We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Heather Sweeney. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Heather below.

Hi Heather, thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about how you learned to do what you do?

I found my way to writing in a roundabout way, basically learning the craft by simply doing it.

Like most writers, I’ve loved writing since I was a child, whether I was keeping a diary or stapling handwritten short stories into books. In high school and college I wrote poetry, but kept my poems private, never considering publication. It wasn’t until I started a blog in 2010 that writing became a passion that ultimately led to a career.

When I first decided to launch a blog, I figured it would be a low stakes way to get my creative juices flowing. I was a stay-at-home mother of two young children at the time, and my then-husband was in the military so he was frequently gone. I found myself wishing for a project to work on, a creative outlet to immerse myself in after my kids went to bed. I had no idea what I was doing, writing and posting about my life as a military spouse like I would write journal entries.

The more followers I got, the more I wrote. I wrote quickly, and ideas flowed through my fingertips onto the keyboard as if I’d been storing them up for years and they couldn’t wait to be shared. Within a few years, after a brief stint as a kindergarten teacher, my blog landed me a job offer essentially writing the same content I was already blogging about. And that’s when the learning truly began.

Because I was my own editor on my blog, my workflow drastically changed when I had other people giving me assignments and editing my work. Ideas that once poured out of me, dried up. And I started second guessing myself and my skills, and I transformed into such a slow writer that one of my bosses set up a meeting to discuss my dwindling productivity. I didn’t realize it at the time, but what I was taking as criticism was actually on-the-job training, the best education I could have gotten.

My job taught me about working with editors, brainstorming ideas and meeting deadlines. But when it came to craft, the understanding of how writers write, I was still winging it.

And then I started writing a memoir. I had published essays in big national publications like the New York Times and Washington Post, but working on a book-length project forced me to expand my knowledge. I bought craft books, joined writing groups on Facebook and discovered a wealth of opportunities to take webinars online. Writing is a solitary activity, but my writing groups showed me the value of community, and the countless webinars I’ve attended taught me a variety of skills, from drafting timely essays to writing a nonfiction book proposal.

I’ve learned so much about writing over the years. I’m not sure I’ll ever stop learning. It’s been a gradual process for me, and I often wonder if my career timeline would have been accelerated if I had gotten an MFA like many writers do. My undergraduate degree is in psychology, my Master’s degree in elementary education. I’ve never taken a writing class at the college level. A degree in writing would have taught me the skills I didn’t learn until I stumbled upon them on my own.

I think determination is one of the most essential skills for a writer, and my own determination is probably one of the main reasons I’ve been a writer for as long as I have. Writing comes with endless rejections – from editors, agents, publishers – far more rejections than acceptances. It’s easy to take those rejections personally, as criticism of your ability to write. And it’s easy to let repeated rejections convince you to give up. However, I try to look at rejections not as obstacles hindering my success, but as learning experiences to make improvements.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

My writing career started with a blog called Riding the Roller Coaster. It was supposed to be a fun project, online journaling about the unique lifestyle of military spouses. But the blog turned out to be so much more. It introduced me to a community of other military spouse bloggers, and once I started getting invitations to write for other websites, I realized that writing was a passion I could turn into a profession.

As a freelance writer, I’ve had essays published in national publications as well as literary magazines, including the New York Times, Washington Post, HuffPost, Business Insider, Newsweek, Good Housekeeping and many more. I write about a range of topics, but I mostly focus on divorce and relationships, military life, women’s health and parenting.

I’m so proud of all the bylines I’ve collected, but my biggest accomplishment is writing a book, signing with an agent for that book, and getting a publishing deal. My memoir CAMOUFLAGE: How I Emerged from the Shadows of a Military Marriage, forthcoming from Post Hill Press in October 2025, is about my journey from being overshadowed by my husband’s military career to rediscovering my identity after divorce as a single mother approaching middle age. I’m hoping it will resonate with military spouses as well as women going through divorce or embarking on other major life transitions.

When I first started jotting down notes for the memoir in 2018, I wasn’t even sure I had enough material for an entire book. As I once did with my blog, I just started writing, jogging my memory by reading through old journals. I finished my first draft in 2021, and from there I kept revising, hired a developmental editor to help with the manuscript, worked with other editors to help me write a query letter to pitch agents, and watched webinars and participated in workshops to learn more about the publication process. I’m beyond proud to see all that hard work culminating in a published book.

What do you find most rewarding about being a creative?

One of my main goals as a writer is to help others feel less alone in their thoughts and feelings. When I was blogging and discovered other military spouses blogging about their lives as well, I realized how being a part of a community of other women going through the same challenges I was going through helped to lift the loneliness I often felt. Sometimes I was embarrassed to admit I was struggling with something, but when another woman wrote about the same struggles, I felt so much better, shedding my embarrassment and feeling hopeful that I could get through it too.

At some point, it occurred to me that my words could help other women like these writers were helping me, making writing even more important to me.

As I continued publishing essays beyond my blog, I started receiving emails from women thanking me for helping them feel less alone. Even now, whether I write about military life, dating after divorce as a single mom, or the grief I felt after undergoing a hysterectomy, I love hearing from readers sharing their own similar experiences and thanking me for opening up a conversation about certain topics that aren’t often discussed. Being able to touch other people like that motivates me to continue writing, to continue candidly sharing my experiences.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

My divorce was a major pivot in both my life in general and my writing career. After thirteen years of marriage, I had to start over as a single woman, figuring out life on my own with two children in elementary school. My divorce changed just about everything in my life, from where I lived to what I wrote about.

Before my divorce, the only topic I wrote about was related to my life as a military spouse. I knew if I wanted to continue being a writer, I had to pivot my focus. I had already built an audience of military spouse readers, and I worried I wouldn’t be able to connect with a different audience if I wrote about divorce instead of marriage.

But that pivot proved I was capable of writing about a range of topics instead of the one I’d always written about. And soon enough, I discovered not only that I enjoyed branching out and writing about other topics, but I also found that versatility made me a better writer.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.heatherlsweeney.com/
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/writersweeney
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/heathersweeneywriter/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-sweeney-5a15115b/
• Twitter: https://x.com/WriterSweeney
• Other: Substack: https://heathersweeney.substack.com/Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/heathersweeney.bsky.social

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