March 16, 2026

There's a particular feeling that comes with sitting back down at a desk you haven't visited in a while. Not quite guilt, not quite relief — something in between. A quiet recognition that this is where I've always felt I should be.

It's been a few years.

After publishing For the Love of Mandy in 2017, life did what life does — it arrived all at once and didn't apologize for it. I was running a holistic arts and healing center out of a studio above our garage on forty acres in Chesterfield, Virginia, with anywhere from sixteen to twenty-five people gathering on Saturdays, classes in intuitive development and Reiki and energy healing filling the week, and a spiritual community that had grown into something genuinely beautiful. At the same time, I was caring for my mother — who lived with us for thirteen years as Parkinson's took its slow toll — and for my brother, who became disabled after we lost her. The marketing of my novels, which had never been my strong suit to begin with, quietly fell away. The books kept winning awards. Nobody was reading them.

Then my husband decided to retire. We took a trip to Egypt in early 2020 — a journey that gave me some of the most profound spiritual experiences of my life — came home, and walked directly into a pandemic. Life went, as I can only describe it, completely topsy-turvy. We made the decision to downsize from forty acres to five, spent over a year living with my daughter's family while our new home was being built, and I spent much of that time finding stable care arrangements for my brother, who now lives ninety minutes away. We moved into our new home in January of 2023.

I signed up for the Extension Master Gardener program almost immediately — and then somehow ended up redesigning an entire organizational website, launching a monthly newsletter, and serving as the public relations and marketing officer for the Goochland-Powhatan Master Gardeners, all on a volunteer basis, simply because they needed someone and I couldn't say no. It turns out that everything I didn't know how to do for my own books, I learned how to do for everyone else. The irony is not lost on me.

I'll be honest: I'm a little burned out. And I'm ready to come home.

Home, for me, has always been the story. Amanda and Garry and Robbie have been living in my head since 1986 — yes, really — and the third chapter of their story, a novel called Whispering Hope, has been waiting patiently for me to sit back down and write it. I intend to do exactly that.

In the coming weeks and months, you'll see this site come alive in ways it hasn't in years. New cover designs for both existing novels — because the stories deserve a fresh face for a new audience. The Spanish edition of One Chance, One Moment, completed by a gifted translator in Argentina, finally making its way into the world. And eventually, the first words of Whispering Hope — Robbie's story, set twenty years later, about love and healing and the particular kind of hope that refuses to go quiet no matter how long it has to wait.

I'm returning to this with more marketing knowledge than I had before — learned the hard way, in service of someone else's organization, which feels about right for my life. I'm returning with a clearer sense of what these books are and who they're for. And I'm returning with the same stubborn certainty I've always had that these stories matter and deserve to be read.

If you've been here before — thank you for waiting. If you're new — welcome. Either way, I'm glad you're here.

The desk is open again.

— Judith