Fiddling…

I felt that Wylie looked too old in the other version. That, and the colors were too bright, kinda cartoony. So… this exploded instead. XD Ah, fun.

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Dorian’s got a cover!

Self explanatory. I’m trying to break whatever this thing is and move forward, so I sat down and got the next episode cover done. This week I want to put the first episode actually on Amazon and publish it. Just gotta keep moving and not think much…

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Hey

Thought I’d check in. I’ve been quiet the last few days, unraveling the emotional wiring that has frozen me in parts of my life. Had a big breakthrough; I finally got around to tackling the moldy room. Spent 2 days cleaning it up. It was looking nice. Got the old bedroom set up as a living room, and the old living room set up as an office for me. Bought some nice curtains, had shit organized, had even set up my graphics computer in there. I was really excited about it all. Then I woke up with my eyes crusted shut and my body in so much pain it felt like my muscles were trying to pull me into a ball.

So, yeah, that’s a no go. Fuck.

I’m feeling pretty demoralized about it all. It’s hard to work without a space of my own. I’ve been working out on the porch, but it’s not protected against the elements and the cold has crept up. I just want a quiet space where the messes of everyone else doesn’t reach me, metaphorically and physically. And I just want a space for me, at this point. Where I can be myself without being observed, judged, required to socialize, or respond. I want to be surrounded by the things that inspire me, not the things that inspire others, always feeling like I’m pushed into a corner taking up space in a place that isn’t mine. I’m still paying for the place, but with my room covered in mold, none of it feels like it’s mine.

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Stuff

Okay, so I’m using a cache again in the hopes of speeding things up, but… well, I’m not 100% sure how it’s going. It seems to be okay, but the subscription software and cache do not mix, so I’m always wary about this shit. Hit me up in the comments if you stumble on anything buggy.

I found myself skimming through Taken By Beasts, thinking, damn, I want to make another one of these! But that’s what Hellcat was supposed to be, just a short fic, and that ended up being 6 months and a novel looking for a sequel *sigh* I’m not sure if my weird writer’s block of late will let me just wip out a short fic. This inability to give in to impulse has been such shit. I’m working on it.

I’m thinking of just doing a section of outline/drafts of stories that I’ve been kicking around. Like a pre wip section… I dunno. I have a fair amount of short stories I wanted to poke at. So many ideas that have just been waiting, filling me with guilt because I’ve been feeling so slow on the writing front. I think just getting back into a creative spirit, looking at the old stuff and reminding myself that things don’t have to be perfect has been helping. I’m hoping one day it’s just going to clear, you know? That I’ll unstuck and it’ll just be in the past.

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Feeling more myself

What religion has done to our ideas of pleasure and quality of life should be a crime. It’s all a sin. They have made enjoyment a sin and then normalized it in our society. Our disgust for everyday people has roots here, tearing us apart until we can’t even see the beauty of each of us but instead their hateful, repressive messaging.

Just look at the seven deadly sins:

1. Confidence held by the lowly is pride, and how dare we ever lift our heads and feel good about ourselves. They will come to crush us when we do.
2. Desiring wealth–you know, that thing we all need to survive–is greed because we want what they say isn’t ours to have.
3. The whore for lust, objectified and shamed as if we all don’t have bodies that seek to feel good, to connect to others. Criminalizing our need to love and be social. Censored to be ‘appropriate’ until we must conform to their dress-codes of shame and their sexual codes of who can love who.
4. The desire for better–to be raised above a station of shit and have control–is envy, because again, we’re not allowed to want what we did not inherit. Wealth belongs to the wealthy.
5. To be fat is to be a glutton, and how we starve ourselves of nutrition, joy, simple pleasures and love as a result, keeping us week physically and spiritually.
6. Anger–that perfectly rational, powerful strength each and every one of us has to utilize so we can say enough is ENOUGH–is the sin of wrath because they want us meek, cowed, obedient. Customer service instead of a revolution.
7. To be relaxed, to sink into life and enjoy our time–our only time on this planet, and it is 100% ours to own–is to be sloth, lazy, unworthy of basic respect and dignity because they want us to die in the streets if we won’t lift a finger to work their factories. To trap us in a system that forces us from the day we are born to pay for our ability to live in a shelter, on a piece of land we will never own but always pay for, where we can grow food to live in the soil they polluted while they sell us cardboard and sand to starve on. Where they tell us that our endeavors are only valuable if it makes money, when it is in the creativity of art and play that we are finally free.

They take the human animal and strip us of the very tools we have to feel, to live, to love, to enjoy life, and to fight back, and they call them ‘sins.’ And this, my dears, is why Sadie Sins. Because fuck that repressive, heartless, hateful shit.

icon-heart Godless Shameless Fearless

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Checking In…

Hey, so I think the first episode of the PATB serial is officially ready. It won’t be available for purchase just yet though. This is my first book launch in a long time, and I need to think a lot about how I want to handle it. Not even along the lines of success–I need to figure out how to do this without bringing unneeded stress into my life that will harm me more than help.

While editing this episode, I was doing a lot of research into my condition and its relation to PTSD, and the correlation is really strong. The human body has built in defense mechanisms that shut it down when it feels required. The same way an animal might feign death when a predator is about to attack, the human body has the same kind of instinctual wiring deep within the nervous system. These systems can turn off dopamine production to stop the obsessive task orientation that can occur in trying to escape once danger has passed, which in turn disrupts motor skills and cognition. It can happen in learned helplessness, or when the body numbs to pain under stress. All these conditions from my emotional and physical numbing I experienced this summer, to the low dopamine symptoms of inability to lift my arms or hold my head up, the cognition loss, etc: these can all be a result of my body having been so ravaged by years of PTSD that it is shutting down as a defense mechanism.

I didn’t realize that just sitting, thinking I was relaxed, wasn’t actually me being relaxed. My body is tight, tense, my mind races, my thoughts hate to be still. I talk a lot about not knowing how to have fun, because, for real, I struggle with it so much. I can’t let myself just enjoy; I think everything I do needs a purpose. My mind knows it’s nonsense, but this is how I live my life. I rush everything–EVERYTHING–because I can’t feel comfortable in the stillness.

Peeps, I decided to start a business when I thought I was fucking dying! Not just the author stuff, either, btw. No, that was the ‘easy’ business. Before I got into writing, I was thinking of sculpting small figures, mass producing them, painting them with airbrushes, and selling them. My arms were so weak I could barely lift them, but I thought maybe I’d knit or crochet things to sell, or create a zillion of these beautiful tree of life necklaces I had designed. That might seem super cool ‘way to fight to live’ kinda bullshit, but that was me killing myself with stress when I needed more than anything to rest. I am fucked and never saw how damn bad it was.

When you read my first books, you’re looking through a brain of a traumatized individual who didn’t like to look around at the world, and therefore had difficulty describing it in words. Who was never really in her body, and therefore couldn’t convey the weight, the sensation, the depth of concrete imagery. I couldn’t write a complete sentence without rushing because a part of me is so uncomfortable being heard and sitting with my thoughts, that I just rush to the next idea, getting through it all instead of enjoying the experience. If you ever had a conversation with me in real life, whoo, it’s rough. I can’t finish my sentences without rushing through. I can’t handle being heard by others, partly because I don’t feel comfortable hearing myself.

I have been running on adrenaline for so long, I don’t know what calm actually is. But I need to figure it out because when I fail and I start rushing again, my body shuts down. It will hit me with a fever, or take the use of my arms away and force me to fall asleep, or will make it so I can’t focus, and I’ll get distracted by whatever, because ‘whatever’ isn’t stressing me out the way the other thing was I was trying to focus on. And it’s not like ‘things’ stress me out–I stress myself out over things. I’m the one doing this shit to myself. I strive to be perfect, controlled, useful, driven and exact instead of just letting myself exist.

I think I realized just why I like shifters so much, because my inner primitive animal is fighting me for control of my body, demanding I change or be knocked out of life for a while. Ha, and no, I didn’t see that when I started writing but it sure seems obvious now. It’s important I figure this out, and as a result, I need to slow down and see where I’m creating stress. I need to find the space between my thoughts and feel comfortable sitting with me. I’m practicing mindfulness lately, and looking at an interesting read about dystonia–dystonia is the movement disorder side of Parkinson’s, but is also traced to trauma wiring the nervous system. This particular doctor has a theory that movement can rewire the brain back to proper health by engaging and rewiring the nervous system. It’s been helping; just stretching when I feel certain muscles tighten and my energy start draining has given me my movement and energy back really quickly. I can see how my thoughts trigger the flares now, how stress does, how self doubt… It’s a lot to take in, and I’m being super slow with that too because I have a habit of jumping in to new health treatments and pushing to get results like I’m running a marathon instead of allowing myself to relax and heal.

I am so hard on myself, peeps, it feels impossible to put into words because I still can’t grasp it. It’s that aspect of my personality–this rigid, demanding drive to succeed at everything including healing–that is likely the source of so much of my problems. I am terrified of looking at myself, so I DO–I run around doing things, putting these value systems on the tasks I do to feel like I’m therefore a valuable person. But if I can’t value myself at rest, I am never actually valuing me, so the vicious cycle continues. I need to find that deep compassion I can find so easily for everyone I meet and actually turn it inward and let myself be okay existing.

It’s tough right now. It’s good to finally see this big link to it all, but whoo, it’s tough to face it at the same time. There are so many things I want to do, but because I let this get so bad, I need to pace myself and do the inner work. I’m waiting for the day I’ll finally sink into my body, sink into my life, and I won’t have to question it all, just experience.

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I think it’s done… It was weirdly easy, so it’s hard to trust that I didn’t mess something up. XD Emails have been sent with passwords. Sign ups should work as expected now. I have rebuilt the shop (cuz it worked with the old software) and everything is back in there. I’ve only moved active members, aka, if you let your subscription lapse, you’ll have to create a new account, that’s all. For those who bought art and audiobooks and aren’t active, the old membership system is still in place. So if you want to download a backup, you can. You can reach your old content here.
~Sins

If you have any questions, feel free to ask.

Hey babes,

I’m doing one of those author takeovers Saturday Sept 28th at 4pm EST. You can catch me on Facebook at House of Taboo BooxXx.

It’s Meraki’s dark and sexy book group soon to be publishing house, so if you haven’t noticed it yet, you’re going to want to jump in. 😉 They’re having a banned book week, talks about censorship and intros to taboo authors you may have missed. I’m giving away a freebie in celebration of banned book week, aka, one of my previously banned books. If you haven’t snagged it yet, you’ll be able to during the author takeover. I look forward to seeing you all there.

Oh, before I forget, Wendy just released a book, Not Another Hero, about porn stars in space. (I know, fucking brilliant. I’m trying to think what a zero gravity cumshot would look like… messy. Very messy.)

Not Another Hero

When porn stars make sexy movies in space, no matter what happens, don’t fall in love!

To help finance expensive voyages, space exploration has become a scripted, triple X soap opera. Trips are fully automated, controlled from Earth. The crew are not scientists but porn stars called Heroes. It’s fun and lucrative, until someone tampers with the script.

Meanwhile, the playboy captain, Stirling Kane, who lives only for filmed hook-ups to bring in the royalties, finds himself falling in love with a new crew member who might not be a real porn star Hero, but an imposter. Worse, he might be an actual scientist!

Includes: Romance among the stars, assless chaps, frozen burritos, serious love, very little science and an HEA.

Check In

I finally (fairly certain) have my shit together enough to publish the PATB serial. (I hope.) I’m trying to bust through this writer’s block and stupid insecurity and just do this shit. I’m treating it like depression, something that was off my radar given all the seemingly bigger health problems. It seems to be working. Making myself exercise every day (light stuff,) taking some gentle mood elevators (lithium orotate) and starting to welcome in some healthy stress now. I’m hopeful that I’m getting to the other side of this bs.

I’ve gotten 2 covers done so far (second one is Dorian <3 yay) and I just gotta push the fuck through. Although, I’m super worried that the first 3 episodes have no sex in them, like, at all. O_O It feels very off brand, you know? Ugh. ^^;;;

A little writing inspiration…

I’m super excited for October. This is seriously my fav time of year. Hope you’re all having a great fall so far. <3

Hey babes,

Before I get into my usual wordiness, I want to share some stuff. The #1 thing driving me at the moment is this:

Baby kitten Piper needs medical help!

Amy’s adorable kitten got between a dog and its dinner, and the poor thing is hurting. If you can spare anything to help pay for the medical bills for this little cutie, you’d be adding some good into this damn unfair world. I hate the price tag we put on life; it’s so cruel. :/

Join The GoFundMe

Overwhelm

I’ve been taking this month to look at it all, look at why I’ve slowed down, why this writer’s block has hit me, and how to unravel from it all. My successes during this time? I’ve looked at stories and outlines I love but have completely ignored the last year because of my focus on the PATB series. I even updated a few fanfics, and added 2 scenes to Chasing Raider, plus briefly fleshed out an outline. I have started eating foods I feared had mold, drinking socially once a week, having sips of coffee even though my adrenals once protested the very thought of it. I’ve been reading—a luxury I cut out for far too long. I have a desk covered in supplements I don’t take anymore because I don’t need them… but I haven’t quite convinced myself to hide them away just yet. I made myself a writing space, a daily thinking space where I can stretch and relax and let the thoughts flow.

I see that I’m stressing myself—that it’s all coming from my own mind—and I’m trying to manage it better, place less to no expectations on myself, and find that creative spark again. And I’m feeling it—the spark is hitting—but I’m also holding back, not responding to impulse, and that is where the biggest problem lies. I have lost my ability to just flow when creativity hits, not because the world is keeping me back, but because I am self-censoring to the point of my own destruction.

I am overwhelmed. The noose of poverty grows ever tighter even as my body strengthens, and I see I have no control over my creative impulse. I see all these beautiful things I want to create, all these places in my mind where I want to play, and I freeze. Because as much fun as I see it all being, there is something underneath it all clawing at me, demanding I hold still and stop rushing off toward the cliff. Surely if I flash off in any direction, I will end up broken and exhausted.

I’m not good with change. When I was a child in foster care, change was not an opportunity but a monster waiting behind every door as I wondered what fresh hells would await. PTSD has ingrained this fear in me, this caution that to fly free is to risk everything. Part of my survival was in being a chameleon, staring deeply into the social mirror and adapting at every turn so as to be whatever it was that would keep me safe at the time. It was very important back then, life and death with no exaggeration, and it is how I learned to live.

So my psyche is self regulating, taking over my nervous system, numbing me, freezing me, dulling my focus so that it can protect me, stealing my love of creating. If it can keep me frozen, I will be safe, even if trapped in this half life. I am my own jailer, and I couldn’t see it because when my psyche made me sick, it was such a good distraction from my thoughts. When it stole my memory—as PTSD has done for over 30 years—I could barely notice it slipping away. It was only in rediscovery that I could see how I had been distracted once again.

And that is key to the problem. I didn’t realize there was a trickster in my head, one who has been running wild since I got PTSD. This part of me thinks its helping, is treating me like an unruly child by modulating my emotions and sensations for me, instead of asking my input. And bluntly, perhaps it was right to do so, because as long as my sympathetic nervous system was engaged, I couldn’t be in the control seat of my mind. PTSD left me in a chronic state of fight or flight, and it’s only in switching over to the parasympathetic nervous system and being able to calm the fuck down, finally, that I can see the damage my thoughts were doing, keeping me in that unbearable state.

So I have found a way to switch off the survival nervous system and be in the calm while also still awake, but I’m seeing now the trickster underneath, the one who is flipping switches when it feels I’m losing control. Some of the triggers I could notice easily, mostly in the emotional. Anger, sorrow, fear—my body shuts them down. I can’t remember the last time I blushed. It can be uncomfortable being in a body that feels, so my body has shut that off when I cross the overwhelm line. It has made me sick, exhausted in a moment, knocking me out so I can stop thinking about what stresses me. Simple, uncomplicated. Half dead. Because my memories hold moments of deep trauma, my body has shut that down too, creating this veil between me and that part of my mind, regulating however it sees fit. And as I peer at it this last week, its hold loosens, and I wait, wondering if I have made a mistake, if I can adapt to feeling whole.

I didn’t see the overwhelm writing was creating in me, partly in how writing makes me feel. Writing has always been a bridge for me to reach both my memories and my emotions. It was a safe bridge, but lately it hasn’t been feeling safe because writing has also become a lot of pressure. It is leading me toward change in my life, great change, positive change, and I feel overwhelmed and lost in it. What monster will be behind this new door and will I belong here?

I think this has been the longest breath to steady myself that I have ever taken, one that has spanned months—perhaps even a lifetime in some ways as I ask myself to just be calm and relax.

Reading

In the proof that I’ve been having fun—I know, I can’t quite believe it myself—I want to share the two books I’ve been reading this month.

Hey babes,

So, for starters I saw Brea has her latest book out, and it looks super fucking adorable—crazy adorable! <3 So I’m smacking it at the top here for anyone who needs a sweet pick me up this weekend.

His Bewildered Mate by Brea Alepoú

True mates are found in the most unlikely of places.

Rhy, a weretiger with a heart so big, that when an elderly woman comes in looking for her lost cat, Mr. Fluffkins, Rhy knew he had to help. He had no way of knowing that it would lead him to his true mate.

Dillan (Mr. Fluffkins), has lived his whole life wishing he was more than just a cat. He never felt right walking around on four paws. He tried to be a normal cat; tried to talk to other animals but it wasn’t possible. They couldn’t think in full sentences or communicate. It was more of feeling they had then what they thought. He watched television, so he could studying humans and what they did. He wanted to interact like humans. His owners showed one another so much love and were always doing something together. Dillan ached to have what they have.

Love, loss, and tender moments. A dream to have the one person that completes you.

Warning** Slow burn. This book is shifter Mpreg pregnancy is mentioned in this book. this is the first book of the series. The series will need to be read in order, as new couples will be introduced but old one’s stories will continue. They will be intertwined. This is a HEA.

What’s up?

I have spent the last 2 weeks really chill. Very calm. Even got a tooth infection last week, but I’m doing really well. Just calm, chill, trying to get used to realizing my body has been tense as fuck forever. I put some blue fairy lights up in the porch I’ve been using as a writing room, and it’s like hanging out in sapphire while listening to some great, calming music. I’m obsessed with Metric at the moment, the album “Grow up and Blow Away” usually playing in the background.

I haven’t had a single Parkinson’s symptom since I started this calm down experiment. When I notice my stress levels rising, or that I’m pushing myself too hard, I stop, I relax, I unwind the rock my stomach has turned into, and I’m good.

Amazingly enough, because of this, I’ve stopped thinking of myself as sick. I haven’t been thinking in terms of I have Parkinson’s or mold toxicity or even PTSD. I’ve just been thinking, oh, that feels stressful on my body. Let’s not have all that stress. It’s doing good things for how I think about myself, where I’m not labeling myself with these pretty big, unpleasant illnesses 24-7, and I’m not narrating giant hoops I need to jump through to be allowed to feel okay. It’s just about not stressing.

Learning to write calmly

I updated a couple of fanfics on the website the last two weeks. I also added these really quick to read dates so you can see the last time a story was updated at a glance. What else… I’ve had a few breakthroughs on the writing front. Now that I could see that I was putting so much pressure on my writing, I was able to kind of side step some of that pressure. But only some.

Last night I had a mini epiphany about a big issue with my creativity. I had been digging up these outlines I have of stories I want to make—I love these stories—but I feel so overwhelmed every time I look at them. I don’t know if you peeps remember what happened to me a little while back. Instafreebie had decided to feature Blackthorne and I had a mini freak out. The book wasn’t well put together. In the matter of a week, I made a new cover, and started editing the 100,000 word book, rewriting large chunks of it. And I was killing myself—I was still sick, and here I was breaking myself over something stupid as fuck. And once it was pointed out to me, I stopped. I let it go… and I haven’t looked at editing Blackthorne since.

It was all or nothing.

I have this habit where everything I do is climbing a mountain. It was why I stopped digital painting. I know what it takes to get to the end of a polished, highly realistic painting. I know the steps, I know the hours on hours put in, and I know I can get to that ending and have an amazing product. But I don’t want to do the work because, unlike normal people who can pace themselves and do other things while they create, I’m a fucking psycho who wants to sprint to the finish line right at the beginning of a marathon. I don’t know how to balance my creative endeavors. It’s why they always seemed so rushed—I was rushing to get everything down before I became too exhausted to keep the pace.

I have no idea how to be anything else, partially because this habit was created out of me being stuck in PTSD mode. My body cannot survive that type of creative process. Plain and simple. But my psyche cannot survive a world without creativity either. So I need to figure out how to flow, how to pace myself, how to have fun, how to stop and be able to start up later after doing something else. I have to stop trying to be a writing machine—I’m too organic to be any good at it. XD

Right now, when I look at all the stories I want to write, all I’m seeing are mountains because that’s what I turn each project into. I’m hoping if I can see that each project is just a little bit of calm time spent enjoying myself—you know, a nice walk instead of an exhausting climb—I’ll start looking at creating differently.

I guess we’ll see how it goes… The last few weeks have been amazing. I didn’t even think I could get this far in just relaxing. I feel like a different person, someone I didn’t even know was here, allowed to exist. I thought it was normal to feel super alert all the time. Now, I can see it was just PTSD that I thought was normal. Life the last few weeks has been feeling a bit like being drugged and happy (without the drugs) because I can be alert in the world, in my life, without being tense at the same time. I just never knew it was a possibility until now.

Hope you’re all doing well! ^.^