Writing Update! | short stories, publications, & my new novel

After nearly a year of burnout-driven writing stagnation, ShaelinWrites says her creative momentum has returned—starting in spring—alongside a busy slate of editing, new short fiction, and the launch of a new novel. The turnaround matters because the slump wasn’t tied to craft or motivation about writing itself; it was life burnout that left her unable to write with her former energy, and she couldn’t fully “take a break” from other obligations. From last June to this May, she drafted only a handful of pieces (a personal fantasy project beginning, one short story, and two flash fictions). By late spring, energy returned, and she began writing regularly again, jumping between projects in a structured “blocks” workflow that finishes specific tasks before moving on.

Her biggest craft milestone is completing developmental and line-level revisions on Holding a Ghost. After a messy Draft Three—where the manuscript started strong but “crashed and burned”—she rebuilt the developmental edits using an evolving chapter-by-chapter outline. Instead of reading straight through, she tackled the book non-linearly: she selected five chapters she could fix quickly, then worked through easier ones toward the hardest, including chapters that required new material. That process led to an improved Draft Five, which she completed by reading the manuscript linearly to check continuity and flush out details. She says the result is no longer just “better,” but at a point she’s happy enough to share with friends, even while acknowledging remaining small issues.

On Honey Vinegar, she completed Draft 10—described as micro-edits driven by her literary agent’s notes. The changes were tiny but took longer than expected because she was careful and tentative, and she estimates she entered the final pass with many small typos still present. Submission is planned “fairly soon,” and she’s paused further updates on that project until a book-deal announcement becomes possible.

Short fiction is where her recovery shows most clearly. She says she “forgot how to write short fiction,” especially how to generate short-story concepts. Her fix was immersion: reading short story collections intensely (six almost back-to-back), plus combing through one-line summaries to internalize what short-story premises look like. That reset led to multiple new ideas and a return to drafting. She’s completed and edited “Where Your Body Is Buried” (second person; a lonely young woman impersonates a missing girl who looks like her) and has started submitting it to a contest. She’s also editing “Landline,” aiming to keep it under 2,500 words for the CBC Prize; it’s a comic, dialogue-heavy story about a failing marriage, an affair with a telemarketer selling lawn mowers, and it’s being revised with contest deadlines as motivation.

Beyond short stories, she’s starting a new novel called Salt Birds. With Honey Vinegar nearing submission and Holding a Ghost in feedback, she feels she finally has time to draft again, planning to alternate deep work on the new book with occasional returns to Holding a Ghost and short-story tasks.

Publication wins round out the update: her long short story “How to Slaughter” is now free online with content warnings for animal cruelty and non-graphic abuse; her flash fiction “After Hours” was nominated for Best of the Net by Vagabond City Lit; and a new story, “Tabula Rasa,” is out in The Thames Review. She also published a book review in a reading recommendation series and shares that her story “Tabula Rasa” follows a teenager whose sister went missing and whose mother allows a hitchhiker into her sister’s old bedroom—written with a teenage voice she calls one of her favorites.