My brain broke during the second month of self-isolation. There was a tipping point between a grey and miserable spring, the heightened societal anxiety about COVID, and me trying to complete a first draft of a novel that was a struggle. I went from writing 3,000 semi-decent, unpolished, words in an evening to 500 garbled words.

I’m a big picture thinker. I like systems, processes, and patterns. It’s one of the reasons I write ridiculously long series—they have long arcs, nuance, and complexity.