Susan Fanetti

Hiya!

It’s summertime! Yay!

If we’re speaking simply about what seasons mean and bring, autumn is unambiguously my favorite season. Though we live in California and don’t actually get much in the way of changing seasons (we basically go from eight months of boiling heat from a sun hanging in an unremittingly blue sky to a few months of gloom and rain and light chill, and back to heat and sun), I love the relief from the heat. I love sweaters and wool skirts and tights and boots. I love jackets and scarves and cute hats. I love the holidays. I’m also a Scorpio, as is my husband, so our birthdays fall right in the thick of it all. As does our oldest son’s, who made me a mother. Autumn is awesome.

However, a career as a professor has brought the delights of summer home to me in a particular way. Though I have two jobs and I’m never not working (teaching and writing most of the year, prepping and writing in the summers), summer means freedom in a way not unlike it meant when I was a kid: my time is my own. For me, this is a peace above most others. Just knowing that I have the room to have a bad day, or a sick day, or just a plain old, contented “me day,” without letting anything slip through a crack, without letting anyone down—that’s a full ton of stress off my shoulders for three whole months. I love it.

Stress is why I’m preparing to put in for retirement at my university; the coming school year will be my last full year teaching. I’m planning to teach a semester a year as emerita faculty for a while as a transition for my department and myself (we are both entities that need gentle transitions), but as of next summer, I will officially be retired. 

It has become all but impossible to teach at all, much less well, under the pressures and conditions in American higher education these days. From devastating budget cuts to the proliferation of AI plagiarism bots, from ICE campus raids to the suppression of faculty speech, too much of our mindshare is being devoured by external concerns. On top of that, our expertise, not to mention our very integrity, is under attack. It’s impossible to leave it all outside the classroom door. It’s taken a seat in the front row.

I’m not going to drag this post down the dark and brambly path of The State of US Higher Education in 2025; I’m saying only that the stress of my day job is why I love summer despite my deep disdain for the heat, and this year the stress has been so intense that not only do I love this summer times about a billion, but I’m also looking to extend my summer to eight months and eventually the whole year. I need my time to be my own. 

That’s basically why I’m an indie author—no demands on me but those I place on myself. And thank the gods for it! If I’d gone through the massive writer’s block I’ve been fighting for the past few years while on a contract with a publisher? Hooboy. Let’s just say I probably wouldn’t be writing this post today.

But today I can report the appearance of some hope. Since the semester ended, I’ve been writing at a pace not too far off the early days: a chapter a day, just about every day. And even better than that, the story I’m writing is living in my head all day long, trying to get written. That used to be the way it always was: when I wasn’t actively writing, I was passively writing, the characters refusing to be quiet. It made me a distracted companion who’d really rather be writing than almost anything else, but it also made me extremely prolific, and at a pretty high level.

Then it just dried up. 

I used to say that I didn’t get—like, understand—writer’s block. “Just sit down and type,” I’d insist. “Put words on the page. Who cares if they’re good, you can fix that later. Just get the story down any way you can.”

Oh, what a sweet summer child I was. Turns out, when block sets in deep, words literally do not come out of your fingers. No words, not even awkward, stupid words. You just sit there, for hours at a time, staring at the empty page and hating yourself. 

It really, really sucks.

For a long time now, writing has been more pain than pleasure, and eventually it got to the point that my seriously waning mental health demanded that I just stop. I didn’t even bother opening the file of my primary WIP for months. I created the file for the story and began to write last September. In the early years, a 100K-word manuscript would have been done before Halloween. This time, I wrote in fits and starts until the story petered out in mid-October. I did not put another word down in that file until a few weeks ago, when I woke up with the next scene in my head. Since then I’ve written at a chapter-a-day pace again.

I’d tried plenty of fixes to get through the block. I started multiple different projects, “fresh ideas,” that all died out in a few thousand words. I picked up my few unfinished projects from earlier days and tried to restart those, to similarly bleak results. I’d nearly come to terms with the idea that my writing career was over.

And then it was just … back.

I can’t tell you what happened, or how, or why, but I’m feeling it again. I am wary, I am absolutely terrified of letting it slip through my fingers, so I’m coming at it sidelong, creeping along the edges so I don’t spook it. But still, it feels fucking amazing just to have the story bouncing around in my head like a puppy who heard the treat jar open.

I am NOT ready to announce a new release yet. I still have thousands of words to write in this story. But I have enough real hope that it will be finished, and will be good, that I’ve “penciled” a target release date in my personal calendar. AND I’ve got notes for a new project to take up when (IF! I need to remember that IF is okay!) this one is done. 

I guess my own little crisis here is one big way all (gestures wildly around) this is affecting me—and that’s extra ironic, since writing used to be the thing that let me escape from the stresses of life and the world. 

Thanks a lot, there, Cosmos. Real dry sense of humor you got there.

It’s not a suffering sweepstakes, we all have our battles and for us they are bloody, but I also try to keep some perspective. A whole lot of folks have things way harder than I do. Writer’s block is existentially excruciating, but even among other authors, this is a fairly minor battle, because writing is not what pays my bills. My needs and reasonable wants are comfortably met, and I have options should that ever be at risk. Many don’t have that degree of privilege. 

Most everybody’s life is extra stressful these days. Chaos seems to reign in every direction, and it feels like it’s moved in to stay. I hope you and yours are as comfortable and secure as possible, and surrounded by a community that will take part of your load when you can’t. I hope you find joy where you can, and have chances to send it into the world for others to find.

And I’ll let you know when (if!) I get this story finished. 

Love to you,
s– ❤️