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!

Monday Motivation: To Sell Your Book, You Must Be Excited About it!

I removed the account name because who this is from really isn't that important.
It's the poor message that he was trying to use to sell his product. 

Today I received the most low energy, passive-aggressive request in a DM on Twitter to go watch and support someone's movie and I was like...if you're not excited about your movie, why should I be? Why should I care at all?

He basically said that his people forced him to "spam" me with information and to feel free to delete it if I didn't want to be bothered like that.

THAT IS NOT HOW YOU GET PEOPLE TO BECOME YOUR FANS. THAT IS NOT HOW YOU MAKE MONEY!

The same applies to books: 

If you are not excited about YOUR BOOK (that YOU MADE and that YOU are trying to sell), no one else will be. SOLID SALES start with energy. Positive energy. That MUST COME FROM YOU.

To get people excited about your book, you must be excited to share it with the world.

Would you buy something from someone who was bored? Someone who was just there, but not really present in the moment? Who was like, "Yeah, I just have this thing I have to sell, I'm not really going to do anything to pique your interest, I just have to give this stupid pitch because my boss is breathing down my neck."?

No.

I can tell you from personal experience, anytime I had that attitude in a sales job, I failed. I barely met daily expectations.

But when I was pumped up, when I was selling something that I was TRULY PASSIONATE about, you betcha I met my sales goes. I met them and then some.

Back in my late 20s when I worked for Godiva Chocolatier (mmmm chocolate!). I was picked to take several huge heavy totes worth of products and sell it at businesses. It was a one day set up of a mini-shop in an office building, essentially, with coffee and samples and a ton of boxes of chocolates to sell.

I sold over $1,000 worth of chocolates in 4 hours. By Myself. 

HOW?

Well, that's easy. I was super passionate and excited about it.

I talked to every single person that came into the room where I had set up shop and helped them find something for Valentine's Day for their sweetheart.

Why?

BECAUSE I FUCKING LOVE CHOCOLATE! (Who doesn't? I mean, aside from those poor unfortunate souls who are allergic to it. You have my sympathies. You really do.)

All you have to do is talk to people, and be passionate about your book. It's really that simple.

You have to be open to meeting new people. You have to be open to finding out what they are looking for and help them get it. That's what sales are all about. And if you find out that the person isn't interested in the genre/type of book that you wrote, you can direct them to one that is. And they'll remember that! And when they run into someone that is looking for something in the same vein that you wrote, they'll recommend it to them. That's one of the key parts of Word of Mouth Sales!

How cool is that?

Look, I know way too many authors that can't bring themselves to promote their product. They feel self-conscious about it. It makes them uncomfortable to give sales pitches of the very thing they spent hours and hours and hours on perfecting before putting it out into the world. They feel like people won't like it, so why bother?They worry that if they do try to sell their work, that all they are doing is  bugging people, like that person who sent me the DM on Twitter.

But here's the thing:
You won't sell a single copy if you are not talking to people!

Seriously.

If I go to a convention and sit at a table, and I'm really not in the mood to talk to strangers, I will hardly sell anything. I know this, because I've had several days like that. My energy was closed off. I didn't want to open up and interact and exchange ideas and thoughts and feelings. The end result? I barely sold 2 copies of a book. It was sad, and I felt awful about it.

But when I show up at a convention and I'm feeling great and open and receptive to speaking to people, and it's very clear I'm happy to be there? You betcha that I move copies off that table and put money in the coffers.

It's all about your energy levels.

Being an excited salesman is a skill that authors need to have! We spend all of our time writing, so we know how to craft sentences that convey a feeling of excitement that is full of passion. (If you don't, that's OK! I can show you how! Just keep an eye on this site. More Motivation Monday posts are to follow.)

Even the most extroverted of souls have days where they just don't feel like interacting with others, and that is when they dig deep, find those talents and sales skills that they have honed, and kick back up that energy level and SELL!

Being a good salesman, and writing books that fly off the shelves and convention tables, or selling tons of copies of eBooks online, is not an innate trait that people are born with. Sorry. But it's not.
THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE IN THE WORLD become successful after failing and failing and failing, and learning lessons each time they fail. And they study. They study the people in their fields that became successful and learned how they did it, and take something away from those life lessons and then apply it to their own careers. And they keep working on becoming successful. And then, one day, they wake up to see the very results that they have been working so hard to achieve.
Why?

BECAUSE THEY NEVER STOP LEARNING.

They don't stop learning about sales. They don't stop learning about how to better interact with people. They don't stop learning about their trade. They don't stop learning NEW SKILLS that will push them forward and improve their work and move them closer to achieving their goals and making their ambitions come to fruition.

And that is something that we all must do if we are to be successful. 

Keep learning. Keep being inspired. Keep moving forward. And you shall succeed. It's as simple as that.

Watch this video. Seriously. I just got finished with it, and it's amazing. You'll never look at selling your book the same way again. Guaranteed.