Yesterday morning, I received an email with my edited manuscript. I was all prepared to dive into the edits and see how I could improve my writing before sending it back to the publisher for one more round of final edits.
Then, I read the email. The small press I had to decided to go with is shutting down as of January 1, 2025 and will not be publishing Catching Dreams.
Hey there!
It’s been a while since I’ve updated, but if you follow me on social media, (which I highly recommend you do) you’ll know that my chapbook is almost complete! We have a title, my publisher and editors have polished it, and I just have my final checks to do before we take it to print. That being said, we’re doing some pretty unusual and cool things with its formatting that I think you all will be excited to see once it’s in print. I’m so excited to share this labor of love with all of you.
Speaking of labors of love, I’m currently going over the first round of edits for Catching Dreams that my publisher has sent over before sending it to the publisher. The first round of edits involves tightening up the prose, tidying up some redundancies, and just overall polishing it up. From there, it will go to the publisher’s editors, go through more editing, and then, hopefully, we’ll start drafting up a cover and it will – fingers crossed – hit the bookshelves in 2025!
I am so excited to share with you the progress of my journey. Also, while I have been away from my website, two of my poems were published in a local literary magazine called Perspectives. If you are interested in receiving a copy, please let me know and I can send you an autographed copy.
That’s all for now, but be sure to keep checking my website for more updates!
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about my art and my writing. I have found sketch pads and notebooks where I have ripped out nearly every single page because I was expecting perfection out of myself. What a lofty goal – perfection ten out of ten times? It was ludicrous. I realized I stopped enjoying the process when I was so focused on the outcome.
It took me some time, and a lot of journaling, to revitalize my love for writing and art as a process. I spent today working on a painting where I told myself, no matter what, I was going to keep it and not throw it away. I accidentally spilled a blotch of purple paint on the corner and my first thought was that I needed to fix it, but instead, I just lived with it. And you know what? All Hell didn’t break loose. I survived, and the painting survived too.
I used to have a friend who said, “It’s not in spite of our flaws that we’re wonderful, it’s because of them.” And that’s the attitude I’m bringing into the new year. I’m enjoying my imperfections, whether it’s in my poetry, fiction, or art. I stopped creating for so long because I was expecting too much out of myself.
Now, I’m back to simply enjoying the process – no matter what the outcome may be.
To recap 2023, I moved to Independence, Missouri, in the last few weeks of December 2022 and started the new year with a brand new beginning. I left everything and everyone I knew to try a fresh start.
I lived with a roommate in Independence for a couple of months before we quickly learned how incompatible we were. I had a couple of jobs and worked on my writing.
For a few months, I just kept my nose to the grindstone, job searching, writing, making new friends, and creating art.
All the while, I was dealing with a bully who spread rumors about me and devastated my self esteem, which resulted in me tearing down this website and rebuilding it from scratch.
I let her erode at my self esteem until there was nothing of me left, and I was hospitalized. I was hospitalized twice last year because of my issues with my mental health.
I struggled immensely with being so far from my family and my loved ones, but I found a way – I continued to work hard and got a publishing offer on my debut novel and my poetry chapbook.
I made new friends while living in Kansas City and met a lot of great and memorable people. I experienced a lot of amazing things, whether meeting film directors and actors from genre films who encouraged me to shoot my own movies or going to see an aerial performance in an ice crystal cave.
I met people like the Mormon who wanted to marry me or the girl who took me to expensive lingerie boutiques and went swimming with me long after the pool had closed.
It was a year of ups and downs, but most importantly, it was a year of growth and new experiences.
We’ll see what 2024 holds.
My poem about my grandmother’s battle with Alzheimer’s is being published in an anthology, Forgotten Fragments of Time, to raise money and awareness about the disease, and I just found out a small press has accepted Catching Dreams, my debut novel!
They want to publish my book. My baby. The one that has been formulating in my mind since I was twelve and having vivid dreams about my grandpa after he died. The book that all began because I kept asking myself, “What if?”
They want to publish it. I never thought I’d be a traditionally published author, but here I am with a contract coming my way.
Isabelle Palerma 