In the last few days, I feel like I've napped more than I’ve been upright. Somehow, I'm still exhausted. I keep snapping at my husband over things that do not deserve that aggression. My back hurts, my hips hurt, my everything hurts - which is not news - but hurting while also being sad is a different animal than hurting while being fine.
Wednesday, October 14th, 2026 was one of the best days of my life.
That is precisely what's led me to this point... eating a cheese stick at 3:30 A.M. while I wallow in my sadness and existential dread.
Here’s a thing about me that I’ve known for years but still haven’t figured out how to outrun. I pick a date. I build it up in my head until it’s load-bearing. I pour every ounce of what I have into getting to it. And then... the thing happens, and it’s good. Then it’s over, and I fall straight off the back of it into the dark hole of self-doubt.
Wednesday was a big one. So, naturally, the hole is deeper.
What actually happened on Wednesday
Midday, I taught a Grit and Resilience session to a room of Snow College students at the GRIT Center. That evening, I sat at the Ephraim library for the Local Authors Meet n’ Greet, celebrating the Sanpete County Library Consortium picking up my entire catalog.
The GRIT presentation went well. I think. Sometimes, I am genuinely unsure whether I delivered something useful or just stood up there speaking fluent gibberish while a room full of polite people nodded along. I usually fight to keep a room but Wednesday I didn’t have to. There were students in the front rows who participated, who asked real questions, who were engaged enough that they were feeding me energy instead of draining it. That hasn’t happened to me like that before. I came out of there lit up from the inside out.
Then I had lunch with some of the Snow business students, they asked me things, and I discovered something mildly alarming: I have opinions about this stuff. A lot of them. And most of my thoughts are pretty valid.
One of them pointed out that my message isn’t the standard one. The usual version of success they get handed is money-shaped. Y'know, "Scale it, monetize it, optimize it, retire at forty on a beach." And here I am saying passion fuels perseverance. Saying that, if you’re grinding at something purely because somebody else decided it counts as success, that’s not going to hold up when it gets hard. If you’ve got a soul built like Tony Robbins, then go. Genuinely. Chase the money. That might be authentic for you and I’m not here to take that away. The magic is in finding the thing that makes your soul sing and then saying fuck it to anybody who thinks you picked wrong.
I’m still learning that one, by the way. I care enormously what people think. Obviously. I’m writing a blog post about how sad I am that a party ended. But I know at a foundational level that I get happier when I follow my own passions. That’s not just a theory. That’s the data.
Coming full circle
I stood next to my eighth grade English teacher at a book signing. As equals. Both of us with books published.
This is the man who told me, when I was thirteen years old: "When you write your first book, I want to be the first to know." Not if. When. He clocked my future before I ever did.
So, when I published my first book, of course I sent him a message. And he has quietly shown up for me as a budding indie author ever since. On Wednesday, I got to stand in a room with him and talk shop. Writer to writer.
When he found out how many library branches carry my books now, he said wow. Then he took a photo of me to send to the local paper.
If that's not belief in someone, then I don't know what is.
The numbers I keep turning over
I officially have twelve published novels, written across eighteen years. I've co-authored two more, both landing later this year. I have a few other manuscripts in progress that could take me years yet. I might be the most prolific author in Sanpete County by sheer volume!
The Sanpete Consortium has eight of the twelve catalogued as of right now. The other four are waiting on their library identifying numbers. Hopefully, they'll soon have all twelve on the Local Authors shelf. The Las Vegas-Clark County Library District carries eight of my novels, four copies each. Farmington picked up a title. Three of mine sit in the Karen H. Huntsman Library on Snow’s campus, main floor, a few spines down from Brandon Sanderson.
Two years ago, I opened a Google Doc and typed that I wanted my novels in a library someday. One library. That was the whole ambition. Now look! Am I doing it?!
I had my entire career audited
I got curious (translated: anxious) about whether any of my hard work is actually... working, so I had the data run. Sales, streams, reviews, library placements, all of it.
Since January of 2025, my catalog has moved more than 1,100 units. Most self-published books never clear a hundred copies in their entire existence, and my top titles cleared that individually. By that math, I’m winning.
But by different calculations, I’m barely moving. Between launches, my whole catalog sells about twenty copies a month. Across twelve novels. And after 1,100-plus sales, I have somewhere around two dozen reviews to my name.
So... which is it? Both, apparently. Success and failure go hand in hand for me.
The unglamorous part
I need inventory for my upcoming Authors Day at the Springville Library. I do not currently have the money to order books, and I haven’t for a while. I’m going to say that plainly because I think a lot of us are in the same boat right now and pretending otherwise helps no one. Money’s tight. It’s been tight for a while. I don’t think my household is remotely alone in that under what’s happening at the national level.
So I’ll pivot, because pivoting is roughly ninety percent of what being an indie author is. I’ll figure out stock. I always do. But I’m not going to pretend the figuring-out is effortless, or that there’s some tidy lesson in it. Sometimes the truth is that the author with books in thirty library branches cannot afford to buy her own book inventory.
The body part
Sometimes it feels like the most radical thing that I do is rest on purpose.
My medical life is still a full-time job that I never applied for and cannot quit and the last couple of months have been the worst stretch I’ve had in a long time. Emergency rooms. Now on oxygen at home. A pile of test results came back normal except one that very much didn't. Specialists, paperwork, waiting, scheduling, pokes for blood draws... all of it leads to that particular exhaustion that's become my norm. The stress of having to be your own medical researcher, advocate, and record-keeper while feeling like absolute hell.
And now it’s not just me! My sweet husband needs his gallbladder out. We meet with the surgeon tomorrow. God, that worries me. He’s the one who drives me to the ER at four in the morning. He’s the one who comforts me when I wake crying from a nightmare. Watching my person need the system that has been chewing on me for most of my life? Yeah, that's its own flavor of helpless.
The chaos agents
We have kittens! We allowed them into existence entirely by accident, which is not a sentence I expected to say about my household. They’re squeaky and small and perfect and they, like all animals, do not care about my lab results even a little. They just want chins scratched and that’s the extent of their asking.
They’ll be ready to re-home soon. If you’re in the Intermountain West and want a tiny agent of chaos delivered to you mid-December, vaccinated and cuddly, say the word.
What’s next
November takes me to Author Nation in Las Vegas. I’m volunteering as a Time Lord, which is my favorite official title I have ever held.
Vegas is my home away from home and I’m not being cute about that. Vegas has everything Utah doesn’t. People who don’t auto-judge on sight. Food at any hour of the day and night, which matters more than you’d think when your body keeps its own schedule. And irreverent people who read my irreverent books and actually enjoy them.
And Hearth & Ink is real. The Sanpete County Wordsmiths are hosting a winter writers retreat, and I’m building it alongside an amazing local writer and editor. It'll be four days at the Yardley Inn & Spa in Manti, January 21 through 24, 2027. The event features guest author workshops, critique circles, catered meals, plus long uninterrupted hours to actually write in a fire-lit parlor while it snows outside (assuming it snows this year, which is a gamble).
Early bird price is $299 through October 31, then it jumps to $349. Registration closes December 5. Rooms get assigned in the order registrations come in, which is my polite way of saying don’t sit on this.
Register at forms.gle/KSKw1Q4z1vydvw947 or email sanpetecountywordsmiths@gmail.com with questions.
The ask
I’m not on social media anymore. That was deliberate, it was for my health, and I don’t regret it. But it means I have basically one way to reach people and you’re reading it.
So: will you send my link to one person?
Not a campaign. Not a share-this-or-else. Just one human you know who might like what I do. Text them something like: Hey, this creative is building a strange little universe of books and songs, if you’re into weird writing and art: https://linktr.ee/mariahtylermoore
One weirdo’s link, passed to another weirdo. That’s the only way my circle has ever grown and I still don’t know a better method.
So here’s where I actually am
Wednesday gave me everything I’d asked the universe for two years ago and then some. A teacher said wow. The students leaned in. The books are on the shelves with the real authors because they are real books by a real author. I’m working on believing that.
I’m writing this at the bottom of a several-day crash, hurting everywhere, scared about my husband, and genuinely unsure how I’m getting books to Springville in six weeks.
All of it is true at once. The good doesn’t cancel the cost and the cost doesn’t cancel the good. They just live here together, rent-free and arguing.
You matter. I matter. We matter. Even when it's bittersweet.