by Anne R. Allen
It’s the darkest day of the year. Which means it will get lighter from now until summer. 🙂
Should we try to write through the darkness?
Sometimes writing can keep you going through the holidays, but treating the rule “Write Every Day” as if it is set in stone can cause stress and despair. So only do it if it makes your life brighter. Sometimes being with family is more important than anything else–especially if you’re around elders and small children. But holiday chaos and disruption can also drive you bonkers–especially this year, when we already have about as much chaos and disruption as we can handle
I’m still home alone nursing my pneumonia after an unpleasant stay in the hospital. I’m old enough that pneumonia can be dangerous, so I’m taking it very easy. My wonderful neighbors feed me, and family will be coming to visit sometime after the 25th.
So I’ll be writing away on my WIP, Mrs. Rodriguez is Not Sorry this week. It will be the 11th installment in my Camilla Randall humorous mystery series.
It’s a Time to Break the Rules
Traditional Winter Solstice celebrations included the “Lord of Misrule” and the upside-down merriment of servants acting as masters and vice versa. It was a time to break rules. One of my rules for myself has always been to keep politics out of my writing and blogging. But today I’m breaking it. Trolls have been attacking this blog with batshit comments that accuse me of being one of the liberal “sophisticated intelligentsia” who scorn X-Twitter and all the denizens therein. Silly, since I’m still on X-Twitter and don’t often criticize my fellow Tweeters on this blog. (I suspect these are paid trolls who don’t understand much English. I do delete their comments, and my WordPress elves are learning to send them immediately to spam.)
But since I’ve already been deemed a dangerous person by the troll community, I guess I’ll break my rule and come out of my intelligentsia closet.
Here it is: Yes, I am unrepentantly pro-reason, pro-rule of law, pro-human rights, pro-planet Earth, pro-kindness, and pro-democracy.
To me, this is indeed the darkest time of the year, or any year, for what used to be my country, and for the world. Forces of chaos and destruction have taken a wrecking ball to everything we used to cherish. This is the most dangerous time I’ve experienced in my long life. I find living in MAGAstan terrifying, exhausting, and embarrassing.
But I resist this cruel regime and, like Mrs. Rodriguez, I’m not sorry.
Making Merry With Writing
One way I cope with my outrage, shock, and terror is to look for humor in the chaos. (After all, “merry” means fun and lighthearted, and perhaps a little tipsy. No matter what you’ve heard, it’s not a religious word.) But as a result, I’m writing my first overtly political novel in the thirty-something years I’ve been writing long-form fiction.
Waverly Nelson Rodriguez is an old friend of Camilla that some readers will recognize from The Best Revenge. She’s an over-privileged WASP who is swept up in an “immigration” raid because of her wealthy husband’s name. But she thinks she’s been kidnapped by a drug cartel. There’s also a mysterious corpse in the trunk of her Mercedes, and a wild raid of San Luis Obispo’s famously pink hotel, the Madonna Inn. Camilla is again tempted by Mr. Wrong, and, of course, we have to deal with a very opinionated cat. I hope it gives readers some laughs.
Practice Gratitude
I also need to remember to be grateful for what I have. The ability to write, for one thing. We need to remember that’s a gift. Writing guru Nathan Bransford has a great blogpost this week encouraging us to write for writing’s sake. No matter how much we are thwarted by terrible circumstances, art that comes from the human soul will always be important.
And it’s good to remember that even in darkness, lights shine. I personally am very grateful for our shiny new Pope. I’m not Catholic, but I think our American Pope Leo represents the very best of what we used to believe the USA was about. He gives me hope.
I also need to remember to be grateful that nobody’s dropping bombs on my house, and I haven’t lost my home to a wildfire or flood. Also, I’m grateful for my amazing neighbors and friends. I’m grateful for my publisher, Thalia Press, and for all of you, my readers.
No matter how dark things feel, practicing gratitude helps.
Writing Can Help us Find Order in the Chaos
I feel better when I can calm down enough to work on the book (which is still only half finished in rough draft.) It’s a way to channel my conflicting emotions and make some kind of order of it all. I’m encouraging you to do the same.
Any act of creativity fights the dark powers of chaos and destruction.
Maybe a book like Mrs. Rodriguez–or even this post–will get me disappeared by MAGA’s lawless death squads. Or maybe some deus ex machina will save this country from its sadistic march to self-destruction.
But at least I’ll know I’ve tried to generate a little merriment, and shine some light in the darkness. I encourage all of you to do the same. Write. Not because you have to, and not because of any “rule,” but because it is your gift—to yourself, and to the world.
by Anne R. Allen (@annerallen and annerallen.bsky.social) December 21, 2025
What about you, scriveners? What are you grateful for? Can you write through chaos and upheaval? What is most likely to get in the way of your writing?
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HOW IT ALL BEGAN: This prequel to the Camilla mysteries romps through the glitzy 1980s, when 19-year-old fashionista Camilla loses everything: her fortune, her gay best friend, and eventually her freedom.
When she’s falsely accused of a TV star’s murder, she discovers she’s made of sterner stuff than anyone imagined — herself included.
“Serious comedy…written without a trace of sentimentality and an underlying tough realism that belies the wonderfully over-the-top nature of some of the characters–the humour in this is necessarily dark–but there’s any number of laugh out loud lines in it.” …Lucinda Elliot at Sophie De Courcy“
I had a love/hate relationship with each character within the amazing pages of this very well written book… I WANT TO HAVE MORE!!!!!! “…Kim Justice at Breath of Life Reviews
“Anne Allen had me laughing unexpectedly and sometimes out loud with her wonderful crafting of her words into sentences that became alive and three dimensional throughout these stories.” …John Williamson at Goodreads
Find The Best Revenge at Amazon, Smashwords, Kobo, Google Play, AppleBooks, & NOOK
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Featured image via Wikimedia Commons
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