An Author on Hiatus

My last post was a long rambling account of why exactly a romance author might, say, disappear for years.

Below are some personal updates from the past couple years while I’ve been AWOL.

Some Epiphanies

I guess you could say I sort of found myself over the past year or so, sort of accidentally.

Silver

Let’s start with really important things like … hair color. 💁🏻‍♀️

I stopped covering my gray hair with dye in August of 2024. It was supposed to be just a cosmetic/practicality decision, but somehow it seemed to change everything.

That’s a bold statement, but I mean it. I’m 42 as I write this, and my hair is now half white, half black. I feel feral and fabulous.

I know it’s just hair, but what started as a “I’m kind of over the regular salon routine” and “Is this dark dye even working with my complexion any more?” really had a lot of ripple effects on my inner well-being as well.

I want to be clear here … I’m not suggesting that embracing gray hair is some sort of magic fix for everyone. I know many women love the identity they get from hair dye. I did myself for years, and 99% of the cherished women in my own life dye their hair.

I only want to speak my piece for anyone out there’s anyone contemplating going gray and feels weirdly scared. I was too. But I stand now on the (almost) other side, and it’s been really liberating.

A Happy Hermit

The silver-hair transition really set off a “what do I want my life to look like” evaluation. One realization kept popping up:

I have spent my entire life thinking there was something just a little bit wrong with me because I’m happiest when mostly left alone to be a happy little hermit.

Now okay, a pause and a deep breath here for me, because I’m terrified to put this in writing, because it makes me feel like a monster, but I think that’s why I need to put it in writing—so I can stop feeling like a monster.

I’ve always known I’m an introvert, always known that I love my alone time, but if I’m really honest, I’ve spent my entire life thinking I was a bad and broken person because of just how much I love it.

So I taught myself to fake loving the social stuff. Because we’re supposed to love connecting with other humans face-to-face, right? If we don’t the robots will take over!

But sometimes I just … don’t work that way. Aside from Mr. Layne, I really connect best with people in writing, whether it’s an email, a handwritten card, a text message. I just feel so much more myself with a pen in my hand or a keyboard under my fingers than I do sitting across the table from them and chatting over burrata.

In my heart of hearts, I want personalized stationary, an old-fashioned wax seal and a pen pal, not a brunch buddy.

I still feel weird about it. Wrong. Broken. I’m working on it, but have gotten a lot better this past year about making peace with just saying, “No thank you…”

Which leads me to:

Peace

In my 20s and 30s, I thought I wanted a glamorous life. High heels, little black dresses, fancy book release parties, a bigger apartment, owning something Chanel, spontaneous trips to London just because.

None of that appeals any more. I still live in NYC and completely love it, but I also know now that I could be reallyhappy in a tiny cabin in the woods, with good coffee whiskey, a notebook, maybe a cat, crisp breezes, perhaps a little garden. And Mr. Layne, of course, who would have to tend that garden, because I while I name all of our plants and sing “Father Figure” to them on the regular (🎶 “I protect the family…”🎶), I don’t often remember to, you know … water them.

All of which to say, what I’ve been craving, seeking and protecting the past few years is peace, on my terms. I don’t know if it’s a just a stage, but what I want more than anything right now is a quiet little life.

And you would think that being a full-time writer would fit so nicely into that vision, but … it’s actually a pretty noisy lifestyle. The inputs are constant, and I’m still sort of figuring out how to balance the needs of the job with a life I love waking up to.

How I’ve filled my days

Reading

I’ve always been an avid reader, riiiiiiight up until the point that I became a published writer. Which is weird, because you think those things should go hand-in-hand, but I just quit making time for reading when I was in the midst of writing deadlines.

So it was really nice to rediscover the joys of reading a book again.

I read nonfiction almost exclusively. I’ve mentioned that before, but always a little sheepishly. As a romance author, when you’re asked what you’re reading, it often feels what people mean is “what novel are you reading that you’d recommend to your readers?”

So for a while there, I felt like I should apologize for not having read the latest rom-com or romantasy or trending sports romance.

But I’m so tired of watering down me , so here we go:

Biographies and philosophy are my favorite, though last year I found learning about the horrors of the Vietnam War, discovering what life was like in 1177 BC, and enraptured by a real life adventure in the Pacific Ocean amidst World War II that involved an aircraft carrier of 27,100 long tons and … a sail.

My current read is Mark Twain by Ron Chernow. It’s a surprisingly quick and easy read for being a 1,200 pages beast!

Astrology

Lest you think the above makes me sound like an elitist snob, I do woo now too.

If you’ve read Miranda in Retrograde, you know that it was about a woman who decided to study astrology for a year despite being a major non-believer. As a non-believer myself, I knew nothing about astrology, so I had to study it to write the book, and did so with an eye roll and a slight lip curl of disdain.

After finishing Miranda, I totally thought I’d sell/donate all my astrology books and put it in the rearview … but astrology wouldn’t let me go.

And, guys? I went deep. I keep the daily transits on my calendar, I can read birth charts, I know what the decans are…

Studying astrology and furthering my knowledge has become a favorite hobby. If any astrology-dabblers want a little insight, drop your Big 3 in the comments! Indulge me!

Websites

Mr. Layne and I still have our side hustle (Last Word Designs) where we build and maintain websites for authors, and increasingly, other industries as well.

I love making websites.

It’s a secondary career, yes, but mostly, it’s my creative outlet. If the resurrecting my writing career goes tits up, that’s where you’ll find me: tinkering in Squarespace and Showit. My own website (Lauren LeDonne, my real name) is my personal playground, I love tinkering with it the way other people get out their sketchbook, paints or knitting.

Journaling

I can literally sit for hours and hours with just a pen and a notebook writing about everything and nothing.

When Mr. Layne travels for work and asks what I did while he’s gone, I’m never quite sure the best way to confess that all I did was listen to rain sounds on my iPad and just write.

Sometimes it’s my own thoughts, sometimes I’ll work on my handwriting and write the same word over and over like a weirdo, other times it’s commonplace-booking, which is writing down passages or quotes from other people’s works for reference. Other times it’s very weird story ideas.

And if you’re thinking, “Layne, are you telling us that you disappeared for years and were just … journaling?”

Honestly, kind of yeah? And loving every second.

I know who I am now. It’s a better feeling than any bestseller accolade I’ve ever received.

A Little But Very Big Recent Thing

My longtime followers, especially from my Instagram era, will remember Bailey, our beloved Pomeranian, who we brought into our family as a puppy just a month after we were married.

💔 Bailey departed this earthly nonsense a few weeks ago for her next great adventure at the fantastic age of 19.

We had a long-standing bit in our home where Bailey’s favorite literary character is Hedwig, the heroic snowy owl from Harry Potter.

That long trek to the final vet visit, as some of you pet owners know, is utterly excruciating. It’s an agonizing brace for the Final Goodbye accompanied by the painful, contradictory doubts: Did we wait too long? Are we sending her off too soon?Is there even a right way to do this?

We arrived at the vet, and a very kind employee started to show us into one room, and then stopped in his tracks and for no reason that we could see said, “Actually. No, sorry.… Let’s go in this next one instead.”

All of the rooms at the vet were named. That next room he led us into? The one where we fed her favorite chicken treats and kissed her goodbye?

It was named:

Hedwig.

And we knew, even with breaking hearts, everything was exactly as it should be.

Give ‘em hell, Bails. I miss you.