Not going to lie February was kind of difficult

A lot happened in February and a lot of it was pretty difficult. I lost a close family member, my elderly mother had an accident which required a greater amount of care, and there was an unprecedented amount of snow that was dumped onto my part of the world in the space of a week which meant that there were hours and hours spent on snow clearing. Time and energy that I would have loved to spend elsewhere.

For me it's important to put my difficulties into perspective as a lot of other people in the world are going through so much worse than I am, but also to recognize my own fatigue, pain, and frustration as well. It's an impossible balancing act to maintain with perfection, but the closer I get to that balance the more I feel I'm able to both give myself time and space to recover, as well as keep from wallowing in self-pity, saying Alhamdullilah, and persisting.

A part of maintaining that perspective is to recognize what I have accomplished over the last month. The biggest of which is moving into a different phase in the journey to publication of "Under The Full And Crescent Moon"

The other stuff first

Before I get to the transition, let's have a quick rundown of what else I've done.

Canva and Instagram posts

One of those things, which probably deserves a blog post of it's own, is that I've started to delve into making picture social media posts on Canva. I've made two of them and will probably make at least one more, and I will say here (so that I don't forget), the inspiration for making these comes from a deep seated desire to get my thoughts across in social media. This is a landscape that is populated with so many corrosive takes that make it hard for us to find our common humanity, and come together to tackle the immense problems that we face as a collective species. It's a fool's errand, but at least it's cathartic, which is not nothing.

Using the blog to help with my other social media posts

I have a lot of ideas for social media posts that I want to make to build up my presence in social media, which will hopefully lead to more follows, which will hopefully lead to more sales. A lot of these are on the backlog of things that I feel like I should do, and it causes me a fair bit of stress.

So the only other blog post I've made in this month here, other than this one, has been an attempt to use this blog as a way to help me with my social media posting. It's worked fairly well as I've used it to make a video publicizing the review I wrote back in December, which leads me too..

The video I made to publicize the review I wrote in December

I wrote a 5000 word here for a terrible bit of Zionist political thinking. It was an interesting experience to revisit something a few weeks later and I found that in that time I was actually able to glean some more insights from it on the struggle for freedom in Palestine. Those made it into the blog post I wrote that I mentioned in the last section and helped me make social media posts and videos about the book that I'm actually pretty happy with.

An interesting thing here is I thought my social media outreach would do better on non Meta platforms like Tiktok and Bluesky, but it turns out that it was on Threads that it got the most engagement. Social media is very odd and it feels like I'm going to have to continue posting on a lot of different platforms in order to get my words noticed. I'm not happy about this but it is what it is.

The transition

I cannot count the number of times I have edited "Under The Full and Crescent Moon". Especially as, early on, I was editing as I was writing. The number of times I read the book during the editing process with my publisher though has been about a half a dozen times as the manuscript has gone through the developmental edit and copy edit processes.

I honestly thought I would be reading the book one more time for the proof edit, but it turned out that was not the case. The proof edit process was to be done purely by the publisher. But I already had it in my head that I would be reading the book for editing purposes and so I went ahead and did. Speaking honestly, this was probably not the best use of my time as it resulted in only a tweak or two to the novel and I could have spent that time doing marketing.

But finishing this final read was an odd experience that I am still processing. It felt as if I was saying goodbye to something. It was not a goodbye to the content of the novel, as, I am going to read it again when, Inshallah, I hold it physically in my hands. Instead, after mulling over it for a while, I think the reason for the strange emotions is that I was saying goodbye to the phase of my life, the long phase of my life, in which I was writing it.

I have no idea how long that phase was, I can say with only some degree of certainty that it has been more than fifteen years since I had the idea for the novel, then researched it, practiced my craft for it by writing short stories, then wrote it, and finally, edited it into the form that it will be published in. There's just no more changes that I will be making to it. I am done, and that is deeply disorienting.

Thinking about it, I felt something similar just this year when I realized that my eldest son is now almost as tall as I am. Just as I am done with the novel, I am also done with the phase of life where my eldest was not only my child, but also a child. He's a young adult now, and my novel is complete. My life has changed.

I am not good with change. Even less minor events like changing jobs or changing homes, all put me into a weird headspace where I feel disconnected from everything as the anchors of my old life fall away and I have to find new ones. I cannot help but be incredibly grateful to the Almighty that both of these recent transitions in my life, completing my novel, and now being a parent to a young adult, are ones that I want. I am blessed.

But just as I am trying to give myself space to come out of the hard month that was February 2025, I have to also try and give myself space to come to terms with the new phase of my publishing journey that is full time marketing and raising a soon to be teenager.

There's only seven months left until launch date though. And the demands on my time outside of my book might not give me that space and I will have to find a way to persist without.

And to that I can only say Alhamdulillah.