I’m coming back to Teen Writers’ Nook (+publishing announcement and life update)

What’s up, TWNers! I can’t believe it’s been nearly a year and a half since I last posted over here. That was not intentional but I guess life just happened. But after months of thinking about returning, praying about it, and talking it over with the other founders of this blog, I am excited to finally say that I am making a returning to blogging and Teen Writers’ Nook is coming back with me! However, with this return there is going to be a LOT of new changes so that’s what I want to cover here.

Where have I been?

So the last year and a half has been marked with a lot of new opportunities and crazy changes for my life. All in all, it’s been kind of insane everything that’s happened. First of all, I finally graduated from Liberty University with a bachelors in history and a minor in military history! The closing of a chapter has brought the opening of so many incredible opportunities. 

class of 2026!

Secondly, I’ve taken on two part-time jobs and I’ve decided to return to school and work towards a master’s degree in historic preservation. In addition to all of this, I’ve been on a bit of a transformative journey in the last year that’s really changed how I see myself, my faith, and the world around me and that has played one of the biggest roles in my return to this site. See, even though it was an unintentional break from blogging as the months turned into a year, I really didn’t think I would be returning to Teen Writers’ Nook. My sisters and I even discussed closing the website down for good. I had burned out from years of making writing and book-related content and because my degree was a writing-intensive one it made me not only not want to blog, I didn’t want to write either. In fact, I really started thinking that writing wasn’t even a dream of mine anymore, that it was just something I had done as a teenager because I had nothing else to do.

Long story short, I realized I had been lying to myself the whole time. 

It was with the publication of Into the Lamp (more on that later) that reawakened a dream I had thought dead. A dream that was really just buried deep inside me. It’s pretty fitting that the novel I started working on the day after this website went live six years ago is the very same book to bring me back here. I guess you could say I’ve come full circle. 

In the last month I’ve come to realize that not only did I miss writing, I miss this website as well. And I knew that I couldn’t just make a return to telling stories without returning to this community that has played one of the biggest roles in shaping the writing I am today.

Teen Writers’ Nook is back

So first announcement I need to make is that yes, Teen Writers’ Nook is going to make an official comeback. However, you might have already noticed the website is undergoing a rebrand as I’m looking toward a different avenue for the platform. So what’s going to be changing?

(1) My sisters are going to continue taking a step back from the platform.

In discussing it over with Katherine and Madeleine, they want to take more of a backseat role in the website for the time being. This is not to say they will never return to posting just that for the time being, I will be running the site mostly on my own. 

(2) Posts will be more limited

To prevent burnout and make sure that I still have time to fulfill my other responsibilities, I am only going to post about twice a month and I have moved the posting date to Thursday rather than Friday to suit my new schedule better.

(3) I will now be posting under my pen name

This is probably the biggest change but I have decided to completely move all of my online presence over to my pen name, D.B. Rayne. The reason for this I plan to explain more below. So I’m still the same person, just using a different name. 

Other than that, you can expect the same writing tips and tricks, and y’all, I already have a ridiculously long list of new tips, ideas, and hacks that has really strengthened my writing. I can’t wait to share them with everyone!

Writing Updates

My writing has also undergone a big transformation. As I said, I now plan to exclusively write and publish under my pen name, D.B. Rayne. With this has come a huge rebranding I’ve been working on over the last couple of months. The reason is because I realized I wasn’t just lying to myself about not wanting to write, I also wasn’t being honest about what I actually wanted to write.

Several years ago, I thought that I wanted to write more books for adults and that I wanted to write historical fiction (largely because I was getting a history degree). But in the last year, I’ve realized those choices were not really what I wanted to do but more because I was around more authors that wrote adult books and in the historical or romance genres. It was easy to just allow myself to be more like the people who were most influential to me at the time. (I wanted to very clear this is not a criticism of them, but one of myself, that sometimes I just allow myself to be more like the people around me rather than being authentic to who I actually am.)

All that to say, while I do not dislike reading adult fiction or historical books, I definitely do not enjoy writing them. (Crazy that it took four years to figure that out, but here I am.) I’ve realized that I most enjoy writing speculative fiction books for the young adult market. My debut novel is a contemporary fantasy inspired by “Aladdin” and my current WIP is a YA dystopian.  

With this decision, I am in need of a rebranding. As I said, I will not be writing under D.B. Rayne and will be closing the old Vintagely Izzy blog I was running for a bit there. In addition, I plan to be doing more content creation on my instagram page, @db_rayne. I am also launching a new newsletter, so if you were subscribed to Vintagely Izzy and still want to receive emails from me in your inbox, you will need to resubscribe to my new newsletter, which you can access here!

Now for the biggest announcement of all, I FINALLY PUBLISHED INTO THE LAMP!!!!!!!!!!!

y’all were probably thinking this wasn’t actually going to happen, weren’t ya?

yeah, I was thinking it too