In 2019, I applied and was accepted to the English master’s program at Minnesota State, Mankato for the 2020 year. If only I had known at the time what the world would look like by the fall of 2020, maybe I would have thought twice about this decision. At the same time, I often think that the extreme upheaval that happened in 2020, and the absolute chaos of life that followed are perhaps the exact circumstances that allowed me to be as successful as I was.

Either way, it was an interesting time to be starting school again for the first time in five years.

I learned a lot about myself in the two years it took for me to get my master’s. Both in a very literal sense (I was diagnosed with ADHD early on in 2020 and the research I put into seeking this diagnosis subsequently led to me seeking an autism diagnosis in 2021) and in a more figurative sense.

One thing that I didn’t have a lot of time for during this time was creative writing. Especially long-form creative writing, which has been a staple of my life since middle school. Of course, I was doing a lot of academic writing, but there was definitely the feeling that something was missing.

I attempted a manuscript during the first year of my master’s, a still unfinished contemporary queer-ish romance (which couldn’t be any more wildly outside of my normal form). I wrote about half of the story before I got overwhelmed by schoolwork and then never opened the project again until just now when I went to check how much I’d actually written.

Unsurprisingly whatever combination of Covid stress and school stress inspired me to write a meet-cute romance novel in 2020 has not returned to date.

But while I didn’t manage to write anything else beyond schoolwork in the rest of my master’s program, that doesn’t mean I stopped planning. In fact, what started as a vague itch to write something “witchy” in 2019 soon joined with the flash of some dialogue which soon became full-on character planning, which gave way to world planning and literal cartography work like you can see in my images.

Along with this, by the time I finished my master’s I had four separate storylines, which all took place at different times within the world I had created, with a host of characters to fill them out. Hence my working title The Behemoth.

I meticulously mapped out my story (along with the literal map) and decided to undergo my first round of drafting during Camp NaNoWriMo in April. But even with the 50k I wrote in April, I still had half a manuscript worth of writing left to do – and that’s just one of the four storylines I’ve got in mind.

Needless to say, I’ve got a ways to go yet on this manuscript, leagues before it ever sees the light of day beyond my computer screen. But getting back into the swing of writing on a regular basis, of dreaming up storylines and characters and watching them take shape in front of my eyes, has been a breath of fresh air after years of very serious academic work.

For anyone out there who, like me, has taken an unplanned break from your passion, try not to fret so much about “losing” those skills. What I’ve found as I’ve dived headfirst back into novel writing is that, while the skills might need a little oiling, the muscle memory is still there. If you can just push through the cringey bits at the start while you shake off all those cobwebs, you’ll find the joy it brings you is still the same.

Happy writing!