First off, thank you to everyone who’s come here for the launch of the Turning Points blog series this week! Thank you for making Gayle Forman and Sean Ferrell feel welcome and commenting on their amazing, inspiring, and brilliant posts. (If you missed these two opening posts—oh but you can’t miss them!—please just ignore my own boring blog o’ the day and go read Gayle’s guest post on overcoming bitterness and finding gratitude and Sean’s guest post on realizing the Writer never shows up.) The Turning Points series will be back next week. I’m taking the day off for MLK day, so look for a new post on Tuesday, and three posts in total next week! I love each of these posts and can’t wait for you to read them.

But if you’re still here, I’ll tell you a strange thing: Last night I had a delicious dinner (gnocchi!) with an editor friend, and I was talking about my publishing junk and I realized how light I felt about it all. Like… anything I used to worry about and strain myself over really didn’t matter so much anymore because I couldn’t control it, so there was no point in worrying. Even like some of the things I’d taken so seriously before were not really so important. Like things were fine. Like I was perfectly content and okay.

Yeah… strange moment, right?

Now why am I feeling this way? No idea. Maybe it’s that I love the novel I’m revising and the writing went exceptionally well yesterday. Maybe it’s that I finished a new draft of a proposal for a new novel and I’m proud of myself for turning that in. Maybe it’s that I have ideas for future novels and I just want to focus on getting to the place where I can write them. Maybe it’s my writer friends, who help more than they know. Maybe part of it is even how I’m spending time focusing on these new features on my blog: thinking about other writers and their books instead of mine. I love doing that. Maybe it’s simply that it’s a new year and feels like a fresh start.

So I woke up this morning feeling lighter than I have in a long time. As I said on Twitter, I feel like this:

Yes, that’s the morning Angela Chase woke up and discovered she was inexplicably “over” Jordan Catalano.

Now, in this analogy does that make the publishing industry my Jordan Catalano? That makes a terrible kind of sense.

I don’t know how long my good feeling will last. But it’s nice while I have it.

Come back next week for more authors revealing their Turning Points! (And I’m still giving away Imaginary Girls… you can enter here.)