Why Everything Looks Different Now

Our story begins with a single color.

I can tell you exactly how that color came into my life, too: with this very website’s first color scheme, which was based off of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade. I thought a mirabelle yellow would pop against the dark, classy red and muted gray-blue I’d also pulled from the painting. Plus, my birthstone is citrine, and if there’s one thing I love to do, it’s adding layers of meaning to make something more beautiful, the same way an oyster adds coat after coat to create a pearl.

Now, I’m not one to half-ass anything. I commit, and I committed to my Scheherazade color palette, particularly the yellow.

And it made an impression. When I say that yellow became “my color,” I mean people really thought of it as mine, and to be honest, so did I! My close friends even bought me gifts in sunshiney shades because they so heavily associated the color with me. And I loved it, too, so much so that I kept that yellow when I changed color palettes to better reflect the sweet historical romance I was writing at the time.

But I was letting myself be overshadowed.

To understand why, you first need to know that I’m a deep winter in the seasonal color analysis system. I have dark features (namely, my eyes and hair, for which I was nicknamed Blancanieves—Snow White in Spanish—by some members of my family), and I look best in rich, dark colors.

And I’m cool-toned.

So, the shade of yellow I’d blithely sought out and added to my wardrobe was warm and completely clashed with my cooler coloring. As a result, when I dressed in or carried around anything yellow, you noticed the color instead of noticing the woman wearing it.

Once I realized that the color didn’t flatter me, I knew I wanted to make a change. Who wants to walk around in a color that doesn’t actually complement their features?

But when I changed palettes again (while thinking I was a dark autumn), I was met with some pushback from people in my circle.

“Where’s the Megany yellow?”

Oh, I thought. Am I making a mistake?

Me being me, I still went forward with changing the colors, but the feedback I’d received rang in my ears while I copied and pasted the hex codes. The words stayed with me even while I was struggling to decide which project to pursue after completing my NaNoWriMo novel.

And thus began the longest creative block of my life.

Then I asked myself a question…

“Who am I as a writer?”

It was a question I hadn’t been avoiding, per se, but it was one I never felt the need to answer. Thus far, I’d gone through life writing in every genre under the sun.

I tried brainstorming and mindmapping and journaling about who I wanted to be as a writer, but I never walked away with an answer. That is, until I decided to list out all of the projects I’d completed and the ones still waiting for me to pick them up again. I didn’t expect anything to come of this exercise, but to my delight, a single thread connected just about all of them in one way or another.

The sea. The stories I was most passionate about involved the sea.

And when I made a list of why I love and am connected to the sea—because, I realized, I always had, even if I hated sand, and hadn’t treated myself to a beach trip as an adult until recently—the bullet points just kept coming.

And with those bullet points came another revelation: I like depth. I’ve never been interested in anything shallow or superficial. If it’s not multifaceted and complex, I don’t want it.

I love all that is lovely, dark, and deep, like the sea herself.

So, I changed my brand again to reflect this. To reflect me.

I’m going to write literary fiction. I’ll write about emotions and the human condition with all its intricacies and convolutions. I’ll write to break your heart and put it back together again.

Now you can see the Megan who was always beneath the surface.

Well, so to speak. I still have my secrets. I’m not about to reveal all of my mysteries, or any of my plans. Less than ten percent of the oceans have been mapped, you know.

And I can’t promise you won’t see a fifth or a five-hundredth color palette come from me. If this was my final metamorphosis, I think that would make me a very boring person! But I can promise you that I feel more in tune with who I am as a creative than ever before.

I hope you’ll stay to see what washes ashore.