Hello Again ...

Six months later ...

Yes, I know; I've been terrible at the Internet again. But I'm still here, still fighting, still writing!

I have a lot to ramble on about this time, so I'll get right to it.

The Legends of Nod, my series of fantasy/adventure novellas, is doing very well at the moment, and I couldn't be happier about it, since I have a total of 130 stories to tell with the series. Episodes 1-11 actually make up what will eventually be collected as "Book 1" in a twelve-book, multi-generational epic. It's nice to know they are being read, as I continue to write such an ambitious saga.

There have been many times over the years, when I wondered who was reading, if anyone. Sometimes I have felt as though I was crying into the wind. Since moving my titles to Amazon several years ago, it has been easier to keep track of what my readers are reading most, and it has been quite rewarding. I'm not on the New York Times Best Sellers List, but I'm fine with that. I like having a cult following. It's nice to be largely unknown, occasionally recognized, content in the knowledge that I am writing, publishing, and even being read.

Now that I have promised a ramble, I shall proceed to jump from topic to topic like a maniac, which I very nearly am. I blogged a couple of years ago about being robbed, about being tormented for hours, threatened, having my friends, family, and co-workers threatened by someone who claimed to know how to get to them should I fail to comply. Immediately following this event, I was met with sadistic, manipulative treatment by someone with "power" at the church I then worked at (more outlandish threats, more trauma), which led to my resignation from a job that had been my purpose and identity for eight years, and also led to my staunch refusal thereafter to ever so much as set foot in a church.

Once I was able to pick myself up and try to phoenix my way into the next adventure, I found that fate had other plans. After five months, I finally found work in an office, as far away from church work as I could get. The job paid less than I was spending in gas to get there, but it kept me from the dreaded "six months unemployed" status that might have made it even harder to find another job. At the same time, I registered for school, which I'd put off the past eight years to focus on my work with youth. My goal was to finish my degree in secondary education, not stopping until I was "Dr. Clark." I wanted never to be looked down on again by people who thought degrees mattered, regardless of one's accomplishments. I was well on my way to making the best of a nightmarish series of events.

Then my mother got sick, and I was in a terrible wreck. I'm not actually sure of the order anymore. I may have even had the wreck before I got the new job. It all happened more or less at once: new job, back in school, wreck, Mom in the hospital. It was yet another series of atom bombs being dropped on my life when I had barely begun to recover from the previous two.

I was frantically trying to keep my head above water. I had no vehicle of my own, I had back and neck pain for months after the truck was totaled, and I could never escape thoughts of mortality. I had almost been driving a different car when I'd had the wreck. If someone else had made another decision, I would have been, and I would have been dead without the mass of my truck to take the bulk of the impact.

Mom was hospitalized five times within a year, and each time we didn't know if she would ever come home. She did, as it turns out, and we are still seeing doctors several times a week, but a year and a half later, she is doing a lot better.

As a result of all of these things, I had to leave the new job, and school, though I kept telling myself I could pull it off, didn't work out with all of Mom's extended hospital visits over the semester. I began to lose hope, and it became increasingly more and more difficult to cope.

All of these crazy things, which I have so far managed to survive, have left me with what seems to be a fairly text book case of PTSD.

I've always said that I think everyone needs therapy, and I still do. I spent ten months in sessions with a really good student therapist from SMU, learning how to juggle all of the things that had to be dealt with at once, and now that he has moved on, I am continuing to work through these things with his successor, focusing now on dealing with the events that left the impact crater in my world a year and a half to two years ago.

I'm telling you all of this, because I know I've not been keeping up with things like I should. Release dates have come and gone on some things, like the re-release of Metrognomes: The Shaman's Apprentice, and the only hold-up has been me. Before all of this, my writing projects only ever got derailed by other people missing their deadlines, or by the occasional computer catastrophe. Now, the setbacks are all on me.

Fear not, though! I am working through this challenge very deliberately. Knowing that people are actually reading my work inspires and motivates me in ways that nothing else can. So, again, thank you so much for being a part of my story!

I had a meeting the other day with my editor and the creative director of Clark Ink, my still-barely-getting-started indie publishing group. I basically laid it out, how this PTSD issue has been affecting my work and my ability to put myself out there and do the things I know need to be done for my writing career to get back on track the way that I want it to. I told them my ideas, what I want to do, and how they can help me to actually see these thoughts through to fulfillment. So, I am going through the motions, I will get my groove back. I just have to work through being generally freaked out and easily overwhelmed all of the time until I get there. I think that, now that people are on board with my goals for this little writing career of mine and know what I'm up against, things are going to start running a lot more smoothly. We are planning some more public things, some more interactive things to engage with readers directly, and I am excited about all of these things! All of it is risky, and years ago I would have just had the ideas and gotten to work making them happen, risky or not. Now, I have the ideas, freak out completely, go to the right people with the ideas, and we work as a team to make them happen. And that is how one refuses to be defeated!

I'm also working through some of my darker issues with the manuscripts I'm working on. One is a contest piece, in which the characters are dealing with similar mental hang-ups, another is the long-put-off sequel to my first novel, which I'm calling A Wayward Path: Shadow of the Werewolf--a very dark and introspective novel, and the third thing I continue to actively work on is of course The Legends of Nod, which is a much lighter place to go for me. While I am processing my pain through the contest piece and the werewolf novel, I am processing and reaffirming my lingering, if somewhat gun-shy, sense of hope through Joryn in The Legends of Nod. Joryn is my idealist. He is the character who can take a beating and keep getting back up, ready to find the solution to any and every crisis. I'm not saying that his life is going to be easy as a result of his idealism. In fact, I'm going to see this character through both heart-raising victory and heart-breaking tragedy; but Joryn's arc in this multi-generational epic is, at it's core, a story of unyielding hope, and that is something that I firmly believe in.