WRITING LIFE: Slack Tide: When the Writing Stops By Maria “Mia” Millefoglie

Three months before the publication of my memoir, I stopped writing.

I’m swimming out to sea in waters that dissolve into the blackness of the sky. No stars or moon

illuminate my course. My strokes become unsteady and I try to return to shore, but my internal compass fails me. Then the blanket wrapped around me slips into the waves. I gasp for air: Will I find my way back?

Before reaching land, I wake.

For weeks, I’ve carried this dream, one that feels less like a nightmare and more like a mirror of my current writing world.

Three months before the publication of my memoir Daughters of Stone and Tide, I stopped writing. The realization unsettles me. I spent years writing this book where each chapter emerged from unsettling questions. Why did my Sicilian family carry so much silence? What did the sea take from us? How did loss and abandonment become inheritance? I wrote because I needed to understand my family’s history, our place of belonging, and ultimately, myself.

Writing demanded patience, solitude and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. I wrestled with words and with truth. Some mornings, I wrote pages; others I spent crafting a single sentence. The work often felt like excavation, uncovering the stones and deciding what to reveal and what to keep buried.

Now, instead of writing, I market.

Each morning, I open an Excel sheet filled with 83 rows organized by awards, media, events, membership organizations, podcasts, and writing submissions, each strategically color-coded for tracking. Green signals success, yellow hope, and red rejection.

Only eight items have achieved the green status.

I reassure myself that I’m making progress: 231 Facebook friends, five scheduled author talks, one conference, two events. Is this a dismal reach, or even a reach at all? Yet beneath the color-coded cells another tally looms: self-doubt.

For three decades, I worked in the communications and marketing field. I developed campaigns, targeted audiences, created materials, and launched strategic initiatives. The nonprofit mission, the powerful call to serve the community, drove those campaigns. This campaign is driven by the call to serve myself.

I’m required to become visible, to rebrand the self that had to become private and vulnerable in order to write a memoir. Somewhere along the way, I crossed a threshold and erased the writer. In her place, I invented a publicist, event planner, and social media manager. My days are spent studying algorithms instead of delving into words. I’m uncomfortable, yet my greatest fear is this: What if there is nothing left for me to say?

When anxiety overwhelms me, I retreat to familiar ground: research.

I discover that many authors experience identity shifts when the solitary work of writing gives way to the public work of becoming visible. The pressure escalates to maintain an online presence, engage an audience, and turn one’s personal story into a public event. The advice is relentless. The metrics for success are equally daunting in a market that favors best-selling authors. I begin to question my own measures for success.

I dive deeper and encounter the distinction between writer’s block and creative depletion. In an interview with David Perell, Anne Lamott calls writer’s block a misnomer, suggesting instead that sometimes we are simply empty: “the sand has escaped from the burlap sack.” The image resonates with me. I wasn’t blocked so much as emptied. I’ve been pouring from a vessel that I’ve neglected to refill. Perhaps I could stop measuring success by algorithms and begin replenishing it, word by word.

The advice offers reassurance. Marketing did not silence me because I had nothing left to say. It silenced me because I had begun measuring success by my visibility rather than my writing.

Yet creative depletion wasn’t the whole story. Beneath it lay something deeper: fear.

Each step I take toward promotion is a step closer to exposure. Will my book be embraced or rejected? Will readers connect with the deeper questions of identity and belonging? Adoption taught me that acceptance could never be assumed. Publication resurrects a deeper fear that the story, and the storyteller, might once again be rejected. I don’t handle rejection well.

And yet the work of publishing pulls me into different questions. How many followers? How many preorders? How many seats filled at events?

These are necessary questions, but they are often uneasy companions for writers. Publication requires us to reconcile two selves: the private one who creates and the public self who asks others to listen. The page requires something different than marketing. It asks for solitude not performance, vulnerability not certainty, faith instead of metrics

Maybe my dream was never about drowning. As I swam farther into the darkness, I believed the blanket slipping into the waves meant I had lost my protection. Now I realize the dream was asking me to let go of what I could no longer carry.

I cannot control how “Daughters of Stone and Tide” will be received. I cannot predict reviews, readers, or book sales. What I can do is return to the page and the questions that brought me here. But where do I start? I return to the words author Andre Dubus III once shared during the Dingle Writers’ Workshop, writing begins with curiosity. It asks us to follow the questions that refuse to let us go, to trust that the search is as important as the destination.

The writer is still there. She must trust her voice, let go of fear and learn to breathe in public.