There is a scene I have always liked in movies. It is when a priest administers absolution. He makes a particular gesture that means “I absolve you of your guilt, your sin, your transgression. You are forgiven. Go and do better.” There is always a sense of relief afterward, a sense that now the protagonist can start over. A sense of renaissance, new birth.

I was thinking about this recently because it seemed to me that after a period of intense productivity in which I published a novel every year, the last of them in 2019, I had a period of about five years in which I was much less productive. I wrote short stories, poems, and essays, and I even published some collections, but no novel. And of course I wondered what was wrong with me, what happened to derail the plans I had made for myself, which of course included writing more novels.

And then I looked back, and realized. The Sinister Mystery of the Mesmerizing Girl was published in 2019. At that point, I knew that I needed a break — my schedule for the second and third Athena Club books had been so tight that I was exhausted. But I had plans. I remember talking about them at the World Science Fiction Convention that year — it was in Dublin. And then, in January 2020, Covid happened. That semester, we started on campus and ended on Zoom. In the fall, I taught remotely. The next spring, I taught hybrid classes. The fall after, I was granted a Professional Development Leave of Absence to develop a curriculum that focused on creativity and innovation in writing pedagogy. The following spring, the spring of 2022, I taught on a Fulbright Fellowship in Budapest. The Covid pandemic was ending, so I started teaching on Zoom and ended on campus. That was also the year Russia invaded Ukraine, the year of refugees coming across the border. Right after the Fulbright, I taught a summer semester in the College of General Studies London program. The following year, I taught a full CGS curriculum for the first time. Which brings us to the fall of 2023.

In the fall of 2023, I applied for a permanent position at CGS. In the spring of 2024 I went through the interview process and got the teaching position I had applied for, which made me so glad and grateful. At the same time, I was going through the process of getting ultrasounds and biopsies for a lump on my neck that the doctors eventually decided might be cancerous. At the end of spring semester, I had surgery. Fortunately, there was no cancer, just some odd-looking but completely benign cells. That summer I taught in London. And then, in the fall, I went to Budapest and opened up the manuscript of the novel I had planned so long ago, which I had barely started before Covid hit. And now I’m working on it.

So there you go. Why wasn’t I as productive as I had planned to be in the past five years? Because in those five years, I have not had a single semester that has been the same, in which I’ve been able to say, “It’s fine, I know what I’m doing.” I’ve been working and learning, and I’ve loved most of it, except the Covid and the surgery. I really do love being a teacher, and it’s a joy to work with my students. But the truth is that writing is work, hard work, work that takes time. I love doing it, and I do it for the love of putting words on a page, but it’s not something I can do in bits of time between doing other things. Poetry, yes. A novel, no. That takes focus and concentration.

So I’m officially absolving myself. I’m making that priestly — in this case priestessly — gesture that means I am forgiven. And if you need absolution, if the last few years have not been as productive for you as you would have liked and you’re feeling guilty, then consider yourself absolved as well. You don’t even have to confess anything, and you don’t need to be particularly contrite. Believe me, I know you feel badly enough about it already. If you’re anything like me, you carry a load of guilt for all the things you did not do, or did not do well enough, as well as for the dishes in the sink and the fact that you haven’t vacuumed for a while.

Let’s start fresh, like pieces of laundry hanging on the line. Let’s figure out what we want to do now, and not worry about the past. It has flown away like a flock of swans, and we are left with a field of possibility that we can fill with more swans, or dancing princesses, or a carnival. If you’ve already started working on something, go you! If not, get out a fresh notebook, or a blank canvas, or whatever you’re going to start on. Figure out what you want to do, and go do it.

Of course, if you’re still in the middle of a great muddle, just hang in there and get through it. But I’m grateful that for the first time since my last novel was published, my life feels relatively stable. Of course, there are crazy things going on all over the world — our political situation is fraught, the climate is out of whack, and it’s entirely possible that humanity will destroy itself within the next few years. But in the meantime, I’m going to be writing.

(The image is Cloister Lilies by Marie Spartali Stillman.)