Briony Hale

The Last Few Inches

June 10th, 2025

I’m a starter. Always have been. The initial flood of excitement, the rush of ideas? I thrive on it. Execution is a completely different beast.

What this means for writing down my silly little stories is that I can come up with God-tier concepts at the drop of a hat, and struggle like a motherfucker to execute them. It’s the most annoying aspect of how I function.

When it comes to plotting, this looks like a killer first act, outlined to the brink of overdoing it but stopping just short, a satisfying and meaningful ending, and… “hijinks ensue” as the middle 2/3.

All of which is to say, I’m struggling to crawl across the last 2,500 words of a project that should have been done days ago, simultaneously cursing the day job that makes sure I have a patio to write on and a drink to sip on while I write and electricity to keep the computer I write on running and cursing the way a certain nonprofit has a chokehold on people’s idea of productivity in the writing space.

But the important thing is that while I may be crawling, I haven’t stopped. It won’t be over if you don’t stop. One step, one stitch, one word, one tick tick tick of the cosmic spiral at a time, we move forward.

All my love,

BH ❤
New Moon, Old Seeds

May 26th, 2025

Yeah. It’s been a hot minute.

I’ve been here, behind the scenes, doing all the normal shit I do, but I haven’t been posting about it here. Partially that’s because there’s just been too much on my plate and partially that’s because I wanted to keep this space more about the writing process and so so so so so so so much of my life lately has been personal shit that I don’t necessarily want to share.

But the personal shit is what makes you human. And the writing, well, it only matters to you if you’re human, too. If the writing is human. There’s a core essence of us that can’t really be touched by faking it, and the real challenge of writing is finding that core inside of yourself and letting someone else touch it, even if it hurts.

That’s kind of what being in love is like, too.

I want to bring up a soft, tender, raw little core of humanity for this space, but the absolute cold hard truth of things is that what’s been grinding my gears lately has been someone else’s humanity, someone else’s… super secret private medical information, which I would be a tremendous asshole to share on the internet, even anonymously.

So here I am, full of life experience, with nowhere to put it but a book, maybe. I say book. I’ve been kind of hot on shorts lately, actually.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the business end of things. These are things that are not about my lover’s hospitalization, so I can say them. This is a pen name. I have others. This one hasn’t published any actual fiction, yet. I’m fond of this pen name. I’m saving it for something that really, really matters.

Other pen names are writing the literary equivalent of McDonald’s French fries, which are not morally bad per se but perhaps ought to be consumed only in moderation, and tempered by something much better for you. Those are selling. Not much, not yet, but I’ve got a bunch of wheels turning and the business back end of things are moving along quite nicely. I’m happy with it.

I’m sitting on the balcony with an iced coffee and a comfy oversized sweatshirt and my laptop, and there’s a nice layer of clouds over the sky this morning. Birds are singing, the world is otherwise quiet and peaceful. It’s basically my ideal time and condition for drafting, but in nearly two hours of work I’ve barely managed a few hundred words across multiple projects.

This is something I have to work on. I have this idea in my head that writing is just output, just production, just words on a page, and the more ideal conditions I have for writing the easier and faster the output must be. That’s how it works, right? Right?

It’s not, of course. I like to think something is happening internally, in my subconscious, that’s going to let the words flow later. I want to be very forward about this, it’s not a matter of me making excuses. I did 3,500 words on a Sunday without even trying. I’ve been producing a few thousand a day for weeks on end, now. I’m satisfied with what my production is generally.

But it’s not all production. Sometimes you have to let your subconscious do its thing, and unfortunately mine has been occupied by aforementioned hospitalization and the general instability of my day to day life. Things are calming down, now. We’ll be okay.

The sun is shining, but not too brightly. The birds are singing. There’s food in the fridge and money in the bank and even though things are hard right now, I’d rather have my problems. And underneath it all, the raw, pulsing human seed moves through phases like the moon. Tonight, it’s something new.

Maybe I can be something new, too.

All my love,

BH ❤
So, my life blew up.

January 6th, 2025

2024 was so not my year.

I mean in a lot of ways, it was. Things that were absolutely not right for me got shed like old snakeskin. I say snakeskin and not lizard skin because I saw a video of a gecko eating its own shed and I’m not gonna lie, it kind of grossed me out. Snakes, as far as I know, just leave their skin for unsuspecting homeowners to find.

In any case, I lost a bunch of stuff in the last, oh, thirteen months or so. Some of it was death. (RIP to the best asshole of a cat I’ll ever love) ((RIP also to the best asshole of an estranged grandma I’ll ever know. We could have had more time together if you weren’t, you know. Like that.))

Some of it was estrangement. I’ve been on the rocks with some family for a long time. Like… decades. I’m barely old enough to have decades-long beef with anyone! Long story short, there’s nothing like a family event (wedding) to highlight what an absolute load of insane shit your family’s on. In front of three hundred guests, no less. Truly a spectacle. You could make a reality TV show out of these people.

Some of it was a natural progression of things. In all honesty I’ve been spending the last few years trying to build lifetime friendships with sometimes (and right-now) people. It’s not my fault I value friendship so deeply, but it is my responsibility to make sure I’m not throwing that much effort and energy into people who don’t reciprocate. You know when you’re wanted and when you’re an afterthought. There’s no need to sacrifice yourself to stay in draining relationships.

It’s also really important to pay attention to your values. Friends of convenience aren’t always going to translate into lifelong rider-or-dies, but a radical mismatch in values is always going to be a huge red flag.

I also uprooted my whole life and moved across the country to live with my fiancee. That was… a lot.

All in all, I’m doing well. I’ve processed what felt like, honestly, an unfair amount of grief, but I think I’m on the other side of the Big Cry. I’m settling into a new life, a new location. Things sucked last year, but the change was necessary.

I’m not much of a New Years’ Resolution kind of person. It’s still midwinter here, and I now live someplace that gets snow (yay!). It doesn’t feel like time to start anything new.

And yet.

And yet I’m me, and the ground is watered, and the bulbs for spring have already been planted. I can feel them ticking away with the beat of the universe. Life. Renewal. Life. Renewal. It’s not quite time for new shoots to break ground, but it is time for me to make sure there’s room for them to grow.

Excited for the new year.

Much love,

BH ❤
Crossroads

May 6th, 2024

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Having A Hard Time

April 4th, 2024

It’s not that I’m not working. I am. On at least three fronts at all times. I just don’t have much to say about the process right now.

This, too, is part of the process, I know. There’s always a lull in spring between the last melting of snow and the first real bustle of activity. In creation this feels like not a lot of writing, but a lot of thinking about writing and daydreaming about the connections between ideas. Deciding what to write about next, I suppose.

But I also run the risk of abandoning projects, so here I am. For posterity. I keep choosing to invest my time and attention and energy into myself. This is as true for me regardless of whether or not I’m leaving a trail of bread crumbs in my wake, but I want the bread crumbs. Maybe this will all make more sense someday.

Still pecking away at the keys. Still trusting the process.

Much love,

BH ❤
Time crawls on…

February 27th, 2024

I intend to do this weekly. It seems I’ve had a hard time of it lately. This is only partially due to the fact that I feel I have very little to say. This is the condition of winter. Everything slows. Time seems to stop. Days become weeks become months of cold, the kind which sends us burrowing into every scrap of warmth we can find.

Spring comes. It’s earlier, this year. Mid-February sees things I used to wait for until the latter half of March. I don’t know if it’s the weather, or the light, or if the only thing changing is me.

I slowed considerably in my work between the holidays. There was a great push in January, but in spite of my productivity (or perhaps because of it) I fell into a kind of cessation that has now spanned three weeks. I’m crawling out of that burrow, but how strange to find myself a creature which hibernates.

A friend of mine released a book. With no advertisement, no ARCs, no ads, she had a successful launch based on nothing more than the draw of her own ideas. I’m struggling, I think, with the discrepancy between art and commerce. I want to make things that are beautiful. I want to say something that matters. I want to make a living. I don’t know how to do it all. It seems that there are others who can make it happen for themselves, and yet for some reason the idea that it could happen for me is unbelievable.

I hate to confess that I’m struggling. I hate anything that contains even a whiff of vulnerability, which probably doesn’t make for good art. I want more than I think I’m allowed to have. I want more than I think I’m allowed to want. I’m acutely aware of how every element of my life interconnects in the webbed gray matter of my mind. Sometimes I feel mad. Mostly, I think I just need to go outside more and embrace spring.

All of this is to say I’m working again, although slowly, and writing a little bit of commercial work, and writing a little bit of artistic work, and worrying very much about both of them. I have more ideas than I’ll ever be able to efficiently execute, and yet I’m always still worrying that I won’t be able to come up with a new idea ever again.

If anything, I’m feeling the need to purge that which overburdens me. I’m still here, though. Still crawling along. I’ve seen how much a life can change in a year. I’m hoping to keep the ship right, to change for the better.

Much love,

BH ❤
Spring

February 5th, 2024

I think I bit off more than I can chew.

This winter has been a season of death, literal death, the ending of things as visceral and raw as they usually are metaphorical. Grief moves slowly, tendrils lacing into corners you forgot existed until you have to pull it up like a weed. The roots always survive.

I’ve taken more time for myself, less for creation, but the frost is melting and the light is warming and perhaps it’s apocalyptic, how early spring comes these days, but it’s here no matter how I feel about it. Things are changing. It’s time for me to change, too.

I need to start creating more. Need to for my own well-being, not in the sense that I feel an obligation to or a need driven by other’s approval. I don’t suppose I ought to. I need to. I need it like I need air and food and sleep and community. I think sometimes about hands on walls, on how the earliest evidence we have of human civilization is art. It is perhaps the most basic impulse we have.

But I’ve never stopped having ideas. I want to bring them all to light, like little flowers in a garden. I want them all to bloom. I think there’s tremendous potential in embracing the emotional impact of a short story. Not every good idea I have needs to be a whole novel. But there’s still so many ideas, so many concepts, so many images I want to carve into the world.

I have to move forward the same way I always do: carefully. Intentionally. With color-coordinated office supplies, probably. A novel, a collection of vignettes, an anthology of shorts, a short, a short, a short. Poetry. I don’t write much poetry, and what does come out is more of the “notes app poetry” variety than the award-winning kind. But it has to come out, somehow. That, in particular, is a feeling I know.

Everything that exists has to end. But everything that you want to exist has to start, too.

Much love,

BH ❤
More on Grief

January 3rd, 2024

There’s a superstition that deaths happen in threes.

I have my own superstition, one which prevents me from speaking aloud the fears of my heart… just in case doing so would speak them into existence. Perhaps it’s a bit delusional. Paranoid, even. The kind of thinking that develops as one tries to adapt to an unpredictable environment, but that perhaps is material best explored at a later date.

In the throes of grief, though, there is joy. Life goes on, even if it feels like it’s slowed to a pace that isn’t moving. One life ends. Another life, two lives together, begins. The seasons change. Maybe this is spring.

So I sit on the cusp of another change, on the edge of a new year in which massive life changes will occur (only some of which will be planned, intentional), weeks away from the last thing I wrote, and feeling a not-quite-yet-ness to the impulse I have to create.

But the impulse is there. Buried under grief, under inertia, under a seasonal breaking I have come to anticipate as much as dread. I have no idea how to begin. I have no idea where I am. I am surrounded by a sense of impending. Underneath the winter, there is still a dormant soul. Maybe this is spring.

Much love,

BH ❤
Monday.

December 11th, 2023

I don’t know how to write about grief.

The day started off normally. Productive, even. I was writing. I was working. I was functioning.

Sudden, unexpected, absolutely devastating personal loss.

I didn’t have time to prepare. Or maybe I did, and the denial was too strong. You know that everything alive, now, will someday die. You, too, will die. Everyone you love will die. But that doesn’t make watching it happen in real time any easier.

You read about other people’s experiences, about looking for someone who isn’t there anymore. It doesn’t make sense until it does.

It’s taken me a week to get off the couch, but the siren song of rotting in my own despair never stops lilting through the now-empty room. I didn’t know it could be this quiet in here, never noticed how much I relied on someone else to fill the void that was my life before.

I’ve started dabbling again, slowly. I know the words will come, eventually, but my God, in the meantime: it hurts. It hurts. I did not want this reminder that so much of what I have to say is tied, like the moon to the tide, to the constant ebb and flow of emotion. The sea is glass still, now, on the surface; underneath is a hurricane that cannot abate.

I can’t stop moving, or I might stop forever.

BH ❤
Letting Seasons Change

November 28th, 2023

The holidays are as busy as they ever are. My sense of time is distorted by the reduction in hours of daylight, made more nebulous by the inconsistency in my schedule. Don’t get me wrong, I’m happy for the time off, but I have to be more conscientious of the changes when I’m planning.

I’m still writing. Not necessarily every day, but at least every other day. I’m also working on other projects, trying to wrap things up around the house by the end of the year. I’m as prone to purging and nesting in the late autumn as we transition into winter as ever. The waning moon encourages this kind of shift.

It’s easy, when you’re focused on production, to have a sense of accomplishment. Write a thousand words a day. Write ten thousand words a week. Write fifty thousand words a month. The focus on production is a siren song for high achievers, but in taking the notion of publication seriously, one quickly finds a tremendous amount of work which cannot be so easily quantified.

I’m in the part of the cycle where you feel like a hamster on a wheel. You’re producing, and producing, and producing, but there’s not enough of any one thing to make a difference in your life. I know if I keep going I’ll get where I’m headed, but the forest is thick, the lights are dim, and I only know I have to keep going.

I’m staying cozy, prioritizing the people who matter to me, and trying to take advantage of this season of rest. I hope it will all be worth it.

Much love,

BH ❤

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