Personal Update: Volume One

My current life, writing, and art.

Hey, guys!

This week’s post is going to be a bit different.

I’m having a blast writing blog posts and personal essays about mental health, writing, and chronic illness. But the thing is, sometimes those blog posts and personal essays can make it sound like I’ve got everything nailed down. I don’t. The past few months have been a bit of a physical and mental train wreck for me. However, I firmly believe in everything I’ve written here, and every day, I strive to live with a mindset rooted in hope and joy.

In Things Are Looking Up, I want to give you guys a fully-rounded frame of reference, not just a montage of my edited thoughts and processes. Life is nitty-gritty, and I want to be honest with where I’m at—because, even in the hardest times, things can be looking up.

And, according to my new reader survey, a lot of you also want to hear more about my story. Which, I’ll be honest, is a really strange feeling—I have yet to get used to the fact that I’m a professional author and illustrator, and that people actually want to know who I am and how I’m doing!

So, every couple of months, I’ll write and send out a personal update in place of a blog post. Each personal update will cover multiple sections: a general life update—including an update on my continued mental/physical health journey—and updates on my writing, illustration, and the Freedom Through Fire Saga. These past few months have been a roller coaster, so this first update ended up being a bit longer than most of my usual posts.

Photo © 2026 India Johnson

Life Update

I always imagined that my senior year would look like the climax of a book series—where I made groundbreaking advances against OCD and dysautonomia, prepared to tackle college head-on with a grin, and, even if there were minor setbacks, 2025 became the best year yet.

Instead, I’ve been reworking my outlines for future graphic novel memoirs, because that was not how 2025 went.

I haven’t written any blog posts specifically about chronic illness yet, but I’ve suffered from dysautonomia my entire life. As previously mentioned in my post about depression, I had a really bad POTS flare this summer, which set off the worst chronic pain, health issues, migraines, and depression I’ve experienced. The past half year has been incredibly difficult and painful. I still haven’t recovered, and right now, I’m just trying to take it one day at a time.

Then, we learned that my Grammy has cancer. The diagnosis was very sudden, and threw all our plans into the air. Over the past two months, my mom has been traveling back and forth between Colorado and New Jersey to take care of her. While my mom has been gone, my health issues have continued with weight loss and severe migraines multiple times a week, leading us to having multiple doctor and naturopath appointments.

Though I have a positive outlook on OCD, it still limits my life. By now, I expected the OCD to have eased—but, over this year, there hasn’t been the improvement I need for college. Because of that, I started seeing an OCD therapist in December. She’s been absolutely incredible so far—I love speaking to someone who understands neuroscience and can advocate for me with other doctors. Right now, we’re pursuing getting me college disability accommodations for both OCD and dysautonomia.

Earlier this year, we made an unexpected move to the house of our dreams, 9,000 feet up in the mountains. With winter setting in, we’ve started to get the full rural experience. We were completely snowed in a few days back (the wind created a snow drift as tall as me), with 75+ mph winds that kept slamming snowballs into my windows. (Every time I walked outside, all I could think about was Sky in Hurricane Zero and Operation Druka, hah!)

During the Christmas season, work ramps up for the National Park Mystery Series. In addition to being an illustrator, I’m an employee for my dad. Since we moved, we spent the last few weeks packaging thousands of books and fulfilling orders in our barn-turned-warehouse, instead of our basement. Due to my health, I wasn’t able to work as much as I’d liked—but my dad got a new employee just in time, and when my mom was home, she stepped in to help ease the load.

At one point, there was a chance of my mom not being home for the holidays—but with the grace of God, both she and my Grammy were able to fly out to be with us over Christmas. And thank goodness…

Because on Christmas Eve, I nearly went to the ER for the worst migraine I’ve ever had. By evening, my eyes were nearly swollen shut, I was throwing up, and I was so inflamed that any slight touch felt like knives being drawn across my skin. The migraine itself was nearly unbearable; I’ve never experienced pain anything like it. But God gave us a Christmas miracle—right as we got prepared to head to the ER, which was over an hour away, I finally fell asleep and slept off the migraine.

On top of my exhaustion and migraine hangover, I spent the majority of Christmas day on the couch with the continued dysautonomia flare. There were points where I was in too much pain to open presents. Despite that, I was able to enjoy the day by leaning into the comfort of family. I was even able to partake of our traditional pumpkin bread, which was the first food besides smoothies, sweet potatoes, and broth that I’d had in nearly a week! I got delightful presents (including Brandon Sanderson novels for my nearly-adult heart, the next City Spies books for my middle-grade author self, and the second book in the Mo and Dale Mystery series for my inner eleven-year-old!) but, by far, the best present of all was spending time with my family.

Also, our beloved cat (Rainier, who frequents the National Park Mystery Series social media pages) and I now have matching pajamas. Which makes everything better.

Unfortunately, my dysautonomia flare continued after Christmas, and I spent most of the last week bedridden. On top of everything, my entire family got the flu right after Christmas. Though we were all miserable, my parents took me to a long-awaited doctor appointment on the 29th…only to learn that my doctor had also gotten sick, and my appointment had been rescheduled for two weeks from now. Since my dysautonomia flare is ongoing, I’m not sure what these next two weeks will look like. Right now, I’m just praying for God’s strength through the pain, that the migraines will stay at bay (no ER visits!!!), and that my tachycardia will calm down.

Despite the chaotic, painful nature of these past months, I’m very hopeful for 2026. I have an appointment with a dysautonomia specialist next October—the soonest we could get in—which should give us some answers and point us toward the next steps. Before then, I still believe that my health and OCD will improve enough for me to head to college, though I’m unsure what my physical and mental capacity will look like.

At this point, I have no idea how to keep moving forward in so much pain. But God has always sustained me in the past, so I believe that no matter what’s coming, He’ll hold me through it until the pain passes. Every time, I’ve ended up way stronger for it—so I’m very willing to be in pain, because, let’s face it: the Enemy is incredibly bad at long-term plans.

Between my health and my Grammy’s cancer, these next few months still look very uncertain for all of us—but I’m choosing to look forward to the things that we do know for certain, like our New Year’s Eve traditions, finishing up Freedom Through Fire, and the time we do get with my mom.

One of my favorite Christmas presents was a custom-made sweatshirt that my mom made for our matching Christmas Eve pajamas. Mine had a photo of the redwoods on the front, with our family’s 2025 motto, “Expect Good Things,” beneath it.

I can’t wait to wear it into the new year.

Writing

On the creative front, amazing things happened over these past months…

Skylar Rusten © 2026 India Johnson

Freedom Through Fire

This fall, I published both The Fugitives Files and Operation Druka, books four and five in the Freedom Through Fire Saga! I broke my personal record, bringing me up to three books published this year.

Over the past months, I’ve been toiling away at the final two FTF books. My goal is to publish them before my eighteenth birthday—or, at very least, before my high school graduation. I’ll be fine if I miss that goal, but I still love striving for it!

Currently, I’m finishing up my beta team for Book Six. I started developmental edits on Book Seven two weeks ago. With my health issues, I’m a month behind schedule, but I’m hoping to get the ball rolling and get this book to the beta team as soon as I can as well. I’m continuously pulling my family aside to tell them all of Lance’s new jokes and ramble about my deep research on gum production and abdominal surgeries.

Meanwhile, Laura Hollingsworth is working on another beautiful cover for Book Six. If all goes to plan, we should have another FTF book at the end of January…!

Over these past few months, the number of fan emails I’ve gotten has taken me by surprise! I’ve been working so hard on the FTF books that I haven’t had a chance to get back to everyone yet, but I’ve been so blessed and amazed by hearing from readers who enjoy my series. You guys are absolutely wonderful, hilarious, and so very kind!

On a similar note: the FTF audience is steadily growing!!! For most of December, The Rebels’ Daughter has been ranking within the top 85,000 books on Amazon, and we more than quadrupled last year’s sales. Now, Google summarizes the series as “gaining popularity and well-regarded in middle grade fantasy,” as opposed to “may have a small following in a niche category.” That’s all you guys—thank you for making a twelve-year-old girl’s dream come true!

As I’m drawing near the end of FTF, writing and editing are becoming much harder. Sky and her story have been with me for eight years, so I’ve been grieving as I approach the finish line. Since I want these last months of FTF to be delightful, not stressful, I’ve started doing emotional awareness and grief processing exercises before I write. I’m hoping that taking good care of myself, my emotions, and my younger self’s heart through this change will allow me to complete my goals and have a blast.

Firefly Tales

Earlier this fall, my first short story was published in Firefly Tales, an anthology written and illustrated by the young authors and artists of the S.E. Collaborative Guild! I’m also one of the illustrators for the anthology—and, since these are my first commissions with characters in them, it was an incredible feeling to hold the book in my hands.

My short story, The Aspen Bride, is an original YA fairy tale—and what readers have described as a “modern spin on Greek and Norse mythology,” “rather tragic,” and “unexpected.” I’ve been surprised and delighted by how much readers have enjoyed the story, since for me, it was more of a side project and an experiment. If you’re interested in checking it out, it’s the first story in the anthology, so there’s a sample available on Amazon! (And you can see Evie Warnemuende’s incredible illustration for the story—the artwork is so beautiful that it nearly brings me to tears!)

Online Store

With the growth of the FTF fandom, I started my own online store! Since I was little, I’ve loved book merch—and I wanted to provide that for other tweens and teens. I priced all the items low to make them affordable, so I only make a dollar or two off of each purchase. But since the money isn’t the point, I’m happy as a clam.

In December, I did a reader poll for FTF fans and let them vote for the merch! Now, there are multiple stickers, phone cases, t-shirts, and even a hoodie in the store. (Gotta say, I’m partial to the Dang It, Steve! sticker myself…) In addition, I illustrated a sticker for The Aspen Bride!

To celebrate my first year on Substack, I’ve also added a new sticker to my store—my author brand logo! Earlier this year, I hired Laura Hollingsworth to illustrate the logo. Now, I have a symbol that represents all of my current projects—FTF, The Aspen Bride, and Things Are Looking Up—alongside all the future ones. I plan to continue using this logo for decades to come!

Illustrating

This past month, I got accepted into my dream animation program! I spent the past year and a half drawing every day, working on my portfolio. It’s a very competitive program, so I didn’t know whether I would get in this year. So, when I received my acceptance letter, I was so excited that I skipped around giggling for an entire evening. Not only did I get into the program, but I also got into the BFA—the more intense (and way cooler) course!

Between work, FTF, and my health, I haven’t been able to draw as much as I’d like this month. But recently, I’ve been testing out ink and alcohol markers. I’ve been very pleased with the results, and I especially like this concept art I did for the sixth FTF book. (Even though the perspective is inaccurate.)

Artwork © 2026 India Johnson

This month, I also tried out digital painting for the first time. Up until this point, I’ve only ever illustrated using lined art—so I was shocked when my first attempt went really well! In the middle of painting the character portrait, I broke down in tears, because it was such an amazing experience to see my character’s face come to life for the first time.

Emboldened by my sudden success, I also tried painting Sky. Unfortunately, unlike the first portrait, the details of Sky’s portrait didn’t exactly work out. But it passes the squint test (when artists squint to check visual design, contrast, and shape) so you guys get the blurry version! Someday, I’ll come back and finish this portrait.

Character Portrait © 2026 India Johnson

I can’t believe I’ve shared so little FTF art with the public! I’m planning on adding a fan art gallery to my website sometime soon, complete with a small section of my own work over the years.

I’ve gone back and forth on whether I should post more of my art on Substack. As an illustrator, I’d love to share more of my work with you guys, but as someone who was raised fairly internet-free, I’m still not quite used to the concept of social media. I’m walking the fine line between keeping myself free from the “how many likes and views does my art have” craze, yet also trying to be a professional illustrator/author and connect with you guys. Let me know in the comments if you have any thoughts!

Wrap Up

That brings us to the end of my first personal update! Come the New Year, I’m planning to dive back in with more posts about writing, creativity, and chronic illness. I have some ideas that I’m looking forward to; I hope you’ll enjoy them.

Happy New Year, everyone! I’m hoping and praying that this is your best year yet!

—India