Hello dear friends and subscribers,

I hope this blog post finds you in wonderful shape.

So, October has arrived. This is my favorite month because it seems that nature offers us the most beautiful colors before falling asleep for the winter. And it’s the month of my birthday 🥂✨ and Halloween. I’ve always loved October, with the end of the year on the horizon…

About September, I must admit that it was an intense month, exhausting.

MOM’S LIFE

We have started the testing for autism for our second son, Baptiste. We will have the results in two weeks. It was very tiring, stressful too… but I am relieved that it is finally done 🙏🏼.

WRITER’S LIFE

Also, in September, I had to prepare my online course platform and the layout of my writing book, HOW TO WRITE YOUR FIRST NOVEL.

It took me a long time to feel ready to release all this, because I always have the “impostor syndrome” in everything I do, but I know people who have never published a single novel and yet give writing advice, which has strangely reassured me.

After a dozen of books published and more than 20 years of writing, I have 24k people subscribed to my two blogs in French and English, and I have 30k people on my French and English networks as well. I tell myself that if these people follow me it’s because I must have interesting things to share.

I had to do a lot of research, website and price studies to prepare everything in the best way, and it’s finally ready. For the moment, the courses will be hosted on my (French) author’s site but, in the near future, I will find another host. I don’t do personalized coaching, I just transmit in video what I have learned. It’s a way to gather all the advice I’ve given over the last few years in one place.

Unfortunately, I no longer have the time to respond to each person who contacts me for writing advice, because as you well understood, the time I used to give on social networks is shrinking with Baptiste’s care.

I have always been the one who motivates, who supports, who accompanies, who is positive, and I remember that I needed to show this side of me on social networks, when everything was going so badly in my life, in order not to fall into depression and total discouragement.

You don’t know, because I’ve never talked about it, but I was really down in the dumps, and it was like a hole, wet and dark, and I had no idea if I would ever see daylight again.

I just kept this hope in me, that one day everything would get better. But that hope looked a lot like despair. I clung to it desperately, I remained positive on the networks and outside, to show nothing of my wounds and doubts because I was convinced that I had to keep faith that one day everything would get better.

Even if it is a blind belief, you have to hold on to it and never let go of it. Every ordeal is there to teach us something about ourselves, resilience, patience, our own physical or mental strength… we just have to believe that one day everything will get better.

After a while, I saw the end of the tunnel. It wasn’t so long ago, just last July, I finally pointed the tip of my nose to the light and I was able to let in all the beautiful things in life.

It was a great relief to let go of everything that was hurting me, to accept to control nothing, to know nothing, to foresee nothing, to let anger against myself, against nature (which took my first baby and gave me two sons who are not in the “norm”) vanish, to let go of the guilt of thinking my thoughts, and not being a perfect mother, to accept the failure of relationships, to draw a line under the past, to just leave me in peace from time to time. And move on.

With all the hardships I have gone through, all the challenges I still have in my life as a mother and as a woman, I realize how much I have to share and bring.

For the moment my sharing is about writing and promoting, but very soon I will share other things about life’s trials, grief, divorce, autism, themes that I already address in my novels. I have a lot of projects and I’m very excited about this new path, I’m really looking forward to it, I feel that maybe I can help people find hope again.

Along with all this, I have received a new request from a literary agent regarding my novel on perinatal grief. She wants to read the first 50 pages and will give me her answer in 4 months… Keep your fingers crossed.

As for my October schedule, well, I’m going to work on my next novel, the one about abusive relationships. I’m have to read and rewrite the first (then second, then third) draft until the end of the year, to publish it I think in early spring.

That’s it for the news,

I send you lots of love and wish you a wonderful week!

Lily 💝