date, and while that played a role in my decision to use its title for this book, it’s not the primary reason. “The Condemned” represents the most common theme I noticed throughout my earlier works:

I often felt condemned in one way or another.

Whether it was from heartbreak, ostracization, disillusionment, the search for home, loss and death, or mental health challenges, I often found myself feeling othered.

However, through those feelings, I also found something hopeful: a stronger sense of self-acceptance, inner truth, and eventually, other types of love, including self-love and romantic.

This is the essence of The Condemned: A memoir told through selected early works of short stories, essays, and poetry. It can be considered an anthology, a collection of fictional short stories, a collection of personal essays, a memoir, women’s literature, and a collection of poetry. One of the reasons I love publishing through my own company, BookBooks Publishing LLC, is the artistic and creative freedom it allows me.

I hope this book will speak to you. Stay tuned. I’ll be launching special pre-order deals within the week and sending them to you, first! If you haven’t already, sign up for my newsletter as a free or paid subscriber and don’t miss the pre-order announcements: