The Long Season Before the Bloom

Watching things push through the ground after months of cold and quiet — it reaches right into my chest. Because I know that feeling. I’ve lived it. Not in a garden. In a manuscript.

My debut novel, The Colors of Home, releases this spring. And if you know my story, you know that sentence didn’t come easily. That book lived in me for more than a decade. I carried it through seasons of doubt. Through life interruptions. Through moments when I genuinely wondered if it would ever find its place in the world.

It bloomed anyway. On God’s timeline. Not mine.

I want to talk to the writer who’s still in the long season. The one looking at a manuscript that feels like it’s been underground forever. The one who’s pitched and waited and revised and waited again. The one watching other writers bloom and quietly asking, What’s wrong with me?

Nothing is wrong with you.

Here’s what I know about seeds: the work doesn’t stop just because you can’t see it. Underground, in the dark, something is forming. Roots are going deeper than they ever could in full sun. That depth? The bloom depends on it later.

Those years I spent with Ebony’s story, they weren’t wasted. They were forming. I grew as a writer. As a person. I understood my characters more deeply because I’d lived more of my own life. The book that releases this March is richer and truer because it waited.

I also had to stop apologizing for the timeline. Comparison will steal your joy. Full stop. Your story is not late. It is not behind. It is exactly where it needs to be right now.

So this spring, here’s my invitation: tend your own ground. Write the next scene. Revise the chapter you’ve been avoiding. Say yes to the critique that scares you. Do the work only you can do on the story only you can tell.

The blooming will come.

It always does.

What season is your writing in right now, and what is it teaching you? I’d love to hear your story in the comments.