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How To Deal With Missing A Writing Day

AKA, How To Keep On Track Without Being Self Ableist And Self Destructive

So, my eyes refused to work yesterday, and they are battling with me today. Since I am feeling terribly discouraged, I decided — because I have to do this emotional work anyways — it would be good to make a post I can share about it, so that I am continuing some sort of consistent update to the website.

I suppose the first thing to start with is outlining the limits my body and brain place on me in regards to writing consistently. This has nothing to do with external factors such as the amount of hours in the day, or scheduling around other people and appointments; this is all about my battle with myself and trying to find a healthy compromise in the middle. Key word being healthy.

For the most part, my biggest issues are:

physical issues

  • exotropia
  • migraines
  • allergies
  • insomnia and/or inconsistent sleep cycle
  • back pain

Mental/behavioral

  • poor focus/concentration
  • poor executive functioning
  • hyperfocus and obsession with task completion
  • perfectionism
  • depression

But I want to break this list down into a different pattern, one that is more honest for the problem at hand. I want to arrange these issues as sources and consequences.

Sources

  • hyperfocus and obsession with task completion
  • allergies

Consequences

  • exotropia — from hyper focusing on screens
  • migraines — from eye strain from being stuck in the hyperfocus mode
  • insomnia and/or inconsistent sleep cycle — lack of sleep from being stuck in the hyperfocus mode
  • back pain — from not moving while being stuck in the hyperfocus mode
  • poor focus/concentration — from not sleeping or remembering ADHD meds from being stuck in the hyperfocus mode
  • poor executive functioning — from not sleeping or remembering adrenal support from being stuck in the hyperfocus mode
  • hyperfocus and obsession with task completion — from inflammation from allergies and the cycle feeding itself from being stuck in the hyperfocus mode
  • perfectionism — neurosis building and justifying being stuck in the hyperfocus mode
  • depression — from mental and physical neglect from being stuck in the hyperfocus mode

Probably not the take you were expecting when reading this post, where I started off complaining about how eye strain is preventing me from getting shit done. But that’s the thing; the eye strain isn’t preventing anything. I got shit done at the expense of my health, and the eye strain and migraines are a consequence of that. Because I have behavioral aspects to my neurological wiring that make task completion dangerous to my health.

Oh, to be clear, it’s not the “they worked themselves into an early grave because they couldn’t get their stress under control” issue. I’m addicted to task completion and I don’t know how to balance a life with doing a thing. This is my default. I will always neglect my health to complete (or work toward the completion of) a task. And I do not have the skill set to balance that yet.

Neurosis

Somewhere within the autism and OCD is a pattern of behavior when it comes to task completion that is absolutely self-destructive for me. And it is something that I know I will be struggling with forever. This is who I am on a base chemical level. This is who I am.

I can highlight the problem quite easily in regards to playing video games, something that I don’t do anymore. I play suduko these days, and that’s it, solely because it’s extremely short, and there is only one way to win it, and winning does not level into another challenge, another game.

The last time I played a proper video game — and thank fuck it was a shortish one — I didn’t sleep for days until I completed it. It was years after I stopped playing video games. My partner bought it for me for my birthday, and became so concerned for me, he kept trying to get me to leave the house, just to get away from it. Once I finished the game and saw that it had another mode after winning, I realized I had to throw it out, that I was going to kill myself if I didn’t remove it from my life completely.

This has to do with the way my brain will find a shape with repetition and hold that shape, getting stuck. Once in that shape, I will hyperfocus, feeding off the neurotransmitters I’m gaining as I’ve adapted to the task, repeating the task for the reward of those neurotransmitters indefinitely until I am finally pulled away to see that I have completely neglected my health and my life.

Hyperfocus comes easily for me even with the ADHD. It’s how I learn to do new things while many others will skim the surface of something but be unable to stick with it long enough to really gain the pattern required to learn something. I joke about my inner animal being a rhinoceros, ever since young, blind and stumbling in a direction with such determination, not seeing the obstacles, not hearing the voices that say you can’t do it, not feeling any blow that might hold me back. And that can seem really positive to have such willpower as you focus on a task and get it done, but there is a cost to having this be my default.

I can pick the wrong direction and keep going. I don’t naturally have the ability to stop and take stock and see that I haven’t slept, or eaten, and that I’ve neglected my personal life. And even when I do have that ability to stop, my brain is still in the pattern of going, of completing that task. And it is very good at finding ways to convince me that I should complete the task so I can be free of this trapped state.

But Once I’m Free? Once I Inevitably Complete A Task?

My brain is still stuck in the shape, in the neurological pattern, and I still have to figure out how to task switch after days or months of focusing on one thing that has managed to arrange my brain in a pattern. And honestly, it can just be a matter of hours, yet stepping out of that state is still the hardest thing ever.

I just want to go back into it. I don’t want to have to feel the pain of my body, or face the complexities of the life that is crashing down around me because I’ve neglected it, or even the complexities of thought that are required for things that are not so single-minded. There is a great escape in being allowed to think about only one thing for hours and not have to face the difficult world we all live in. And my neurological wiring is rewarded on so many different levels when I hyper focus. Shit, I get paid to escape.

I become the task in the way my brain and muscles remember through constant repetition, and I can come back to any task later, reconnect those connections with a little work, and it’s all there, waiting. I get to do so many different things; be these things. I know who I am in those moments… And if I’m a person outside of all of that, I have no fucking clue. I have never hyper focused on day to day life. Being a person is being lost without a task to do.

My brain is an organic computer in a body that has no actual innate purpose to have that computer; it’s just there, insisting on systematizing a chaos that is absolutely supposed to be chaotic.

Where It Went Wrong This Week

I stumbled into a couple issues this week I wasn’t prepared for. I didn’t even notice some of them until writing this now — which is why this process is so damn important. It’s essential to stop and really look at how it goes wrong to properly problem solve.

The short version is that after 2 days of writing, I told myself to rest my eyes when I woke up with a migraine starting yesterday. But instead, when the meds got it under control, I decided to do some coding, which triggered the neurosis long into the morning, leaving me with my eyes again screaming at me today.

And that could have been it, could have been really straight forward… but I looked around my house today, and I saw it was mess. I hadn’t been keeping up with tidying each night before bed. And I hadn’t remembered to eat — breakfast had been a slice of bread the last 3 days to let me take my meds without putting a hole in my stomach, and I hadn’t had any lunch. I repeatedly kept forgetting my second round of hydrocortisone.

I wasn’t sleeping well cuz I was trying to fix my sleep cycle so I would be awake during daylight hours — didn’t take, btw. And I had stayed up late on day 2 to edit a blog post without thinking of the consequences, which was probably why my eyes hurt on day 3. And I had been putting way too many emotional and self worth ideals on me getting back to writing, which was making me push myself blindly toward some lofty goal and feel like shit if I didn’t achieve it in the one way that my perfectionist side was insisting upon.

I had neglected my life at some point in the course of the first two days of writing, and it took another day and another headache for me to stop and see I had already fucked it all up and didn’t know how to solve it. After promising myself I would be watching to prevent my self-destructive tendencies from taking over.

So here we are, day 4 of writing, only having written for 2 days, trying to figure out how I’m going to do this without destroying myself. Because I don’t actually know how. I just know that I have all intentions of figuring it out while having little experience in doing so.

This Is Exactly What I’ve Been Worried About

The main reason I haven’t been writing these last 2 years isn’t the executive dysfunction. It was the wake-up call I got when my working memory and executive functions broke 3 years ago, and I found myself staring at a wall every day not knowing what I was supposed to do. I had to make what I called an executive functioning board where I created note cards of tasks that needed to be done. Like taking my meds and supplements, having breakfast, doing laundry, getting dressed, cleaning, grocery shop, etc. I had to do that for months upon months, checking that board of mundane tasks after each was done, so that I could be a person living a life.

I started to see how much time it took. I started to notice how these were things that rarely got done when I was writing. Not just on the day of writing, but when my mind was in the pattern of writing. And it was so much worse when I was making art. Art was as destructive as video games to my brain. I would wake up, wake up my computer, and go right to where I had left off before bed when I was making digital art. And I would work on that art until long into the morning hours until I was too tired and would fall asleep. That would happen for days straight until I finished the piece, and then I would find something else to art because my brain was happy to be repeating a pattern, no matter the consequences of health and life.

When my executive functioning broke to the point that I could barely do anything, I was forced to truly stop for months upon months. It was only then that I was willing to face that I had never successfully negotiated with this obsessive aspect of my brain. I had only ever neglected my life around it. Every single time.

I Don’t Know What I’m Doing

The only way I know how to deal with this part of me is what I did with the video games; not interact, not engage with the element that triggers my brain into this behavior. I don’t have a skill set to deal with this, because at a base chemical level this is my default. I become addicted to doing tasks.

Right now, I’m trying to manage the consequences as I get back to writing, because that seemed like a logical take. I had hoped the ADHD treatment would give me adequate neurotransmitters support so that my brain might not fall into this pattern of behavior. It doesn’t seem to be the case.

The reality is, I need to do this. I need to be allowed to function in the world doing the things I love whether my brain turns it into an obsessive mess or not. To feel fulfilled as a human being, I need to be able to do the things I love to do. It’s just… what I’m battling is so bizarre, so impossible and unyielding.

It grows strong as I grow strong, and loses power as it steals all my energy and neglects my health. It decides a lot of my perspectives on the things I do, especially in the moment. Especially my priorities and values when I am in the grip of a task.

And once when I break free and step out to face the consequences, I find myself in a society that champions this self-destructive aspect of me. That feeds the obsession, and normalizes it, and suggests I’m not going far enough. That instead, I’m just the wrong broken form housing this addictive will, and if only my form were stronger, or better at time management, and could do all the things that it is impossible to do at once, everything will be fine. That my inability to find balance has nothing to do with the fact I’m dealing with a dangerous behavioral aspect of myself that would destroy me, but instead that I am lacking as a human being on some level because I am struggling at all.

Having all this time off from writing as I learn more about my autism and ADHD has helped. It has shown me that life is more than just doing things. But it doesn’t solve the neurological wiring. It doesn’t make my default healthy every time I go to do a thing. It sure as fuck doesn’t stop the gas lighting of an end-stage capitalist society that would watch us all die just to reach some dumbfuck productivity metric. (Did we do it efficiently enough? Could we have reached environmental collapse faster? Come on, people, synergize!)

Solutions Require Looking At The Problem

Did I sit down to write a plan of how to move my days around when this happens so that I can adapt around the migraines that result from writing too much? Yeah, because that’s my brain digging in, trying to modulate the consequences while still doing the things. And yeah, it’s something I will likely do, because I want to stick with this. But I’ve lost two days of writing, and what I really need to do is work on my mindset as to why I think that way when I absolutely spent yesterday working on my business and coding, and today writing and figuring out why I’m falling behind in taking care of myself while writing.

The neurosis, the perfectionist — the self destructive ableist — who is ingrained deep inside me thinks I need to be more of a computer, and to do things in such a way, instead of accepting that a whole person is involved in what I do.

I hope this gets easier. Not the consequences of when I fuck up — clearly I need them to see I’ve gotten off path because otherwise I will check out of my life indefinitely. No, just to notice that I’m losing myself and switch out. I think that’s what I really need to find. The reset out of a hyper focus brain shape activity.

This is the first fucking week, and it’s not my eyes that have failed me. It’s me for not sleeping enough, for not taking breaks, or stopping and putting more time into my personal life on my writing days. I ignored the self worth I was feeding into getting back to writing, and as a result, I ignored that I was justifying blowing through my healthy boundaries because “productive = valuable person.”

I need to schedule a healthy life in — not out of a neurotic need, but because when I’m stuck in the neurosis, I can’t see anything beyond the task. It is my world, my identity. I need something to be able to break my obsessive brain open and let me out, not once every week, but repeatedly throughout each day. I don’t know what that is — I don’t know if it even exists. But it’s my job to find it.

My Writing Week

A Day For Maintenance

Well, it’s Monday. My first Monday since mostly completing the website theme. Officially my first Monday of getting back to real writing. There are some things I need to figure out, those things to be planned today, actually. I thought since I wrote that big thing yesterday about what I do/did to stay on track for writing and running this business, it would be a good time to actually, you know, share a bit of it. And then do it.

The nice thing about doing a little blog about getting back into writing is that it has me writing right after getting up and having breakfast. It has me thinking about writing even if I’m not chapters into writing a novel. It reminds me that writing is easy, just so long as I get out of my own way.

A big part of starting to write again is this struggle of choosing where to actually start. There are a lot of stories waiting to be updated, and some still require a lot of reference notes and reading to even remotely get to that place. And those big stories, they’re valuable. Valuable income wise, but also valuable sentimentally wise. Aka, I care about them too much to fuck them up, and there’s a danger in that kind of thinking. But for now, I’m going to find the gentle path and fuck up a different story first XD, just to get used to these doubts and insecurities so I can push them away for the bigger stories.

A Grand Experiment

Getting back to writing is a grand experiment in a lot of ways as I push my brain to be more than its limits currently are. And I know it could reach that place once, but after the months of my hyper-sensitized trigeminal nerve screaming at me and my pituitary unable to demand the required cortisol, my brain changed. So I’m building the support structure I think I need before starting, hoping it will evolve to what I need once writing as my brain changes. And that’s kind of exciting.

I’m an adventurer of thought, if not anything else. I love to see what the human mind can do. As much as teachers had claimed the calculator would make us lazy, it made me push to be more efficient to understand how I needed to think, and then use the calculator to support and bring accuracy to the problem solving I was doing with math. Creating tools to support basic human deficits is damn exciting because it allows us to be more. But only if we, as individuals want to grow instead of stagnate.

Anyways…

Planning A Week At A Time Starting With Rest

Every Monday is my “maintenance” day. It’s the first day of my official work week after a weekend focusing on family time, household errands, and personal hobbies.

Giving myself the weekend was something new for me to make sure my entire life wasn’t about work, but also required because of the unavoidable distraction my loved ones pose. Oh, I fought it for as long as I could. Only to realize I was perpetuating some self destructive ableism on myself by failing to rationalize rest. I do that; I will logic self destructive behavior and call it productive, and I know I’m not unique in that department. We’re all going to drop dead one day, and no, I don’t want to have prioritized work over living. I’m not apologizing for that.

Taking the weekends was to help my mindset, to accept that I was going to be distracted, and that instead of feeling frustrated with it, it was a sign I shouldn’t be working during that time anyways. Because I would work all the time. Once my brain gets into the ruts of a behavior, it stays there. It found the shape, the pattern of thought to work forever, and I can be a total grumpy fuck if not careful. Weekends are set aside to ensure that I’m a decent human being who rests, who spends quality time with family, and has other shit going on than staring at a screen all day.

It also means it’s a time that I’m not putting all the household stuff first, just finding a way to fill the rest time with a different work. That’s for Monday.

Maintenance Monday

Maintenance Mondays exist to get me back into the mindset of doing after the weekends of playing. I deal with the emails that weren’t required to be dealt with immediately while running the laundry. I figure out medical shit and appointments, bills, important household stuff that has to be addressed. I tidy up the kitchen and bedroom/office. I plan and make meals for the week, or make sure I’ve got easy make options so I’m not starving my brain during work hours. I plan my week of writing, the goals I want to hit, the time I’m willing to spend (because I always go over, not under, and time is everything.) I then plan my allergy shots and errands around that time frame.

This week I have to plan more website updates alongside writing. Because of the eye situation, I have to figure out just how much screen time is going to result in a migraine and plan around that. Using Word is hurting my eyes, and Word is how I make those PDFs. I was able to get Scrivener to a beautiful layout for writing, nice soothing colors and perfect font size. It doesn’t hurt as much, and I wish I could get Word to the same place, but it’s time. It’s a trade-off of pain where to invest in solving a problem while it causes a problem could steal away days of my ability to write. So that is my big thing to plan this week.

Defend The Routine

Because Monday is the day I manage my life and business, and plan the week, it’s also the day I have to guard as fiercely as possible. It sets me up for the week, and if some random doctor’s appointment or someone home sick interrupts this day, I will either push it to Tuesday, or the worst case scenario is I lose the week, lose the rhythm, the thread, and wing it hoping the energy I spend actually leads to something productive. Never good with ADHD.

The biggest importance of Maintenance Monday is that it acknowledges that working from home is a fucking problem that has a million distractions that need to be addressed before work can get done. I can’t have laundry waiting for me when I’m working; I’m going to do the laundry because when I’m home, my priorities are with my immediate space. I can’t have a messy room because visual disorder hurts my eyes and no, I can’t afford an office. Walking into the kitchen to make a quick meal before getting back to writing can mean being completely interrupted by cleaning a messy kitchen and then forgetting what I was doing, losing the thought pattern of writing.

Just like with human distractions, where I have no ability to compromise once they’re in my space, it’s the same with disorganization and mess. I won’t win. My focus will go to the immediate problem that needs solving so that I’m then allowed to get back to work — and know, I don’t want to work. Not really. So every distraction from work means the very real possibility of not working. On Monday I solve those biggest issues, and every evening before bed I will do a quick tidy up to solve them again (because I live with slobs and cats). Anything less is setting myself up for failure.

A Day For Ongoing Projects

Mondays are also the day I get to put some time into the big organization projects that need doing, but are dangerous to touch on a work day. Because if I get in the habit of trying to tackle the intense clutterfuck thing that happened after 10 years of being ill, moving, and two different episodes of mold taking over this place, suddenly my week could be about doing that. Because it IS important. And my brain prioritizes my immediate space instinctively because, hey, years of allergies has turned this into trauma. I have to not trigger that instinct.

I have a lot of big projects waiting. The one I’m doing today is getting the rest of the holiday decorations taken down. I was holding off, hoping that we could do it as a family, but yeah, it never happened. I put them up alone as well, because I can self motivate and others can’t. I suppose at the heart of it, because I care and they don’t. We have a garage full of things that were supposed to be taken to goodwill when we first moved in here, but it never happened. A basement full of moldy storage that was supposed to be dumped when the black mold hit the house, and it sat there when the white mold hit, and is still there.

Being sick has been difficult when I’m the only one who cleans. Running a business when an entire dirty house has been dumped into my lap as people walk in and out throwing their shit down anywhere they want in shared spaces and thinking they’re not responsible… it’s impossible, really. I don’t get to leave the house to work like other people do. The eye sight issue has made that pretty impossible, and my work environment outside of my clean space is far from ideal. And at the end of the day, it doesn’t get to matter. What I prioritize is my choice, and I’m not obligated to solve other people to be allowed to live my life.

I solved my room before getting myself back into the routine of writing. I painted, got fresh storage in here, and decluttered. The important thing was to have visual balance, soothing colors, and lighting that wouldn’t contribute to eye strain. I fostered a space to love, to feel calm in so that when I go to create, it’s easy and familiar. Any project can be swiftly boxed up and tucked out of space to make room for writing or to give me a distraction free view. I don’t have to worry about cats knocking things down when there’s nothing to knock over.

If I had decided not to do it all in one go, Mondays would have been the day to work on it, doing a piece at a time. Monday lets me take care of some of these big things a bit without turning it into a daily work day thing. My work week is for the 4 days that follow Monday.

A Four Day Writing Week

I write 4 days a week. I work a 5 day week. Do I still find myself working on the weekends? Sure. I’m only mortal (for someone who keeps saying work sucks, it’s really hard to pull me away.) But these 4 days are the days I count. The days that matter. The days I set aside to do the work with writing sprints and editing sprints (oh yes, you read that right. Editing sprints, because I have no fucks left to give.) 2 of these days also require the huge distraction of leaving the house to interact with beings who are not cats long enough to get my allergy shots.

Leaving the house for anything is about the biggest distraction I can think of from doing work (even worse than having people in the house cuz sometimes they’re actually quiet), so this is no small feat.

The Greatest Distraction Of All: Leaving The Planet

Leaving the space of work is like leaving the world behind. I am defined by my environment. I don’t know why; I could romanticize it or what not, but it’s the reality I deal with. It’s great when I need to escape a mood, but it has the same effect when it comes to losing the brain shape I need to focus on work.

I become an artist outside the house, falling in love with the landscape, or the go getter who is getting errands done, or the drop in who randomly says hi to their partner at work (because being home alone sucks.) And it shouldn’t be such a big deal. Being spontaneous and fun shouldn’t ruin an entire day of work. But it does for me.

My brain takes a certain amount of energy and time to twist into the right shape (this is a metaphor, peeps, just saying. My alien traits have not evolved this far, thank you). I need structure, and I need consistency, because being spontaneous doesn’t mean spontaneously writing 5000 words on a different story. It means deciding to paint my ceiling, or rearrange the pantry, or clean out the garage and sort what’s going to goodwill.

There is so much waiting to get done, and the more my physical health and energy return, the more this body of mine wants to fuck off and do all the things, all at once, to an amazingly belligerent degree when external resistance is felt. I get angry when something hurts or I feel tired — how dare anything hold me back after years of chronic fatigue and adrenal insufficiency! XD And that anger is also a wonderful excuse to keep me from getting my work done.

Self Motivation Has To Be From The Self

Anger is great for ADHD when you don’t have motivation. Unfortunately, it can be hard to direct. I’ve been feeling a lot of anger in regards to the anti-trans bullshit happening lately. The normalization of it. The consumer market exploiting it. I’ve been fucking pissed, and I’ve used that to show up every day and remind people I’m still here. That I’m not letting them push me out of my life just because they’re that fucking selfish they want transpeople to disappear because we don’t fit their concept of what’s allowed to exist. Fuck that.

I don’t recommend having your motivation be in defiance of an external factor, not really. Because you don’t get to control that. You can start relying on getting great reviews or feedback or even anger — I have found some amazing inspiration from some rather outraged reviews. XD But when it’s silent and it’s just you and your thoughts, you have to be ready to self motivate. Every time.

I think this is one of the hardest things for self published writers to really understand. That when they put a work out into the world and no one says a word back, this is going to define them. What their brain generates in the silence is going to decide if they keep pushing forward, or if they give up. That what their brain generates can change at any damn moment so that if they were being their own cheerleader, suddenly they can be their worst enemy and not be prepared for it.

It sucks. It’s absolutely normal and it sucks.

We are our greatest enemy. The brain is the most dangerous weapon, sharp teeth once tearing into thought now turned inward, tearing into the ego, the dreams, the motivation and leaving everything bloody. We’ve evolved to feel this as social beings. Shame is part of our biological makeup, but just like stress gets triggered from nonsensical things in the modern world, so does shame.

Do You Really Know Yourself?

There is nothing domesticated about the human psyche. If you think you have trained yours to be gentle and loving, that you will never be tested, it’ll be a lot harder to push back when those biological factors activate and turn on you.

Because it will. Vulnerability is in all of us, and from that vulnerability springs our greatest warriors. Warriors who turn on ourselves to logic out of the pain — to just stop doing the things that bring the vulnerability, like putting yourself and your work out there. Your greatest lessons will be learned when the brain comes in to fill in the silence when you were expecting social validation. In the same way I have a day to plan on how to keep my shit together through the week, you need a plan for how to keep it together during those moments. I have one.

If you’re doing this, if you’re real about this, you will be seeking those moments. You will be seeking to grow as you seek that pain and tell it to fuck off. But you have to be honest with yourself that the vulnerability is there. That the pain hurts. That you have to feel it to deal with it and overcome it. Like any muscle, one can get stronger dealing with this stuff, but it’s going to be the worst pain in the beginning every damn time, and there isn’t a shortcut.

Writing isn’t hard. Showing up is where the majority of people fail. And you will find system after system telling people you just have to write 100 words a day, or sit down for an hour a day, or sacrifice a main character to the writing muses on a full moon, etc, etc. And yeah, maybe they’ll get a story out of it… but then what? What do they do with it? Does it ever even meet another set of eyeballs?

If you’re not showing up, there’s a reason not being addressed. Like my reason of working for a living sucks and I don’t like being home alone all day. And if you don’t acknowledge it and do the work to accept and deal with it, those reasons will always decide for you.

The will is an extension of the subconscious; if your subconscious has decided something, it’s decided. It will be your default until you deal with that shit. And every time you feel resistance to dealing with that shit, you’re being given a path of where to go: into the resistance. If you’re not seeking that pain and facing the things holding you back, you’re not really doing this.

There’s a reason so many entrepreneurs are sociopaths, and 1 in 5 business leaders are psychopaths. They don’t have to do this work to get to where they are. The psychological wiring just isn’t there to battle. Everyone else does, and it defines if they’re going to make it or not.

Congrats for not being a sociopath. Here’s some pain to guide you forward.

mocha reading

DEMON BONDED: COVEN SAGA
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EPISODE #12
ep 12: Scene 2 last updated 8/10/20

?New Demon Bonded Scenes To Read?

Hey, babes!

So, some cool shit. You can read the first 2 scenes of Demon Bonded: Episode #12 up on the free part of the website. That page will be updated every time more of the story is, so feel free to check in whenever.

Wendy has a new book out, just released, that’s looking damn cool. It’s in KU for all you peeps who enjoy that program during these tough times. Check it.

 

Omega Chattel

At Zilly’s Chattel Farm, Alli is seen as an upstart Omega. But in reality, he is the victim of a brutal house-dad who wants to control him. Threatened with being institutionalized when he turns eighteen, Alli runs away.

Tarin is an Alpha who runs a small school from his own home for wayward Omegas. Three or four students at a time are all he can handle and his home is full. But when he meets Alli on the streets, he is compelled to bring him home.

Alli wants a better future for himself, better than selling himself on the streets, so he agrees to be a student, when what he really wants is Tarin himself. Tarin doesn’t sleep with his Omega students, and the one exception he made broke his heart.

But Alli is persistent. And not only does Tarin have a weakness for broken young men, there seems to be a spontaneous bond forming between them. The combination is turning hotter faster than they can keep up.

Non-shifter omegaverse, fated mates, age gap, virgin, knotting/bonding, high steam, HEA.

 

Back to Writing

I’m starting up writing again, and gonna be real, it’s a bit like wrestling my brain to focus… through barbed wire… while on fire. >_> While jumping back into Demon Bonded, which has been ignored far too fucking long, I came up with a super cute story focused on the apprentices. It’ll be a little mini side story… er, spin off? from the Demon Bonded world.

See, I had this really fun Liem story where he finally chooses a demon after being burned with his experience with Fido/Brave and that douchebag Tobias, but it was its own thing, you know? It felt more than a bonus story, more than just a little side thing, and it was going to be long enough to be multiple episodes—something I’ve never done with a bonus story. And, as we jump into the Aeternum, where Ky meets the apprentices of the time, I realized I really wanted to make a thief apprentice there to mad steal from the sorcerers of Blackstone Falls.

So, I thought, hey, why not just make it all its own thing where, well, Demon Bonded Apprentices are the focus. Liem can be his sadistic self as he tries to be a better person (while being a total asshole to the more dickish apprentices) and winning over a rather wild, violent relic who is very reluctant to trust anyone, and we could also have this super cute Cade sorcerer come in, playing dumb as he infiltrates the apprentice mentor program, while looking to get everything he can from the peeps running a demon slave trade out of the small town.

I don’t think it’ll be a super long story. Like, maybe five episodes tops… but it’s hard to say. You never know, sometimes characters do their own things and surprise you. Cade definitely has his eye on someone, and I’m pretty sure he’s going to steal him too by the time it’s all written. <3

Right now, I’m clinging to the creativity I’m feeling to help pull me through the damn misery of trying to organize my brain to write again. I was working on the interactive choose your own adventure, but realized it was only becoming this loop where I didn’t know how to move forward, so I decided I needed a more linear story to focus on for the moment. This mold thing is fucking hard—it’s like every time it hits, I have to remake my brain all over again to function the way I want. But fuck, it beats looking at the damn news and predicting a horrendous future, so yeah, gotta do the work. Gotta push through and just keep working at it until things flow again. I’m hoping I’ll be myself by the time I finish the Demon Bonded/Demon Bonded Apprentices episodes to jump right into the 3rd PATB episode.

 

Office!

Oh, shit, I finished setting up my office! It’s so weird to realize I haven’t done a newsletter in so long. @_@ Uh, I basically set up these dry erase note cards all over my office. One set is the completed outline of the next episode of PATB—yeah, I’m on that shit, just waiting for my brain to show up. (The energy needs some tweaking in the first part of the episode, just kinda dragging right now.) The other is focused on Demon Bonded, while I got an entire wall divided between fanfics, WIPs and audiobooks.

I realized this summer that not only did visuals help me comprehend what I had on my plate creatively, but it also made it more manageable. I’ve been doing a lot of things to find ways for anything but my brain to hold onto the info I’ve been juggling all this time in my head. With the way dopamine is lowered from allergy response, and the brain swelling and plain old neurological scrambling that comes along with mold exposure, having external constants where I can just reference my own notes about my books makes writing so much easier. Which I’m learning the hard way this week when writing Demon Bonded and realized I gotta stop and make an actual reference, otherwise this just isn’t going to happen. I already did this with PATB, which is why I was able to bang those two novels out—I had reference at my fingertips. But of course I forgot that was why until I failed to have that reference for Demon Bonded. @_@

It feels like this annoying busy work keeping me from what I want to do, but at the same time, I know if I don’t create a reference, I’m not going to move forward. (fucking adulting for a scrambled brain.) I hate it—it is so boring taking notes of my own stories—but I seriously can’t remember enough to not do the work.

So, yeah, that’s me. My cleanroom bubble is working, and as long as I stay out of moldy buildings, I’m pretty much 100%. It’s just getting my brain to remember the neurological pathways to do the shit it’s good at. Started up bullet journaling again, too.

Honestly, I watched my dad go through dementia, and I had to follow after him, you know, just see the trail of consequences of having a brain that just doesn’t want to do what it needs to do when his kidneys started failing. I am doing everything I can to not default there. It’s not fun. It is always going to feel like work. And if it’s easier on my loved ones, then yeah, I will do the damn work every single time. It becomes a series of habits to keep your head straight after something like this. Ideally, those habits will become default. But if they don’t, they don’t, so it’s better now to build a life where those habits are normalized and set into focus to get the best chance you can at healing.

 

Peace

Hope you peeps are doing well. I could tell you a zillion horror stories of all my fears since the US Congress decided they didn’t have to protect and support the American people during covid 19 and they just took a fucking month long vaca while letting unemployment insurance drop when our numbers are at a world wide worst, but yeah, with my brain the way it is, I gotta focus on less upsetting things. (but if a revolution is happening anytime soon, count me in.)

Shit’s tough. I think I get by helping others the little that I can. There’s something about feeling part of a community during a time when you see every thing working to divide us that feels a positive rebellion of its own. A smile is a rebellion against the assholes of the world. I don’t know when it became ‘everyone for themselves’ in this country of mine, but it’s a pretty disgusting, sociopathic mentality that has no place in crisis—it has no place in the future of humanity. We’re all in this together, whether we like it or not, so better to show up and be good to each other. At least, that’s my motto of the moment. 😉

Hope you’re all safe, all healthy, all happy.

?Of Cleanrooms, Interactive Novels and Politics?

Hey babes, I’m alive.

It’s been over two months since I checked in. >_> Sorry. Things are actually pretty good. It’s hard to put it in perspective because of how the country has been so crazy — I’m in the US with covid cases jumping up again as we ‘reopen,’ (why yes, we’re run by morons) and we’re in the middle of some long needed and 100% justified civil rights protests to support Black Lives Matter. It’s kinda hard to want to write anything about myself right now, because I feel like a grain of sand in the middle of these huge moments in history.

I’m a doer, a problem solver. When something breaks, I immediately think of a million ways to fix it, and then I experiment until I get the solution that works. So it’s hard to live in a country where fixing things isn’t a thing. We talk about innovation in the US, but all we innovate is how to part money from people’s wallets. It’s never about real change, and this place becomes ugly and decaying and stagnant as a result. There are so many in pain, living on vapors their entire lives who are never heard, never represented in this country. Sanders being brought down by status quo Joe Biden, the most conservative mouthpiece in the Democratic party — it breaks me every time to see how pathetic this country is for what we settle for while claiming we’re revolutionaries. (The revolution of sitting on our asses bitching about pointless shit. :/)

I’m really proud of the protests, of the changes being demanded, and I truly hope they don’t stop until real change comes. I have no love for the police, and even less respect or trust. No one’s life should be put above another, and no system should be in place to do exactly that.

But yeah, speaking of solving problems.

 

I made myself a cleanroom/bubble…

image of plastic wrapped shelves and zippered doorway to cleanroom

plastic wrapped shelves

image of plastic wrapped bedroom, no furniture

bedless, furnitureless bedroom

image of plastic wrapped office

the office, plastic wrapped and tubbed

I transformed my moldy bedroom and living room into an allergy free zone by building an internal structure out of PVC pipe and wrapping it all in plastic sheeting, basically a bubble inside the room. I ensured there was enough space all around so that the bubble didn’t touch the walls, creating a channel of air where the AC and heater could continue to temperature control all around the bubble. Also sectioned it off from the rest of the main house to ensure that any of that moldy air wouldn’t mix with the non cleanroom living space.

image of air scrubber connected to vent system

air scrubber for the win

I then used an air scrubber to pull air in through one intake into a sectioned off area in the bubble (basically zippered it off) where the air is then filtered and pushed out into the cleanroom through these really simple vents I made with the plastic sheeting. It creates the positive air flow required to make this work, (because air scrubbers naturally create a negative air flow that would readily pull all the moldy air from outside into the space if not careful.) There are two exhausts of the filtered air, one going into the office area, and the other into the bedroom area, that way, each room can be shut off from each other just in case the worst happens and one is compromised with mold/allergens. And if it is contaminated, I can just unhook the air scrubber and run it in the infected room to suck up the allergens.

(Note: Air scrubbers have been sold out for months because there’s false information going on out there that they can filter covid out of the air. They cannot. If you are seriously worried about covid, there is a cheep, effective solution in the purchase of an ozone machine. I’ve used them to break down allergens for years now, but they also kill coronavirus, including the covid-19 strain. Read the instructions; ozone is dangerous to health and lung function so don’t breathe the shit in. But yeah, ozone– cheep machines versus throwing big money down on shit that won’t even work. I don’t know why people keep getting info wrong, but damn, it keeps fucking up my ability to get basic stuff for allergy survival. @_@)

image of office wall with notecards and pens

just waiting for inspiration to strike

Anyways, I now officially have an office, all focused on my writing and art. I can turn a wall into my outlines and no one will complain. XD Oh, I missed having my own room. Living on top of people (messy people, at that) can get tiring really quick.

I’m waiting on a latex mattress for the bedroom. They’re supposed to be really good with people who have allergies and multiple chemical sensitivity. I had to throw out my old mattress years back when it was destroyed by the black mold. But even this, just having the cleanrooms and spending most of my time in them, my health has bounced back. I can read again. Like sit down, and get lost in a book, and not have it feel like my brain can’t focus. I’m looking forward to seeing how that translates to editing, actually… I’m not ‘cured.’ Aka, a lungful of mold still knocks me on my ass, same with me having insomnia and itching all over if the cats so much as jump on a place I end up sleeping. But I recover much faster, and am able to hit *okay* instead of *less sick* when I do recover.

The landlord had sent in a mold remediation crew a couple months back, but my allergies were just too far gone by then. I think some bodies just build neurotoxins up and can’t clear them out after a mold exposure the way others can. I gained so much weight when the white mold took over, it really is like the body can’t let anything go. The dust, the cats— everything was setting me off. I was living in the car, and reacting to any air that got in. It was pretty shit, all in all. But this worked. And it’s not just the way my health is better that’s been so awesome about this, but how it’s lifted a psychological weight from me.

I know mold is everywhere. The wind blows and there’s mold; I might as well be allergic to air. I have never lived in a house or apartment free of mold, and I was seeing this narrow path of misery laid out in front of me of trying to run from mold and gaining only small moments between being knocked out. But now I know I can build a cleanroom anywhere and create a bubble of fresh air. It’s not horrendously expensive, and it’s portable. It’s like being given the keys to my own life, and I’m full of so much gratitude for having found this solution.

 

Interactive Novels

(aka, adult choose your own adventure books)

Having a space to literally breathe has changed everything, and I’m being deliberately slow in getting back into life as I try to adjust. And don’t get me wrong, I’ve got plenty to be distracted about. My PTSD is on high alert with all the news, so I’ve been tasking myself with finding ways to have fun —more importantly, remember what fun is. @_@ I’m currently outlining an adult choose your own adventure.

I realized as much as I want to do a visual novel, there are just too many elements that were overwhelming me and keeping me from even trying to move forward. Art, coding an entirely different medium— it’s a lot for my mold bruised brain. But a simple choose your own adventure? Way easier.

I doing the dragon gangbang story, using it as one of the paths to multiple different opportunities and storylines. And it’s been crazy fun just to plot out. Like, once I decided on areas in the underground, on specific dragon species in each area, certain required items needed such as a crowbar, an amulet, a flashlight, it was so easy to start coming up with all these different ideas. And I don’t want to talk too much about it, because I don’t want to give anything away! XD I’m doing a secret, bonus branch that you can unlock that will take the reader on a totally different route!!! Gah, it’s so fun just thinking about it.

Focusing on trying to fit as many taboo sexy scenes/scenarios in there as possible has been half the joy of this. It’s really the strategy of creating the story and trying to design something fun as fuck for the reader that’s been the most interesting part. Here’s a little idea of my outlining process. I’m using Scapple, which has been so perfect in conceptualizing and organizing it all. (the text should be too fuzzy to read, but it’s all early stuff, so if shouldn’t matter anyways.)

Interactive Novel outline in Scapple

What else… Oh, I finished the Hellcat audiobook which members of the site can listen to. Also did the same for Fox Claims Vince, and finally made a cover for it. I’m still doing the audiobooks while working on the interactive story. It’s really important to me that I make the site more accessible. Now that I can read again, I realize just how much I lost during that time, and I want to make sure anyone else who might be struggling in such a way has a ready option.

Fox Claims Vince cover art

Fox Claims Vince cover art

I do this thing where I stress myself out with these lofty goals every time I get healthy again, partially because I see me not feeling sick as these little windows that I have to sprint through or they’re wasted. But when you’re healthy, life is more a marathon, and I don’t really know how to balance my time or set appropriate goals that won’t burn me out. It’s something I’m going to have to learn. Don’t get me wrong, I love the ambition and the challenge of my work and doing things like writing a novel a month, but this is also in the middle of a global pandemic and civil rights movement months before one of the most consequential elections of my lifetime to date. Will the US finally get a vote by mail system that’s accessible to all, or are we watching what’s left of democracy crumble into the ocean?

 

Figuring out how to survive this political shitshow

July is quickly approaching when the covid 19 unemployment benefits of, you know, basic living wage that has been like a lottery in my house will run out, and I’m looking at all the bills I deliberately didn’t pay the last months because I knew the moment covid hit, that this cliff would be inevitable, and it’s better to have enough $ now to eat than throw away on bills early on, no matter the debt accrued. Covid has not magically cured itself or disappeared with the hot weather. There is no 100% guarantee that a vaccine will be viable, and if it is, not for 6 months to a year. It’s a really stressful time, as I’m sure lots of people are experiencing right now, especially those without financial support.

If you’re not up to date, or even better, if you live in a country who cares about their citizens, Congress is basically leaving us to die in America. More than half of the people in Congress are millionaires who have no perspective to the wealth inequality they’re creating. Those with enough money to work from home have no idea what it’s like to have a job where you’re asked to go die so that other people can have groceries or gas or fast food. For every person who readily wears a mask, there is another who refuses to, will walk into businesses, get into people’s faces and will not be stopped from coughing or sneezing or contaminating others, including the workers who have to be there.

Our government should be paying us to stay home and uphold the public health to prevent an overburdening of hospitals, but instead they looted our taxes and handed it to the largest corporations in the country to bail them out, and they’re letting the citizens fail, ensuring that we will not be economically sound enough to do the job of staying home and upholding public health. Partly why some people want to go to work right now in America is because they don’t have any food, they don’t have any income, and they have no way to get it. They’re being kicked out of their houses and apartments because they can’t pay to stay there. They have kids who need to eat, and have nothing— losing school meant losing the school lunch program for families in need. Entire states are refusing to pay unemployment benefits because they don’t want to give the tax money collected from citizens back to their citizens. They want the people to go to work like a global pandemic isn’t happening at all, no matter who dies.

And as stark as that is, it’s leading to a larger, even worse problem, because the economic classes are being divided greater than ever before. Wealth has changed hands exponentially where the stock market and fortune 500 companies have seen their greatest gains in decades while citizens are kicked out of their homes and lost businesses and jobs. The mismanagement of covid relief from the government is leading to hundreds of thousands of small businesses shutting down completely because little to nothing was enacted to support their payrolls, to ensure workers would have jobs to go to after this is all done. And larger businesses gobbled up the money whenever a loophole was available. Even when the big businesses gave the money back, that went right into the government’s pocket, not to the small businesses that needed it. Fresh graduates have no jobs to go to, unless they want a pittance and to risk their lives and the lives of their families as an essential worker as they clutch their expensive degrees.

My country is looking at a cataclysm of wealth inequality that will be felt for the next decade, easy, with businesses who don’t uphold human rights like Amazon taking over our infrastructure (pretty sure we’re going to see the Post Office destroyed and Amazon put in place) and Bezos looking to be the first trillionaire ever. All while small businesses are wiped out and those running them won’t be able to get credit or cash to revive them because the banks are playing favorites and no one is stopping them. And we’re given a joke of a candidate against Trump, a man who wants to turn things back to 4 years ago to a time that led us to exactly why we ended up with Trump and the wealth divide we have. The government is infested with corporatists wearing either blue or red political signs and claiming they’re going to fix things while they keep bleeding the American people dry.

The reality is, we have a government who doesn’t care about the lives of their people. And it’s not a new problem. It’s why health care only goes to those who can afford it in the richest country in the world. Why you need a fucking job to be allowed to have healthcare—how insane as millions upon millions of Americans are removed from their employment and they lose their healthcare all in one go during covid. They did nothing to stop it from happening and they don’t care that in a global pandemic Americans can’t afford to go to a doctor. This is why drug patents are paid for by our government and then handed for free to pharmaceutical companies who then charge gigantic profits on every American who needs that drug. My diabetic brother is getting a first hand lesson of watching his insulin prices jump up during covid — when people have less money — all because the pharmaceutical companies are allowed to gouge us until we’re literally dead. It’s why minimum wage is not a living wage, and hasn’t been for years. It’s why black individuals can be shot and murdered by police again and again while they try to survive in an economic genocide that’s been going on since slaves were freed centuries ago. It’s why our prisons are for profit and not for rehabilitation.

Our government doesn’t care if we live. And when that’s the reality, the next best thing you can get is for your government to be terrified of the people. The protests are important, and even more so are the riots, and I am happy to support whoever is going out there risking attack by equipment and strategies made for war as unarmed protesters fight against the tyranny of their militarized, tax funded police force. The government shouldn’t be comfortable— no one should be comfortable right now until every single person is allowed to be as safe as the most wealthiest among us.

Change can happen, but only if we’re willing to be uncomfortable, and willing to let go of our collective apathy.

So yeah, shit is grim. I don’t have any glasses rose colored enough to make this not stink like the shit it is. And because my brain is far too aware of exactly all of this, I need to find coping strategies like focusing on how to have fun. And once this adult choose your own adventure book is made, maybe it will help others have a little fun too — because fuck, we all need some damn fun. Revolutions aren’t won in a day. This fucking battle for equality has been going on my entire lifetime and far longer before it. We gotta live, even as we continue to fight the good fight.

Oh, and if you have issues with an erotic author speaking about politics, you can suck my clit. I don’t care about your minuscule discomfort when people are out there literally being murdered for existing while black. If you haven’t figured out what I stand for yet, see my bluntness as a gift.

Hope you’re all safe. Hope you’re all healthy, and being smart, and not risking you or the lives of your community by being fucktards mid global pandemic. We’re all in this together (whether we like it or not.) We are only as strong as our willingness to raise up the weakest. This pandemic is because of our horrendous approach to environmentalism, an approach that will be repeated no matter which candidate in the US is elected because they both don’t give a fuck about the changes that need to happen. So hopefully we will find some real problem solvers to step up, because this apathy and looting of the country as it decays just isn’t working. Enough is enough.

So what does sexy sound like? ?

Hey peeps,

I wanted to check in and let you all know that I have some new audiobooks up on the website, many of them free. So far there’s

Demon Bonded: Demencious Saga

Demon Bonded: Apprentice Saga

I’ll Tell: A Blackmailing Stepbrother Romance

The Autumn Prince (members only)

I’m recording Hellcat: Mated To The Demon Prince atm. One of the longer novels, I’m hoping to have it on the website soon depending on how well I can keep my focus. I’m also eyeballing certain tech and having different ideas about how to proceed. I stopped to try something different with I’ll Tell, where I attempted to alter the voices so that they would sound like different characters… but I don’t think it really worked because of the synthetic voice base.

Oh, Wendy has a new book out! It’s a continuation of her Omega Misfits series.

Alpha’s Embrace

I am Misha.

My name was given to me at birth by the doctor who delivered me. I have never known my parents. I live in a ten by ten space with one window, a sink and toilet, a bed and a locked door. Once a day I’m taken to an outdoor exercise area. I am allowed a limited access tablet and tutored online by computer programs. I have one friend I talk to through a tiny crack in the wall. His name is Cedric and he has trouble keeping himself quiet. When he isn’t talking to me about monsters and demons, he screams all the time.

Why is my life so isolated and depressing? Because I am a Sylph. Sylphs are the byproduct of illegal Omega to Omega matings. We are all beautiful, but 99.9% are born insane. The rarest of Sylphs, like me, show no outward signs of madness or brain damage, but we live in institutions because we cannot be trusted.

All of us Sylphs who have lived long enough to pass through puberty have hypersexual disorder which makes life even more difficult for us, let alone our keepers. It is like something Alphas call the Burn, a mating urge Alphas experience once every couple of months.

But we’re Sylphs, not Alphas, and this Burn thing? We experience it all the time. It’s a huge problem and why we are kept isolated. Most of us don’t survive through our teens because of it.

One day, a handsome Alpha comes to interview and study me. He calls himself the Chief of Staff but his real name is Geo. Like magic, I fall in love with him instantly. I do everything I can to seduce him. He will have none of it because touch between an Alpha and a Sylph is taboo. But I have plans. No matter what, I intend to bond him and make him mine. Forever.

 

catching up

So after a month of me living in the car, things have finally been settled between the landlord and homeowners insurance, etc and we got some mold people to come in and clean things up. They started yesterday. Won’t be 100% done until Monday (I think.) I’m having some misgivings about the whole thing, one being that no one found out how water got in the house and therefore we have no way of knowing if there’s a leak or something. >_> And one mold group said there was mold in the insulation under my bedroom, while this mold group says there isn’t, and, yeah… since they won’t remove the insulation, that might be a serious issue, depending on if it’s moldy or not.

I don’t know. I don’t understand half-assing something like this. No inspector to figure out how water got in — I don’t understand why someone would spend thousands while not actually ensuring the job is done right to prevent needing to spend thousands later. I’m thinking about making a bubble in the house once the mold peeps are done, see if that might be useful… >_>

So yeah, that’s the news I woke up to and just shit I gotta deal with. Being sick has made it really hard to advocate for myself in a reasonable way—I want to yell a lot. It’s like my default. My brain is swollen and all I want to do is yell about shit. And don’t get me started about what’s happening in the world, cuz I got plenty of rage for the ineptness and stupidity and criminal ignorance that has led to such shitty responses to the virus. But I’m not going to talk about that shit— or much shit at all, because I’m just angry and tired and broken about everything.

Anyways… Err…

I haven’t been able to write, but I’m enjoying making the audiobooks. I found some cool software to try different voices, but my Internet connection just doesn’t seem to be steady enough for it. I can’t believe Hellcat is nearly done — it felt like such a big project but it really didn’t take too long. I’m just being slow cuz of the edit. The synthetic voice pauses a lot on commas. Like, to the point the phrasing just sounds wrong and confusing, so I’m literally going in and shortening certain dead air to make things flow… (because I’m a crazy person. >_> ) I’m not sure which one to do next… maybe Heat and Bite from the A Mate Of His Own Series… We’ll see. I’m holding off on the PATB books, only because I did so many freaking sound effects and growls and shit @_@ and I’m not sure how to get that to work just yet. Like, should I try to overlay a weird wolf growling to get the effect or a hissing noise? Hmm… that might actually work instead of trying to get the synthetic voice to hiss…

So yeah, that’s been my last month. My brain goes in and out of severe inflammation. Focus has been shit. Emotional stability shit. But I’m, for the most part, perfectly fine. The car is comfy. I’ve got a mini heater for the nights. We wet down the ground and driveway so the dust and mold in the yard doesn’t fuck me up when I’m in the car at night. I have little to no routine—showering is extremely scarce. Stare at the phone screen a lot wishing my mind would focus… uh… yeah. It’s not death. Pain comes and goes. Getting over a tooth infection — because of course it got infected again. Yeah, just stuff. Not much worth mentioning except maybe, soon, I’ll have a mold free house back.

Hope you’re all healthy and safe, and that this virus hasn’t reached you. The privilege to be able to social distance when some people live on top of each other in small apartments just to have a roof over their heads is rarely talked about. Those forced to work right now (my bf is working >_> ) when we all know staying home and put is the safest… it’s a lot of bullshit to have to face. Essential workers are paid the least— have been for decades— and are also taken completely for granted. And this has not changed that at all. The lip service while workers still aren’t paid a living wage or even given adequate safety equipment, while congress refuses to get money to people to ensure they don’t need to go into work or starve— all while you have rich celebrities and media talk heads and congress people videoing in from their fucking mansions while not doing shit to help anyone… *sigh*

 

I don’t really want to talk about it…

This is shit, babes. Like, the world is going to hell, I’m watching my government’s ineptness and corruption lead to the worst consequences for everyday people, and it’s just enraging. It’s one thing to see common sense and question things on a small scale, but when you just watched 4.5 trillion dollars be handed to corporation in a bailout they don’t deserve because they inflated the stock market with stock buybacks instead of being responsible and saving their money for later so they could bail themselves out?

When you watch a shitty candidate be installed as the Democratic nominee by the DNC — a choice between rapists, that’s what this election has become. >_< All because the DNC is terrified that a populace candidate will steal their power away (and this is how they use their power, by not helping the working class who can’t pay rent, who are the ones forced to work at grocery stores and in shipping without any appropriate safety equipment for the shittiest of pay) and they won’t even give them single payer healthcare, won’t give them free treatment for coronavirus, won’t pass a moratorium on rent and utilities — let me just say how fucking pathetic the US system is where they think capitalism is going to save us when we can’t even get a company to make us fucking masks or life saving ventilators right now. The people running the show from the corporate mouthpieces posing as government to are actual government are greedy, inept, selfish, and they’re using this global pandemic as an opportunity to grow fat while the American public wonders if they’re going to have food or if hospitals will have enough supplies to keep us alive.

Yeah, I’ve got anger and I don’t want to turn this newsletter into me bitching about the shit that is the wealth inequality that is highlighted and growing because of Covid-19 right now. But it’s what I’m thinking about. A lot. >_> Sorry, I thought this was going to be about making audiobooks, but nope, just lots of rage lately. Stay safe, stay healthy, and tell anyone who wants you to risk your life for some rich assholes who aren’t brave enough to work a hospital or grocery store or delivery truck job for minimum wage to go fuck themselves. Life is worth more than $$ (but if you have to risk your life for others, my fuck, pay people enough to make it worth their while.)

 

…I think I’m freaking out a bit. Hope. It has been years running from this mold thing, and yet here we are, some weird, sudden promise that it’s going to be fixed in less than a week. That I can have a stable home that doesn’t make me sick and as a result, a stable life where I can do whatever I want to do. I think it’s a bit like being on a rocking boat all your life and suddenly standing on solid ground. It’s unsettling and I’m nor sure how to deal with it all just yet…

Sorry. This is a weird newsletter. Weird times. I truly do hope you’re all well — I know some aren’t. I know a few who already got the virus. But hope, yeah? Tomorrow can be better.

Peace, babes.

 

PATB Magic, Tech & Lore

MAGIC

TECH

LORE

How does magic work in PATB?

Magic is an energy—a paranormal energy—that occurs side by side with our normal energy, very similar in every way except for a few key differences:

1) Magic is energy that can be manipulated through will.

2) Magic is solely created in the bodies of paranormals.

3) Magic, unlike energy, does not experience entropy.

4) Magic needs will and/or to be connected to a paranormal, otherwise it becomes inert.

5) Inert magic requires a lot of energy to activate, the only exception being activation through elemental magic users.

What can be done with Magic?

*Magic can interact with normal energy and matter, manipulating what’s around the user to change the world as willed. As long as a sorcerer has enough will, and enough magic, basically anything can be done with magic from changing the concrete world to creating illusions in the minds of people.

*Magic can transform like normal energy does but cannot be transformed into normal energy.

*Magic can be willed. It can be kinetic energy, willed by a sorcerer into spells/sorcery to alter the physical world. Because it doesn’t entropy once triggered, magic can be far more powerful than normal energy, a little going a long way.

*Magic can be stored. It can be potential energy, willed by a sorcerer to be stored in wards/charms without any energy loss, therefore usable once the spell is triggered.

*Magic has limits. Without a will to direct magic, it becomes inert, existing in a potential but nonreactive form, spreading out in the natural world and eventually infusing with whatever it’s around. This is how elemental magic comes to exist in the PATB world.

Magic comes from paranormals

*All active magic is connected to a paranormal or a will, that will requiring some level of paranormal origin.

*Paranormals run on magic, produce magic, or sometimes both.

*Some magic users require magic to function as a biological being, while other magic users can manipulate magic but cannot produce it.

*All magic users have some level of magic in their life force, aka, if their magic is fully drained, they will come close to or completely die.

*For magic users drained of their magic who can’t naturally restore it, they will spend the rest of their days without magic unless an energy transfer is made, be it willing or stolen magic.

Why are shifters hunted?

1) Shifters are unique, beings who can transform the normal energy they get from food into magic to fuel their inner beasts. This results in very large appetites, but also the ability to produce magic constantly and store large amounts.

2) All shifter flesh—alive or dead—will always have magic in active form.

These two key reasons are why shifters are sought after so relentlessly by the power hungry. Magical traits natural to the dead shifter can still be used, such as invisibility of a chameleon shifter or healing of a dragon’s saliva, etc, making capturing of rare shifters with special powers all the more valuable. Because the magic in a shifter’s body remains active instead of going inert like other paranormals, it also means that their remains can power spells that would otherwise be too energy extensive for most magic users to do.

Even though a shifter’s body may hold a lot of magic, that doesn’t necessarily mean they can direct that magic in spells. The magic it takes to maintain a shifter beast’s life force is usually where the bulk of most shifters’ energy is going toward, and to use it in sorcery would be to endanger their life. Sorcerers who don’t care about the well being of shifters, and have the time, are known to first harvest as much energy as they can from shifters before eventually killing them and using their flesh for spells long after.

Magic stealing and storage

Most magic users have a preset biological ability to create and control magic that can’t be surpassed, but there are plenty of power hungry people looking be more by any means necessary.

Magic can be stolen from anyone. Sorcerers are targeted for energy drains, but in less frequency as shifters, if only because a dead sorcerer is far more likely to lead to a search than a dead shifter. The magic is just as valuable no matter the source.

Holding large amounts of energy under one’s will, absorbed in the body, can lead to explosions of raw magic. Most sorcerers with extra magic will store the excess outside of themselves, useful for selling or having a backup store for later. When stored properly, the magic will remain active and there is no fear that control will be lost.

Skinners have been finding ways to be overcome nature since the moment they learned magic could be stolen and stored. Unlike hunters or the independent magic user who seeks a personal boost by utilizing stolen magic and shifter flesh, skinners have ensured their magical legacy is passed through the generations, spelling their stolen powers into the flesh of their children. It’s not just traits and flesh skinners steal, but spells, ones of ancient knowledge that allows magic to be drained from their prey and the traits imbued into the thief.

There is no way to change a person’s biological makeup to allow them to produce magic if they don’t, or control magic if they can’t, with the one exception being the howler plague. A human infected with the werewolf virus can gain paranormal powers, good and bad, that they otherwise never would have had. This has led to a lot of debate of if a virus could be manipulated to turn people into paranormals without the horrible side effects of the howlers.

The Shifter Slave Trade

What was first created for the sole purpose of hunting, stealing, and harvesting the energy and eventual bodies of shifters and rare paranormals has evolved since the years of the howler plagues. A new market has rose up, one interested in more long term placement for stolen shifters, seeking out those with powerful allure for the sex trade, or great strength and specialized skills for manual labor and protection.

It’s not uncommon for shifters who have been stolen from their lives to be manipulated by magical and psychological means until they are willing participants in their captivity. Some going so far as to help steal other shifters for slavery or butchery. Because of this, rare paranormals, including demons, with powers greater than the average shifter can be found doing the bidding of criminal sorcerers, and even protecting them.

Anti paranormal tech

Anti-paranormal tech is a combination of nullifying technology, heavy duty armor, wards and weapons designed specifically to take on a paranormal.

Some of this technology was created to stop the spread of the werewolf plague, while others were designed to assist skinners and hunters in tracking down and restraining and killing shifters. The most prevalent, legal use of anti paranormal tech is in the prison system and in the howler prevention fences.

Visdevor

This synthetic compound is the root to nullifying technology and the howler prevention fences. A thin coat is bonded to steel for it to be effective. Routinely paired with a layer of kevlar to prevent removal of the visdevor coating.

When visdevor makes contact with paranormal flesh it causes burns and damage to the living tissue as the paranormal energy in the cells are nullified/made inert. Long term exposure can lead to permanent damage and scarring.

Nullifiers

Anti paranormal tech commonly used by the police and prison system. When electricity is conducted through steel coated in visdevor, a nullifying field is created that can suck the very magic out of a paranormal and the air, turning the magic inert.

It takes a huge amount of energy for a nullifier to raise enough power to be able to turn magic inert, and as a result, multiple nullifying generators can be required for just one cage/armored vehicle. Although extremely effective against paranormals, this cost plus the weight of the generators limits the use of nullifiers to that of the wealthy and the government.

Depending on a paranormal’s need for magic, contact with a nullifier is potentially lethal, and always dangerous when electricity is involved. Headaches, exhaustion, and feeling unwell are very common among paranormals who are in the proximity of nullfiers for any amount of time. Shifter beasts are quickly knocked unconscious from nullfiers, and halflings and werewolves suffer danger to health and life just by being close to a nullifying field.

Howler prevention fences

Electrified visdevor fences over 30 feet tall and topped with barbed wire surrounding a large, usually public area, these fences were first designed by a coven of sorcerers as a means to protect themselves from the howler plague. The technology was shared with humans to prevent the plague from spreading when sorcerers revealed to be real.

A common sight found in the PATB world, these fences are a staple in urban areas. In small towns and rural areas, fences are either erected in a shared area close to everyone and paid for by those involved, or rich sorcerers with their own fences will open their homes for the night of the full moon to the surrounding residents.

Given the para-biological makeup of a howler, aka, a fully infected werewolf, these fences can kill a howler on contact, and weaken any in the vicinity of the fence. Because of the huge amounts of power required to run electricity through the fences, community fences are only turned on during the full moon, although wealthy private residents have been known to use similar fences as deterrents against all paranormals.

Null-collar

Collar restraint used on patients at the Academy when their magic or shifter beast is out of control.

Disgusted with the barbaric use of nullifier technology in the prison system, Collin McPherson has been pushing research into the development of paranormal safe restraints. The null-collar is still in its developmental phases, but can currently subdue paranormal ability without harming the paranormal or turning their magic inert.

McPherson’s goal is to one day create a nonlethal solution for the remaining victims of the werewolf curse to subdue howlers without killing the host. Currently a null-collar used on werewolves where the virus has progressed leads to the host going in a coma.

Grave digging

Grave digging of shifters, although far more common in the past, is still a troublesome occurrence in modern times. Ancient burial sites are the most likely to be desecrated as magic users seek out rare, valuable remains of shifters for spells.

Is magic conscious?

There are a lot of different theories in the PATB world as to just why magic is the way it is and where it came from. There are some interesting aspects of magic that raise the question of if magic might have it own consciousness. This is one of those questions that no one really knows the answer to but paranormals think on a lot as they find themselves so different from everyone else.

*Shifter beasts have a completely different personality than their human counterparts. The inner beast can like different foods, can want different things—it can even fall in love—all autonomous to the human side’s interests. That inner beast can take on its own form through shifting into a body of paranormal biology. It can even force a shift, taking over the human will to do as it pleases.

*Because of the duality of a shifter, there is no way to know if they are humans who manifested a magic based consciousness, or if a magic based consciousness chose a host to grow inside. Some shifter animals claim to have existed before their current manifestation, but there’s no way to know if that’s not the human psyche trying to rationalize the ability to shift into another form by creating a separate personality.

*The cursed infected with the magic based virus each take on distinct personality and physical traits similar to each other as they are taken over. During the full moon when the moon empowers the wolf to take over the human host, the infected howler’s one goal is to spread the virus and therefore help the virus reproduce. This magic based virus doesn’t just seek to survive but manifests it’s personality into its human host as it battles for dominance.

*There are signs to suggest that the cursed virus—being all the same strand—is manifesting the same consciousness into every howler out there like a hive mind or pando colony.

*People with magic are usually more beautiful, more charismatic and full of allure. Magic allows for any gender to reproduce together. It’s almost as if it’s doing everything to mate the most viable of magic users to create a perfect host body for magic.

*Magic when around elements long enough will infuse and become elemental magic. Consider how magic is manipulated by will alone, in some ways an extension of will. Could magic become will power the same way it becomes an element?

*Magic could originate outside of the known universe. If it did and was imitating life, perhaps it also ended up imitating consciousness as a result, instead of starting out with one. Is it imitating life by imitating consciousness?

Bias against werewolves

Although the werewolf plague of the past has been subdued, there remains a common bias in modern times against any of the cursed. Howlers, fully infected werewolves, are still killed on sight, but there are still plenty of people who believe humans in the earlier stages of the virus should also be killed as a preventative measure. No one cursed has never not eventually turned into a howler and lost to the mad wolf. Some see killing the infected as a mercy killing, or a requirement to keep the community safe.

These beliefs are just as strong, if not more, in the paranormal community. Shifters, who have a keen sense of smell, can usually scent an infected before any signs are noticed. Their inner beasts will usually have a reaction to scenting the distinct magic of the mad wolf and either fear or seek to kill.

Sorcerers, who have a history of battling the howlers and helping to contain them for the good of humanity, are very single-minded when they identify an infected. They believe it is their duty to kill all werewolves and rid the world of the cursed completely.

It’s only been in recent years with the plague long contained and information getting out of the atrocities committed by sorcerers during the howler hunts that biases have shifted. Werewolf rights activists have started changing public opinion to allow the cursed to live the best lives they can, and only judge them for their actions and not their potential actions. Modern shifter packs are learning to empathize with the plight of the infected.

Sorcerers though, are still hold outs, a side effect of their past experiences of taking howlers as trophies and being at war with the wolves for so long.

?10 Changes From Demon Arms To The PATB Serial

Hey peeps,

I’m hanging out at the hospital. My brother ended up with appendicitis and we’re waiting to see if the antibiotics will be enough, or if he’ll need surgery. So, to avoid having to think of all those worrisome things, I thought I share with you all some of the reasons I went in the direction I did with The Paranormal Academy For Troubled Boys Serial.

Oh, if you missed the preorder for the second episode of PATB Serial, you can snag it here!

Before I get into the changes made in the serial, I picked up a book today that was, like, everything I’ve been missing in my reading lately. In the first chapter alone there was forced-to-fuck, straight to gay, noncon, and unseen alien/demonic entities controlling the action. First chapter. And yeah, there’s plot too. <3 So if you’re interested in a crazy, wild ride of a read—one that’s only $0.99—you should check out the Beast In The Nothing Room.

A lot of amazing books released this week. I’m putting them all here, cuz I’m being wordy today and I don’t want anyone to miss any of the deals.

MM Reads

MF and LGBTQ Reads

10 Things I deliberately changed in PATB (and didn’t)

So, I feel like I should start this off by explaining, a lot of these changes came about because of branding. When I started writing, I wasn’t thinking too much of long term. I was ill, life was happening, and writing was just about whatever felt fun in the moment. But that started to change once I saw my health improving, and I could look at my writing as a business, not just an escape. I had to make some big decisions of how I wanted to brand the Sadie Sins books so that whenever someone picked up one of my books, they would have a fair idea of what to expect about the contents.

If you’ve read episode #1 of the PATB Serial (which hit bestseller in LGBT fantasy last week!!! <3 ) and happened to have read Demon Arms before, you might already have an idea of what direction I’m going for with my branding. But if you haven’t, I’m happy to explain it a bit.

1. More Than Insta Love!

When I was writing the first sequel to Demon Arms, I got to do something I’d never done before. I got to write characters falling in love instead of crashing straight there. I wanted to do that in the Demon Arms story arc too, where it felt like there were reasons Wylie and Dorian end up together, emotional connections and stuff beyond plain old chemistry and a demanding inner dragon. I wanted a space they could grow together, not just magic into love. I write a lot of lust stories—and I love them, don’t get me wrong! XD But I wanted to write a real love story (well, ass real as magic and shifters can get, anyways.)

2. Turning Up The Heat

This was actually one of the choices I struggled with conceptually for a while with this series, partially with how tame I had written Demon Arms. Demon Arms had been confused for YA by a lot of readers, YA with some sex—it just didn’t make much sense, especially when these readers would then see what else I wrote and find a bunch of books that pushed limits they didn’t want pushed. This choice was where the branding direction came in, and I’m sure it is both controversial and loved depending on each reader’s preference.

Here’s the deal, I didn’t want to have to use a new pen name for this series, I didn’t want to build something from scratch, and more importantly, I didn’t want to find myself stuck writing a series I didn’t enjoy writing. So I went in and turned the heat up. For the peeps leaving reviews such as ‘rape and more rape’ yes, that was absolutely by design. Now you know; welcome to a Sadie Sins’s book. For anyone who picks up episode #1 of PATB Serial and enjoys it, they can be happy to discover that my other books contain adult subjects, much of it dark and sexual explicit, and they will not be freaked out by that. For those who can’t handle this first episode, I don’t have to worry about them hating on my other books.

So you’re now all informed. There will be no ‘sweet’ Demon Arms sequels free of kinky sex and aggressive personalities. I’m planning threesomes, sexual slavery, dubcon, scenes of my delicious killer Theo doing what he does best, dark moments, caretakers crossing boundaries with patients, and just all around fun. There’s no point having a power like allure and not using it like a weapon or weakness. This is a world of dark, manipulative magics gained through hunting down and killing shifters; it’s not supposed to be a civilized reflection of reality.

I want a mature audience. I’m not talking like in age (although, to be real, I’ve met more than a few awesome-sauce 80 year old fans.) I’m talking a more mature mentality when it comes to erotic sex, in not thinking fiction is real, in allowing a book to be a book and not demanding it be anything else. I want to have some fucking fun, and I don’t need peeps crying rape about words on a screen. (Go ahead, try to rape words. See how they respond when you shove a dick into text. If pain is felt, it’s not from the damn words.)

This is a tame series, but it’s still a Sadie Sins book. I’m tired of being told erotic sex can’t ever meet amazing plot and strong characterization. I’m tired of people trying to insist that sex ruins the validity and value of a story, and that stories with sex have to be hidden away. I do not subscribe to that kind of discriminatory thinking about my fiction, and I want to draw in readers who don’t either.

3. Show, Not Tell

I started this when I wrote Hellcat, this hint of craft that’s been growing after I spent a few years writing. I has started looking at scripts, started studying movies and tv series and musing on how I could improve the things my writing was lacking. I needed to create a more concrete world. My characters were all in their heads, narrating the events instead of IN the events. I wanted to show the world, but more importantly, show how the characters impacted their environment. What did a gesture do to the scene—a burst of magic, a flare of anger, anxiety? If it were a movie, how would it look, and how would the physical world change in response to the character’s action? I felt the best way to get the characters out of their heads was to put them in the scene.

Now, when Wylie’s hands are shaking because he’s nervous, he tears through a shelf and a bundle of cash so we can SEE he’s nervous. We don’t narrate that men are hollering at Theodore for base, sexual favors but have them shout thinks like “suck my dick, sexy!” In my first draft of Hellcat, I had tried to explain that Sean was a shitty friend to TJ, only to realize it would be way easier to show it by having him jerk off while talking to him on the phone. It that doesn’t say total shit friend, what does, right?

There are some consequences to showing instead of telling. My very first draft of Demon Arms was in first person, and it had a strong narrative voice as a result that shined through even when I changed it to third person for the final draft of the book. Showing a scene instead of letting Wylie tell it stripped a lot of the personality away from his inner voice. I tried to preserve it a bit, ensure that his thoughts or words were heard, but it absolutely changed things. Wylie’s not just telling a story now but is in one, reacting to what’s happening, and at the same time, the environment reacting to him.

I still struggle with it. It’s a new skill I’m learning, not quite a natural habit, but it makes me see my writing in a brand new way, I love that. I love the challenge. I can’t imagine ever settling for the same old thing as a creative. Without the promise of something new to learn, it just gets boring after a while.

4. Beast Voices

This was a last minute decision, but it made this story in a lot of ways. I was doing the final draft and I kept forgetting the motivation of a very important character Wylie was dealing with: his dragon. There’s this voice inside of him that’s been quiet for so long, so quiet that he confused it with his own for the last 10 years. Yet here he is, mid heist, letting his demon arms out for the longest time ever, and he’s starting to realize he’s not that alone in his head. That the shit he thought was annoying about his arms is actually quite deliberate because the beast inside him is a different being who wants different things—for starters, blood.

Wylie was not an ‘out-of-control’ paranormal like the other patients in Demon Arms, he was just a wannabe thug with a bad past that he used to excuse his shitty behavior. But as our intro into the series, I wanted to show what out of control really meant—how a shifter could lose control because they’re battling with a completely different personality inside them. I think Theodore becomes a beautiful example for this. We don’t really know why he’s working for the Academy in this intro, why he is so interested in ensuring the patients are safe, but we know in this first book that he is damn well familiar with what it’s like to be out of control when it comes to his dragon. For the most part, they seem in sync, doing what needs to be done, the goals the same… until the dragon asserts a demand of the moment, and you can see the cascade of compromises Theodore must make to get along with the beast.

Would these compromises be required when things are much calmer, when stress isn’t crashing down around Theodore? Probably not. We get to see the beasts as a stress response, where the more difficult something presses on Theodore psychologically, the more his beast rebels and wants to do things his way. It’s why Wylie’s dragon showed up in that gang initiation—stress. Stress kills, even. XD We don’t see Theodore go out of control, but we do see what happens when his beast is in control, tearing through skinners and full of a rage that comes from being hunted for a lifetime and seeing so many die.

I found that in Demon Arms, the conflict was rather nonexistent or easily diffused when it came to the patients. It wasn’t realistic, and I realized I needed those beast voices—those impulsive, animalistic reactions—to keep tensions up in the more peaceful parts of the story. Otherwise, it’s boring.

5. A Grown Up Perspective

I really wanted some adults to get a pov this time around. Theodore and Michael get love story arcs later in the series that I wanted to easily transition into by giving them stronger parts now. I wanted to head hop, I’ll be real. XD I like head hopping, and apparently I did it well this time cuz no complaints were made (that I saw.) I want readers to meet the characters and care, and I could only do that if they got to really see and feel what it was like to be in their shoes.

But also, Theo and Michael are the first wave of Academy goers—the ones still alive—and they’ve seen up close the world and danger that they’re protecting their paranormal patients from. They’re a bridge in a lot of ways, providing a more worldly view. They don’t get to hide from the world but are forced to navigate it as a form of protection. They understand when direct action is needed and how sometimes good and bad are completely blurred when fighting to live. That those lines are naturally blurred when it comes to killing, and trying to pretend they aren’t is idealistic nonsense that neither of them subscribe to.

Killing to survive is not a heroic act. Murder at all is not some white shining knight BS. Death should not be prettied up or sanitized—to kill a person, there is blood, pain, a line crossed every time. This is not a simple ‘bad guys are evil and therefore they deserve to die’ type of series. That’s 2-Dimensional and unrealistic. Everyone who dies is a character, and I want my characters to be fleshed out, felt, possibly even mourned.

I am not here to write a manual of how to be a good person—the teens in this book; that goal might be important to a lot of them. It’s usually a theme for younger people as they strive to find a place in the world. But Michael and Theodore have experienced a level of life—of war and slaughter and systematic bigotry—that makes them not care about morality the same way. They care about survival; they care about a life well lived; they care about doing what needs to be done with ruthless precision, sometimes preemptively, so that they can wake up and face themselves in the mirror each day because their patients weren’t slaughtered. For every confused question from the teens of if it’s right to do bad to survive, our caretaker adults already have an answer and it’s ‘it doesn’t matter. Just survive.’

6. Not Always Agreeing With The Characters

This was a risk, but at the same time I find the stories I love the most are of complex characters we don’t necessarily like all the time. I don’t think good characters are necessarily supposed to be people that would be your best friend. I think it’s a bit like the funny prankster in a story; that guy is usually a sarcastic, total asshole. People ignore it because they laugh, but the reality is you don’t want to live with Homer Simpson, or Peter Griffin, or with those douche-bags from the big bang nerd show. People in sitcoms are fucking terrible, and I don’t think their behavior should really be a reflection of how people should treat each other. But that doesn’t mean they’re not entertaining.

So, this is not a sitcom. These are people trying to do the right thing, but in situations where right is a compromise to the dark stuff happening around them. It’s the compromise of ‘a little bit better than worst.’ First time around, everyone was best friends in the Academy, except for Leo. Leo is won over pretty easily, and you see this a lot in stories, especially romance troops. It’s like this equalizing of conflict and personalities to get along, just because the characters are all in the same scenes. They lose their independence, they lose their motivation, and they become tools for the author who is failing to notice that these characters are no longer there own personalities.

In that regard, I’m trying to be better this time around (but it is tough.) I’m not saying on making them enemies for the sake of conflict – although there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s more, trying to allow the characters to be true to themselves while not being caught up by my own personal need to make them agreeable to get the plot going. Sometimes characters kick and scream, fighting against the plot, and those are usually the best stories. These big personalities, these alphas, sorcerers, just inner beasts combined with hormonal teens and 20 somethings should not result in everyone getting along. That shouldn’t be automatic; that should be what a lot of the work in the character development is for, teaching them to get along.

7. Villains

I realized we needed villains. Wylie’s gangsters weren’t going to be enough. How could I show that this was a world full of shifter hunters, that shifters were actually in danger, and let it be felt, not just heard in passing? Well, now the police station isn’t full of indifferent professionals who were just trying their best, but some are clearly bigoted against paranormals like Wylie, hating him just because they know at some point he can turn into something they can’t. We can see the bigotry is deep, where even the paramedics, a company created to help people, would put the well-being of others and their own profit aside to ensure their unreasonable hatred makes their decisions.

This is why villains, shifter hunters and skinners, were needed from the very beginning. We need to see what it means to hunt a shifter, what that power looks like that they’re trying to obtain, the type of money that went into it—that armored bus wasn’t cheap—and we got to see that in things like the chameleon coat, and some of the abilities the skinners use against Theodore as they battle. We get to see the hatred, the question of what is really human in the sorcerer who takes over George Snyder’s appearance. Here’s a sorcerer passing as everyone else around him, but his hatred runs far deeper than any strangeness that would be in a shifter hiding in human flesh.

These themes were already there in the first book, but they were just themes, they weren’t really realized in the environment. I think this time around you get to feel the weight of these concepts, see how the world is shaped by them. I’m actually rather excited about it, to be honest. Characters grow the best when in conflict, and stories get more interesting as a result.

8. Increased Word Count and Detail

Okay, this was not particularly planned. Actually, I fought this a lot until I realized just WHY my writing style had changed so drastically. When I realized what was happening, I gave into it. I don’t subscribe to a ‘right’ kind of writing. I think we all have different styles and that’s perfectly fine. But I do know as a content creator, some level of consistency in style is helpful, if not expected, and that was my concern in all this.

Here’s the reality: my brain changed. I had no say in the matter. It started happening once I got my allergies under control. I think the first signs of it were when I was writing Hellcat in the beginning of 2018. That book—believe it or not—was supposed to be a short story. Instead it became a novel over 100,000 words long. I noticed something was happening in my head, how I looked at words, how I started to *see* a scene and not just float around in the dark. Shortly after publishing Hellcat, I was hit with mold that took over my bedroom and living room, and the neurotoxins had me suffering with multiple chemical sensitivity for months. During this really shitty time, my brain got messed up. It’s hard to be an observer to your mind when your brain is the one struggling, but my functionality in my life was impaired. Eventually, after taking a ton of supplements to regrow neurons, support and protect my brain, supplement my flat lined dopamine, remove the neurotoxins, heal the damage, lower the inflammation and stop the immune response, I returned to ‘normal.’ Except normal had changed.

You can see the change when during episode 11 of Demon Bonded in July, 2018. What averaged as 15,000 word episodes became 35,000 just for a handful of scenes, and I was completely unable to stop it. My brain had decided on a new level of ‘done,’ and it wasn’t where the old line used to be.

Have you ever looked at the way someone cleans a kitchen counter top—or a room, or maybe it’s their car, etc—and it’s different from the way you clean? We all have different levels of done. Some people need to wash that counter down, make sure every crumb and speck it swept away, clearing off the surface completely just to neatly arrange things back once it’s all clean: that’s their done. Someone else, they pick up the obviously dirty dishes piled there, toss them in the sink for washing later, and flick a few crumbs away: that’s their done. Another person might glance at the mess on the counter top and decide to go watch tv: that’s their done. We’re all different, yet we still have a line that’s called done. My done line moved, and it feels in a drastic way, much more toward the cleaning every fucking aspect of the counter to then neatly arrange the stuff back on the top. And no, this style is not always relatable to people who wait a week or month to get to cleaning their counter top.

When I started this rewrite, I noticed that a scene suddenly took 3 times the amount of words to write on average. It required more words to describe a scene, to linger and show an action instead of have the character think something unattached to the physical world of the scene. The style was more immersive, more in-depth, more action oriented. And to be real, when I saw this drastic change, I worried. A lot. I had attracted a fan base with my previous style. 100%. And I know the writing game—popular fiction is rarely about wordage or sophisticated vocabulary. And erotica? Yeah, no. Just no. This could absolutely destroy me as a writer if my fanbase hated it. But… my brain couldn’t write any other way.

I had no choice in this. Seriously, it’s not like I’m looking to pad word count, or scam people by making a book so long it needs to be broken into pieces, or anything like that. It broke me for a while— I could see the severe problems with such a big writing style change after years of having put out a different style. It could be career breaking, or at least fan breaking—I don’t even like to read long books, but here I am, everything I write becoming long as fuck! My brain changed and there was nothing I could do about it.

So… I chose to embrace it instead of trying to slice up this new style. I had spent far too long battling with myself, battling my insecurities, and making compromises where I was never allowed to just exist as I am. I accepted there was no going back and forged forward instead. The new style came naturally, meaning I would write faster this way, in flow, as long as I didn’t battle myself. If I set the style in the first book, those who liked it would know the entire series had the same style instead of getting a bad surprise next book. And it is a style thing—style doesn’t mean anything beyond a preference of getting words on a page. I can’t decide what readers like; I can only write to the best of my ability and put my work out there.

I am absolutely certain that I have alienated previous readers with this style, and there is very little I can do about it but keep writing. I’m sorry if you were used to how I wrote before; I really am. I can just hope my brain has settled and sticks with one style—whatever it might be—so fans won’t have to go through such a drastic change again.

9. Serial Instead of Novels

This story was too complex in plot and far too much planned in the future to be able to squish it all into a novel format. Demon Arms was planned as a love story a book, and it just wasn’t going to work. I started Fox and Vincent’s story arc in the sequel and they just couldn’t fit some romance mold. So instead of cutting the story down to fit a norm, I decided to go wild and plan this as a long serial. Each episode plans to be around 80,000 words, give or take.

10. Demon Arms Was Unscathed

I think the greatest reason I was able to break out of the old style was by not touching Demon Arms. This wasn’t a rewrite that was ‘fixing’ the original. I didn’t want to replace it, didn’t want to take it away from the fans. This was probably the final deciding factor in why I pushed to create it as a serial instead of novels; I needed to change the format completely to push away from it getting caught up in the old book.

I was a younger author when I wrote Demon Arms, still swayed by popular demands, still trying to figure out what my style was, what my brand was. I had to think hard about if I wanted to be isolated on Amazon and the romance genre for being dark—dark romance was so damn small, and it was hard to know if it would be allowed to grow when everyone was screaming about requiring HEAs for a book to be a ‘real’ romance, etc. I didn’t want to erase the first book even though I had grown up. When I set out to write the PATB Serial, I knew who I was, and I knew who Sadie Sins was, and I didn’t need to erase that journey.

Sadie Sins does not write young adult. Her endings are happy but there are always compromises, always dark paths to get there, and morality is not the main key. Cleverness, perseverance, character connections; that’s how happy endings are reached. Love in the darkest of moments fuel these characters to never give up, to be their best versions, even if they’re still imperfect and held back by their unique limits. It’s easy to love a diamond for its shine, but far more valuable to love it for its flaws.