The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

So, if you haven’t noticed, I’ve been a little MIA until recently. The February crunch did not happen in any way. In fact, my world imploded in so many different ways that it seems like something straight out of a Wattpad story.

And I’m not going to explain what happened in an significant detail. Because it involves one of my children. The short of it all is that she has been hospitalized for some time and will continue to remain in treatment until she is healthy enough to come home, but there isn’t a reliable time frame for this to happen in. Our family has been living in limbo through all of this as we have focused all of our time and attention on my sweet girl.

Until you have been in a position where you child faces such an extreme decline in their health and safety, there’s no understanding the horror that comes along with it. It broke something inside of me. I fell off with everything and everyone, including this book, and it was all I could do to keep going for the sake of her and my other child. I’m talking an extreme state of depression that I’m still working on coping with. Some days are better than others, and some days, I can’t manage to eat or shower. But we’re all getting there little by little with time, patience, and the incredible love and support we’ve had from the people in our lives.

But this isn’t going to be a one and done kind of situation. This will be something we deal with for the rest of her life. It took significant time away from the world to process this and deal with it. And it also didn’t help that I had an abrupt decline in my health after the stress triggered a relapse of some of my conditions and others worsened because of the natural progression on my disease.

It’s been a clusterfuck. But life can’t stay at a standstill. So here we are, guilt and all, where I’m making the attempt to live life in a somewhat normal way with everything that is going on. So onto the good…

The Daughter of the Veil is still happening.

I’m actively writing again and so excited for where the story is heading. I’ve made of lot of changes to this book and the overall series to create a stronger fantasy plot element and a more balanced split between Erissa and Rhazien with all of the other characters. I was developing the same problem that I talked about in my review of What Lies Beyond the Veil, where the romance overshadows all of the great world-building, side characters, and plot. That means this will be a longer book, but it will be a much better one where readers will get the best of epic fantasy and the best of fantasy romance/romantasy. I would rather take a little longer (okay…a lot longer) to get the book out and have it published the right way, then cut corners and not give myself, the story, and the reader what we all deserve from it.

My goal is to finish the book by this fall, get it edited, and make a decision on a publishing path. I’m leaning heavily toward self-publishing. Querying and going through that entire process sounds exhausting, and I really want to maintain my creative vision for this book. But who knows. I’m researching different options, and hopefully, I’ll make a decision about the time I finish the manuscript.

Until then, I’m going to get back to posting reviews and writing updates. And be sure to check out my social media at the bottom of every page to keep in touch!