About Sabbatical. About me.
Let’s start with the bad news. I’m going to push the SABBATICAL release back a few more days. The new release date is November 21.
Now I’m going to tell you why.
Every now and then I write a book that’s meant to hit close (and I hope maybe it’ll hit readers in the same way.) The entire Bay Area Blues series is like slicing open my brain and heart and excavating the worst and best parts of the city where I was born, the city I love, but a city I no longer know. I wrote LAYOVER primarily to process so much of the unhealed pain from my grandfather’s death when I was 20. It helped, but that wound will never heal and I can accept that now.
I wrote BACK IN THE DAY to process a few things, actually. Mostly, I wanted to deal with a trip I took back to the Bay Area in 2019. On that trip, I spent a few hours walking around Oakland. On my way to meet friends, I was in Downtown Oakland and looked up, only to realize that I was standing on a corner, just a few blocks from the City Center and Chinatown, that I knew very well, but hadn’t recognized at first.
When I was in high school, a friend and I used to catch the bus straight down Shattuck Avenue from Berkeley to go to a web design class at a local non-profit twice a week. At the time, it was a great opportunity to learn html. I remember nothing from that class but I loved those long bus rides. And the bus stop I took to get home was across the street.
I stood on that corner the day my eldest niece started kindergarten. I was weeks away from leaving state to go to grad school, but I didn’t want to miss this day. In fact, while I’d been pulling together my grad school applications, I’d also been getting her ready for school; potty-training her, going over her letters, numbers, and colors while reading Black history children’s books to her at nap time. I was also helping care for her younger sister, who was about 6 months old, and she soaked up everything her sister was learning at the time. That fall/winter was one of the best of my life.
So it was special that I got to watch her start school before I started school myself. But she was also The Baby. She was - and is - the sweetest, most sensitive, human and I worried about her being in an entirely new environment with people who wouldn’t care for her. Her mother and I dropped her off at school and then decided to hang around the area… just in case. We walked around the City Center, stopped into the Walgreens across the street from that bus stop for Arizona Ice Teas and sunflower seeds probably, and then picked The Baby up from school as soon as we possibly could.
I could spend the rest of this post telling you about so many other memories I have from that one corner alone, but what mattered was that the familiar corner was no longer familiar and that hit me in the gut. So, I wrote Amir and Alonzo’s story to explore what it’s like to watch something (or someone) you love change before your eyes and drift away.
Thankfully the love remains.
I wrote BACK IN THE DAY for other reasons, as well. I was, once again, annoyed at the idea that historical romances with Black characters had to be set in Regency England to count. Or to demonstrate what I meant about an HEA only making sense to me at death. (It’s not as morbid as it seems.) Or that Black men are not worthy romance protagonists. (My book was not the first or the last to do any of these things, just a contribution.)
The point of all this is to say that sometimes I write a story and know it will hurt.
SABBATICAL was not meant to hurt.
I took my sabbatical in the fall of 2019 through spring 2020. In the fall, I spent a bit of time in Europe, seeing colleagues and friends, writing, reading, dealing with a terrible roommate, and mourning the loss of my favorite cousin, Eric. I dedicated EVERY NEW YEAR to him, but I haven’t processed his death yet, if I’m honest. When the spring came, I was preparing to head back to Europe to “find myself” professionally, and then the pandemic hit the U.S.
Some people took this moment to feel the fear and uncertainty (often because they had no choice), while I worked. I sat on Zoom with friends all day, writing. I made figuring out how to safely get groceries a problem I could solve. I cleaned a lot. I tried my hand at growing things in the backyard and pulled up more poison ivy than anything else. I kept dealing with that terrible roommate until I bought my house and she moved out. I said yes to every virtual conference invitation. I worked and worked and worked.
I did not rest.
When I started suffering serious back pains in the fall of 2020, I bought heating pads and propped myself up with pillows so I could sit in front of my computer to teach for 8-12 hours a day.
When my depression got out of hand, I slept a lot, but I never felt rested. The back pain came and went.
2021 was… a year. The back pain returned in full force, until by the end of the year, I couldn’t walk, sit, or stand without wanting to cry. Sometimes, I did cry. Walking was a chore. I spent months at a chiropractor. I found a massage therapist who helped immensely. (She described my back muscles during our first appointment as hard rocks, nearly immovable.) In the midst of a good week, I bought a ticket to Spain for a real summer vacation. But just a few weeks later, I wondered if I should cancel, because I could not sit up for more than half an hour at a time without becoming so stiff I couldn’t walk. How was I going to survive a ten-hour flight?
I bought every pillow I could to ease my body. I started stretching and doing yoga. And thankfully I made that trip to Spain, with my yoga mat as my carry-on.
I took walks along the beach. I slept. I rested (after a while).
Learning to rest is a theme of SABBATICAL in a way I did not plan, but not in the way I lived it. Toni is not me, in the same way Deja was not me, but I know women like them. Black women who worked through all their pain (emotional, physical, and mental) because we’ve been told that tenure will be our reward. Women who got tenure and find that it was the reward they hoped it would be. Women who got it and found that it was not. Women who have no idea what they’re doing in their jobs, but don’t know how to ask for help (or who will help them if they did). Women who know exactly what they’re doing and have to fight for recognition. Women who know exactly what they’re doing so their schools work them until they’re dust because of it.
Women who’ve died because of the work.
Toni’s story is my sincere hope for my colleagues and myself. If I am anyone in this story, I’m Mike. I just want want to help those women I love learn how to rest. But before I can do that, I have to learn how to do that myself. I cannot pour from an empty cup and for most of 2020, 2021, and 2022, I was empty.
So I pushed SABBATICAL back because I had one too many projects under construction, which is a thing I still need to unlearn. I needed time to sit and be. My brain needed time to fix a few problems in the book and my life. My eyes needed rest, literally.
I needed to drive to Detroit and have dinner with a friend who’s been out of the country for three years.
I needed to listen to cozy mystery audiobooks because they make me happy.
I won’t apologize for needing just a little more time to make this book what I wanted. (I’m learning not to apologize for putting myself first.)
But I hope when you read Mike and Toni’s story you take to heart the importance of rest and you open your door to the people who will help you build a soft space to land. And I hope you think it was worth the wait.
xoxo
kat
P.S.
I’ve been waiting to start blogging again. I used to LOVE to blog, but haven’t had the time or energy for the last few years (probably because I was spending too much time on Twitter.) But now that I’m back, my favorite thing about blogging again is being able to recommend books in a centralized way. So click here for a link to a list of books I mentioned in this post and books I read or plan to read as I learn how to rest.