I remember the existential crisis that came promptly as I shelved my first work, a portal fantasy YA that was trope-laded and suffered from lumpy pacing. As proud as I was of that book–having garnered multiple #pitmad likes and several full requests–what worried me was not the shelving of my first completed novel. It was this idea that you have a singular “Book of Your Heart.”

Writers talk about this as this Big One. The one that’s been invading brain space for so long, it basically wrote itself in the quiet moments of your life before you ever thought about putting it to paper. It flows out of you like a prophecy fulfilling itself, and you are so connected to it that the manuscript is a literal manifestation of your soul.

So as I stopped querying my first novel, I worried. What if this was it? The only one I’d ever write because 1) writing a novel is hard, and 2) could I do it if it wasn’t the Book of My Heart… again?

But here’s what I learned after writing, querying, and signing with Book of my Heart #2: they are ALL the Books of your Heart. Your cardiovascular system is designed to be responsive. It’s designed to grow & break & expand & learn. Who I was when I wrote my first, second, and now third novels? I’ve been a different person in each phase, and I’ve learned so much from each previous me.

So yes, it is possible to have more than one Book of your Heart. And it’s also possible to write the stories that tell a specific moment of your life, and hold on the stories you’re just not ready to tell yet.

The hardest part of accepting this mentality is that you have to let go of the previous book to fully dive into the new one. But by embracing the new world and new characters, you are able to gently bid farewell to the piece of your heart that you can no longer control.

Maybe one day I’ll pull that YA off the shelf and give it another go, but for now it remains the book that first opened my heart to storytelling.