You Won't Believe Why I Stopped Blogging

Hey guys, I just realized that it's been over a year since I've posted anything on here.

This post is extremely personal. I know I don't normally talk about my life outside of writing, but I wanted to share my experience here. (And talk about my future publishing plans! Ah!)

I feel a little guilty about neglecting my blog and my book writing, but I have a very, very good reason for it.  I stopped writing because of this beautiful bundle of joy, baby Lorelei.

She was born September 27th 2018 via emergency C-section, 5 weeks early, due to my having severe pre-eclampsia.

Lorelei is a preterm baby. But, thank God, she was born healthy and strong, and she is growing stronger every day. She didn't need to go to the NICU (newborn intensive care unit) and got to go home with us after I stayed in the hospital for 5 days. (A C-section and super high blood pressure will do that to you.)

She was due October 31st. I was so over the moon about having a Halloween baby. We had gotten married on Halloween. It's the best holiday of the year. 

However, my body had other plans.

I started going into labor the third week of September. They managed to stop it and I went back home, but my condition was deteriorating. I was diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and soon I found myself in the doctor's office being told that they were getting me a room at the hospital because my blood pressure was too high and that we were having the baby that night. (It actually took two nights because they induced labor but couldn't get me to dilate. Talk about a painful nightmare! Yikes.).

The pregnancy was very rough from the start, mainly because it was my first, and I was over 35 years old. I'll spare you the details, other than I was physically miserable from March to September. But damn was I happy.

We had finally done it and made ourselves a family. 

Yes, it was hard. But, I don't regret a single minute of it. Because she's so freaking cute. One of the most fulfilling things I've ever done is to become a mom.

Just look at this face! Ah! So cute!

At first, we thought that we couldn't have kids. We tried for 5 years after we got married. FIVE. YEARS.

It turns out that the medicines I was taking for depression and ADD, were causing miscarriages and infertility issues. I had been on them for 20 years. No one ever told me that I could stop taking them a year after I had clinical depression and I'd be all right. (I was 17 when I had a bad episode, which was a direct cause of a shitty family situation. It really wasn't me, it was them. Took me a long time to accept that.)

I struggled for years with the idea that I "had" to take medicine to live a normal life free from depression. Mainly because my mother, who long suffered from bipolar disorder, convinced me that I needed to be on them.

Well, I don't.

Long (and very sad story) short, my mom was a prescription drug addict and wanted me to become one too.

She was crazy. I've come to terms with it. 

But, like a lot of medicines, if you take them a long time, your brain becomes addicted to them. 

So I had to take time off from writing to deal with withdrawal and immense brain fog. The first three weeks were the hardest.

It takes one month for every year you are on a drug to get it out of your system and quit being dependant on it (that's a nice way to say that your brain is addicted to the chemicals you've been pumping into it).  That's why my productivity slowed down in late 2017, I was dealing with withdrawal. From prescribed medication. From a doctor I trusted. Thanks, doc.

I was on two medications that were preventing us from having a baby. Adderall and Wellbutrin. Adderall was for ADD and Wellbutrin was for depression.

I was not diagnosed with ADD until I was out of college and in my late 20s. I survived school with good grades. Graduated with a Bachelor's in English with honors even. However, I struggled to focus if things were boring. I still do. (Yes my grades did suffer in a few classes that I REALLY didn't want to take, but was forced to. But I passed the classes with a shitty grade and did fucking fantastic in everything else.)

If anything I'd like people to know that Adderall is a horrible thing to get hooked on. It helped to mellow me out a bit and was a great combo with Welbutrin, but it CHANGED my personality and essentially killed my creativity and drive to do things. (Yes. It killed MY creativity. Believe it or not.)

I could sit at the computer for 10 hours straight doing just one thing. Sure. That was fucking great if I wanted to do some writing. But there were days where all I would do is play a video game. I logged 600 hours in Terraria. (Yes. Terraria. Sue me. It's fun. Addicting even. To the point where I had to force myself to stop playing or I wouldn't get anything else done.)

I didn't want to go outside and enjoy life. I was a drone. Even worse, it had really snuffed out my empathy and turned me into a bitch. I didn't even realize how bad I was becoming until I stopped taking it. That shit numbs you. My depth of emotional experiences was shallow.

It was...awful.

The good news is that it's been two years since I've kicked the habit of antidepressants/ADD meds and I'm fine. In fact, I'm more than fine. I'm great. I feel like myself again. My creativity is way up.

The music is back in my life, in many ways. 

Dreams are more vivid. Inspiration hits fast and hard (in a good way. Shut up. Get your mind out of the gutter.). I'm less closed minded. I am no longer trapped in a mental box that I could not see out of.

I have hope, genuine hope that everything is going to turn out all right.

I laugh and cry easier now. And that's OK.

I do have days where I can't focus well. And that's OK too. I know why I get that way, and really, with a baby, it's hard to do things in long sittings anyways, so it works out just fine.

So between removing unnecessary medications from my life and having a baby, I've been pretty damn busy in the self-care department. And that is why all the stuff I had planned to write, was put on hold.

Not abandoned, just set aside. I have a beautiful 6-month-old daughter, and my elderly father who is losing his memory to take care of, so my time is limited. But I have found ways to increase my productivity, including using my phone and tablet to write while feeding the baby, so I will slowly and surely get shit done.

My Plans for 2019

Books

• Finish the 3 Thieves of Night Serial that I got 3/4 of the way through posting on here. 
• Finish the Caddis Initiative Trilogy, Titles TBD
• Publish Addicted to the Abyss in book form for people to buy. (It will have a different title that will be announced later. The one I used here is not a good one for sales.)
• Start the Black Hearts and Bloodied Lips Book Series (I've fleshed out the world and made it a mashup of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Stakeland and Metro 2033. You're gonna love it!)
• Start an Urban Fantasy Wizard Problem Solver/Detective Series (it was inspired by a vivid dream I had. I'll tell you guys about it later. I decided to go with this because it has a bigger market so I'll be selling more books. Which is always a good thing.)

Podcasts

• Upload all 5 episodes of Carnage Cove
• Upload all 12 episodes of Myth Vault

I can't wait to share my work with you guys!

The Dying Light: A Free Preview

Frank and I had shared spooky stories ever since our families when camping together when we were seven. It was our thing—each of us tried to tell a scarier story than the other guy.

The last one he told me kept me up for a week. I had to sleep with a flashlight. Neither of us would ever admit just how scared we got.

But that was part of the fun.

“A long time ago, when the Finnish and Welsh settlers first came here, there was this Ojibwe tribe that worked the original copper mines. One clever tribesman managed to win the deed from the owner in a poker game. They’d been trying to get the property rights to it for years, saying the mine was made by their ancestors and rightfully belonged to them. So it was a big deal for them to get it back.

“A whole group of tribesmen goes down in the mine to survey and map out the oldest, deepest parts of the mine. Things seemed to be going fine, but none of them came back up at the end of the shift. They sent down a search party to see what happened, and there was blood and body parts everywhere. Like, people were just torn apart by something stupid strong.

“The day after, the tribe just up and left; they practically handed the mine deed back over to the settlers. The last Indian to leave told them not to go down too deep, as certain parts of the ancient mine was guarded by an evil great spirit called Gaaway Manidoo. He said that the miners accidentally found a sacred cave, and paid for it with their lives.

“Seeing how dead serious the Ojibwe were, they boarded off the area that lead down to the section where the murders happened.”

“What? That’s it? That’s your story?”

“No. Shut up, I’m not done yet.”

I laughed and he sucker punched my shoulder.

“You wanna hear the rest or no?”

“OK, OK keep going. Sheesh.”

“Anyways, years later this miner, a young Finnish immigrant, comes across an old section of tunnels and decides to go in them. Then one day he comes up all excited ‘cause he found something.”

“What’d he find?”

“I’m getting to that part. Just wait for it. So the Finn, he gets some guy from the mine museum over in Marquette to come over with a newspaper reporter and they take all kinds of pictures. Turns out the Indians used that section of the mine for human sacrifices. It was a big controversy. My dad says he remembers it happening when he was a kid.”

“No way.”

“Ya way. They took lots of artifacts out of the mine for display; bones of the victims, sacrificial flint-stone daggers with beaded handles, the works. The miner sees that these things have value, so he decides he’s going to find something for himself. You know, like a souvenir or something that he could sell for a lot of money.

“He explores the whole mine system for months, searching for the perfect treasure.

“One day he comes up all pale and scared out of his mind. He’s got this clay pot in his hands, it’s an old oil lamp made by the Indians. His hands are gripped on it, like white-knuckled. He won’t let anyone touch it. He keeps it with him all the time, and starts getting really weird and jumpy. He stops working, he can’t handle being in the mines anymore. It made him a nervous wreck to be down there.

“That winter, he heads out to his cabin in the woods to go hunting. Just so happens that his cabin was over by the mines where he found the lamp.

“A bad storm hit. Like, total white-out blizzard. Howling winds, the works. The roads were closed for the season and the guy gets cabin fever real bad. His neighbor goes and visits him, because he was worried, seeing as how he was living there by himself and all, and he finds that the guy had boarded himself inside the cabin. Took him a while to open the door, and once he let him in, he kept going on an on about lamp oil, ‘cause he was running out.

“A few days later, the miner guy goes from one end of the town to the other, pounding on doors, screaming and carrying on about needing lamp oil and something hunting him from the shadows in the woods. People wanted to help, but no one had any lamp oil. By then most people had switched over to kerosene. So he was shit out of luck.

“His neighbor invited him to come stay at his house a few days, seeing as how he was all alone and it was a real bad snowstorm. He didn’t want the guy to freeze to death or anything, you know? But the dude refused. Even though it would have been in his best interest to spend a few days with people just so he shook off the cabin fever. But…he didn’t. He went home, dejected, scared out of his mind. Boarded up everything. Didn’t light a fire in the fireplace or anything, like he was trying to hide that he was there.

“That night, the locals heard something heavy running across their rooftops. My dad says that his uncle swears that he heard them himself. After the thumping on the roof, a man screamed, and over the wailing winds of the blizzard, they heard several gun shots. His neighbor’s wife rounded up her boys and they went over to the guy’s cabin. They find the boarded-over door on the ground, ripped off its hinges. Snow had drifted inside. The guy was nowhere to be found. All they saw was two deep bloody hoof prints in the snow, the other footprints around the cabin had filled in already by the snow drifts. The guy was never heard from again.”

“Shut up.”

“It’s true. I asked my dad. His cousin has a cabin over there. It happened.”

“Sure. Try another one.”

“OK. You hear the one about the snipe hunter?”

I hit him hard. “Shut up. Snipes aren’t real.”

“You know, Brad, I know where the cabin is. We should go up there.”

“Sure. Why not?”

You can get The Dying Light at all major online eBook retailers!