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!

Top 5 Important Lessons I learned in 2017

Well, guys, we made it through another CRAZY year over at Casa de la Carnage. And boy, am I tired!

Too bad I can't hibernate. Sigh.

I don't know about you, but 2017 was pretty darn rough for me. And, like most periods of trial and tribulation, I learned some very valuable lessons.

Without further ado, here are my top 5 things I learned in 2017.

5. Social Media is Great for Self Promotion

Twitter is an invaluable promoting tool for an author. Prior to doing book ad blasts on my Twitter account, I was lucky to get 200 page views a day. This number increased up to 2,000 page views on average.

It would be higher, but I had some run-ins with the Google Search Engine police...meaning they kept changing the algorithm and started punishing people for putting links to their own books on their blogs. Not sure why, but they HATE it when you do that. They call it link stuffing. Been slapped on the wrist twice by Google for doing that now.

It's bullshit, but whatever.

4. Link Stuffing is Not Something You do to Turkeys for Thanksgiving

Say for instance you have a book published on multiple sites, and you decide to share ALL THE LINKS in a post so that people know where to find them, and on what sites they show up. That will get your search results rank lowered. BIG TIME. I went from 2,000 page views to 100 page views overnight. OUCH! THAT HURTS.

So...from now on, no big list of links on the site to my books on Amazon etc. And if I do share a link to Amazon,  it has to have the rel=no follow attribute added to it.  You can read more about that here if you're interested.

3.  If Given the Proper Amount of Time, I Can Write up to 10,000 Words in One Day

Wait...what? Are you fucking serious?!

Yes. Yes, I am.

BUT!

Keep in mind, on average it takes me 1 hour to type 1,000 words. So, in order to write that much, I have to have my butt in the chair, with zero distractions, for 10 hours straight. Needless to say, that doesn't happen very often. But when it does, it's fucking glorious. Feels good too.

Leading up to that was several months of writing 4,000 words a day. I had to flex my writing muscles and build up their strength to achieve such feats. Will I ever do that again? Probably. Am I counting on every day being that fucking amazing? No. Definitely not. That's just setting myself up for failure, and I won't do that again.

2. If You Don't Give Yourself Permission to Write for Fun, You will Suffer Burnout 

This lesson was a tough one to learn.

Writer's block, physical and mental fatigue, frustration, feelings of being useless and a failure, all go hand-in-hand with writer's burnout.

Burnout can happen in a myriad of ways.

I suffered it back in June and it took me 4 months to break out of it.

I was pushing myself too hard, and putting way too much emphasis on how much my books were selling (and how little money they were making) and not enough emphasis on how much I enjoyed my work.

That combined with absolutely zero emotional support from the people I lived with, made it pretty damn hard to get up and be eager to start working on my next book. Or free serial for that matter.

It sucked. HARD. And not in the good way. We're talking vacuum cleaner, not sexy kinky sucking.

All that dirt and crap from the stress of not reaching unrealistic sales goals right off the bat got stuck in my head and made a complete mess of me. I had to fight tooth and nail to get my headspace cleaned up and back in working order.

And once I did that (after summer and fall had passed) I realized that I had unrealistic expectations and that they caused me to stop enjoying what I was doing, and that is why I had the worst writer's block I have ever suffered from.

Here's something "they" won't tell you: 

When you first start out as an author, your books won't sell that much. That's just a fact. But every time you put out a new book, the sales numbers increase. Sales for your other books will raise as well.

I know a good number of fellow authors that gave up because their first book didn't sell for shit.
I'm talking making less than $20 in a month type of shit sales here. That hurts. It hurts your bank account and your ego.

Until you have three books up, don't pay for advertising, and don't expect your books to sell well. Because people buy in bulk. If they find a new author they're interested in, they'll buy all the books that they've put out.

Just keep that in mind, and don't ever stop working on your next project just because you aren't selling books. KEEP ON KEEPING ON my friends.

1. Don't Quit. Ever.

If you're a creative type, like me, it's easy to get discouraged. Perfectionism, focusing low sales numbers during the summer (when there is always a lull in sales- you can look it up. I know I had to, in order to find out what the best months for book sales were during the year),  and family members telling you to give up your craft and go get a "safe job" in a different field all lead to INTENSE PRESSURE THAT THREATENS TO CAVE IN YOUR SKULL.

Creativity jumps head-first out the top story window and plummets to its death, splatting on the pavement in a streak of red gore and shattered bone.

You're left sitting at your desk, staring at a blank Word program screen, watching the cursor blink and spacing out, before the frustrated tears start to fall and blur your vision. (Did I mention that this year was fucking hard? Because it really, really was.)

And then I saw this video and everything started to click into place. 

Yes, I know it sounds like self-help guru bullshit. But, it's not. TRUST ME ON THIS ONE!

Essentially, whenever you have zero motivation, like you feel like giving up and shooting your brains out for instance, (That's hyperbole. I was not suicidal, but I was damn near close to becoming depressed.) you take a step back and count down from 5 to 1.

And in that short span of time, it makes your brain go to a screeching halt and stops the negative thinking. It helps you refocus your attention so that you can start tasks. Whatever they may be, if you don't feel like doing them, don't wait for the motivation to strike. DO IT NOW.

Take a deep breath, count down from 5 to 1, and GO DO YOUR SHIT.

I was so pleasantly surprised when I discovered that this actually works!

It is also very useful if you suffer from random anxiety attacks like I do. It cuts that shit off fast. It is probably THE MOST USEFUL BRAIN HACK I HAVE EVER COME ACROSS. Seriously.
Try it. You won't be disappointed.

With everything that I accomplished this year, (and really, I have accomplished a lot! I published two books, started another serial, was establishing my reader fan base here on my blog and on Twitter, and getting a lot of praise for my writing) I was frustrated. I felt useless and like I was a huge failure.

Then I saw that video. I watched it several times.

Things starting clicking into place and I realized, I can change everything that is wrong with my life. Very easily. I just needed to do it.

And that is what I have been doing. One step at a time. I've been figuring out what I can do to make my life better, and I'm doing it. Some days are easier than others, but I am committed to making positive, permanent change in my life.

I'm also eating better.

Yeah, I also learned this year that I am gluten intolerant. Not in the trendy hipster way, but in the "oh shit this is fucking up my stomach and intestines" kind of way whenever I eat wheat. Like, the pain and bloating and other unsalacious things I won't mention that go along with Celiac disease kind of way. Of which,  also causes depression and a whole bunch of other nasty things if it is ignored. There's no cure for Celiac. There's no pill to make the symptoms better. The only thing to do is to not eat wheat, barley, rye, or any of their by-products.

So I am now on a low carb diet, sans gluten of any kind. And I FEEL BETTER! Mentally, and physically. And it's nice.

What do I anticipate will happen in 2018? 

I am going to work smarter, not harder.

I've started using this free app called HabitHub. It lets me track when I do certain tasks and gives me reminders that I can set during the day, to ensure that I finish them. It gives me a visual, a chain of finished events that I have done over the week. The goal is to get that chain longer and longer until I am just so damn proud of myself that I brag about it on social media.

The plan is to establish a new writing routine that gets my mind set up to habitually want to write every day. I did it before, back in 2009 when I first started doing technical writing for sites, so I know that I can do it again. And I will.

I've crunched the numbers (because I'm a HUGE PLANNER GAL) and figured out how much I need to write, on a daily basis, to get everything I want to do, done. This includes paid technical writing while I get my fiction writing career off the ground.

Doing paid writing work for websites also takes the pressure off of me, so that I can finally enjoy writing fiction again.

For every hour I do technical writing, I will do one hour of writing for fun. And naturally, for me, writing for fun involves a good amount of blood and suffering for my characters. Mwahahaha!

Also, I decided that if my books sell significant amounts next year, great! If not, I won't be crying about it. I'll just keep plugging away until I reach my sales goals and can scale back the technical writing side of things.

And finally, I am going to help my husband and lift him up so that he gets a better paying job. This will also take pressure off of me and will help us get a new house. Because sooner or later (hopefully sooner) we're going to be starting a family. I am looking forward to that.

How about you?

How was 2017 for you?

Do you have any goals for the new year?

I'd love to hear from you!

-Cassie

If You Aren't Using These Two Social Sites for Promoting Your Book, You Are Doing It Wrong.

The two biggest social networking sites that you NEED to be active on to drive traffic for your website (and book sales) are Twitter and Pinterest.

By active I mean posting things every day, at least 10x a day. Sounds like a lot, but it really isn't.

Twitter

It takes less than an hour to set up daily scheduled Tweets on Tweetdeck (which is free by the way). You can start by scheduling one to be sent out at every hour of the day. Or, if you're like me, you can do one on the hour, and on the half hour marks, like 2pm and 2:30pm.

I also mix in between those promo tweets links to my FaceBook pages, and links to posts I made on my blog here, and on my website www.bloodywhisper.com.

The difference appeared right away. Look at this huge spike in traffic. Over 1,000 more page views in a day!

Before I started actively using Twitter and Pinterest, I was lucky to get over 100 page views in a single day.

One of the main reasons why the traffic spiked so much, is well...it's a secret, but I'm going to tell you, because I can.

As your Twitter account popularity raises (i.e. how often you tweet, the amount of followers you have, and how often they like and retweet your tweets), your Google rank raises. Meaning your posts will appear in people's searches closer to the top of the front page.

Blogger is a Google site. Raise in Rank thanks to Twitter and Pinterest driving page hits, means that traffic will spike. It's as simple as that.

But how do I Write Tweets?

Tweets are super short and don't require a lot of text. Like 2 sentences tops. Super easy.

For instance, the scheduled Tweets I made for today can be seen in the pic below. See how short they are?

Here's an example:

WE ARE ALL MONSTERS ebook on sale now $1 #horror #iartg http://bit.ly/waam11

The smart thing to do, is make a whole bunch of Tweets ahead of time to promote your book. Do the atypical sales ones, such as the one above with the price in it. And then write twelve quotes or short summaries of what your book is about.


Since WE ARE ALL MONSTERS is a story collection, I made fast, one to three sentence descriptions of each story in the book.

This is the one I wrote for HER ROTTEN EMBRACE:

What the swamp takes, she also gives back. #horror #monsters #iartg #ebook #ghosts http://bit.ly/waam11 

Simple. Effective. Fast to write, fast to read, fast to catch your follower's attention. Slap a few hashtags on it, and you're good to go!

Check out Hastagify to research hashtags commonly used for topics related to your posts and book subjects. It's stupid fast to use, and simple enough for anyone to figure out during their first try at it. (Oh, and it's FREE!)

I highly recommend researching self published retweet groups for your genre, as they are super helpful for getting instant retweets and new daily followers.

Also, since you have limited space in the Tweet text box, use a URL shortener, such as bitly to save space. Sign up for a free account. Choose the name of the shortened URL wisely- something related to your book or site that will be easy to remember, and make your shortened link for Twitter!

Pinterest

Pins on Pinterest just require a click on a picture to add to your boards. Put a description and a link when you go to add the picture and voila- instant traffic boost. I kid you not, it's that easy. You can add the Pinterest Plug in to your web browser, and just click on the icon when you are on a page you want to share. It lets you pick the picture you want, and select the board you want to put it in.

Easy Peasy.

Under the picture on the left there's a text field. Just type in the name of the post and copy/paste the URL and then click on the board you want it to go on.


If you are interested in learning more or have questions on how to get started with Tweetdeck or Pinterest, please feel free to ask in the comments below!


Follow my boards on Pinterest here. 

Follow me at Twitter @cchouseofhorror