This week has been a weird combination of wanting to do absolutely nothing and somehow still getting a lot done.

Which is pretty much how I operate.

I see people talk about daily writing goals all the time, and I have finally accepted that I am never going to be one of those people.

There are days when I can barely make myself open my computer. Sometimes I will go more than a week without writing anything at all. Then something clicks and I'll write thousands of words in a day or finish an entire draft in a few weeks.

For a long time, I thought I needed to fix that.

Now I'm trying to work with it instead.

Depression, anxiety, trauma, and disability don't care about your carefully organized productivity schedule. Some days I have energy. Some days I don't. When I get a window where my brain actually wants to create, I've learned to take advantage of it.

And this week, I did.

I've been working on Werewolf Summer, the second Woods Bay book, and getting back into that world has been exactly what I needed. I've also been doing the decidedly less glamorous author things like line edits, metadata, book descriptions, anthology work, and repeatedly wondering where the hell my print proofs are.

Because apparently publishing a book means spending at least 30% of your life asking, "Why hasn't this shipped yet?"

There were some really good things mixed in too.

Two of our Death by TBR Books titles hit #1 in their IngramSpark subject sales rankings, which was one of those moments where I actually had to stop and remind myself that I'm allowed to be proud of what I'm building.

I am very bad at that.

Usually I accomplish something and immediately move on to the seventeen things still unfinished.

I'm trying not to do that as much.

I've also continued turning part of my house into the nostalgia cave of my dreams.

There's now an old CRT television involved.

VHS tapes.

DVDs.

Old magazines.

Movie tickets.

And apparently I am one impulse purchase away from completely recreating a teenager's bedroom from 2001.

This is fine.

Actually, it's more than fine. It's making me ridiculously happy.

I've been thinking a lot about what I wrote last week about wanting more nostalgia, more movies, more reading, and less time staring at my phone. I'm still figuring out what that looks like in practice, but I can already tell I'm happier when the internet isn't the main event of my day anymore.

I'm watching old movies on an old TV.

I'm collecting things I loved when I was younger.

I'm writing when I actually have something in me to write.

I'm letting some emails sit there.

The harder part has been giving myself permission to have low-energy days without turning them into evidence that I'm failing.

This was a rough mental health week.

There were days when depression felt heavy enough that accomplishing anything seemed ridiculous.

So I'm trying to count things differently.

Did I write something this week?

Yes.

Did I work on my books?

Yes.

Did I spend time doing things that genuinely made me happy?

Yes.

Did I survive the days that sucked?

Also yes.

Maybe that gets to be enough.

I don't need a daily word count.

I don't need to post three times a day.

I definitely don't need to understand whatever Instagram's algorithm is doing.

I need to create when I can.

Rest when I can't.

Watch horror movies.

Read books.

Hang out with my cats.

I'm Stephanie Rose. Horror author, publisher, house goblin, cat lady, Halloween queen, and horror maven. I'm currently living somewhere between 1999 and 2003 whenever possible, and frankly, I think I'm staying here.