Just a Brief Update

Hi, everyone, I hope you’re all doing as well as can be expected given the fact that it’s 2020. This might seem out-of-the-blue since I’ve barely made an appearance online recently except to occasionally retweet things, but I figured now was as good a time as any to check in and let you all know that I am still alive.

It’s been over two months now since the release of High Risk, and yes, I was hoping to have had my next two upcoming books out by now, or at the very least one of them. I’m really sorry that it hasn’t happened yet and I won’t make any excuses for myself, and as tempted as I am to promise that Flying High will be out in the next week or two and Tangled Love soon after, I’ll honestly just be happy with myself if I get one of those out by the end of the fall, and both of them plus the final book of the Risky Business Trilogy out by the end of the year.

But as of right now, I’m really just trying to take things one day at a time. I hesitate to go into too much detail right now, especially given the fact that so much about my life situation is still in flux right now; sometime perhaps a couple months in the future I’ll come back to it and give you a more detailed rundown of what’s been going on with me, vomit up all the thoughts and emotions that have been building up inside me onto my blog, but I’m just not in the right place to do that yet. What I will say for right now is that I’m going through a moment of personal crisis that I feel like my life has been building up to for quite a while now. A lot of it has to do with my mental health, and all these complicated feelings of being lost and aimless, feeling like a childish loser for not having my shit figured out well into my late twenties, and the shame of putting off some critical decisions regarding my career and the possibility of going back to school out of a combination of anxiety and other reasons that I couldn’t put my finger on.

This personal crisis more or less came to a head recently, and while it’s lead to some really important mental/emotional breakthroughs in my life and I feel like I’m finally, slowly starting to get my life on the track I want it to be on, these breakthroughs have also revealed the fact that I still have a lot more big, scary steps to take in the right direction. In many ways, I feel a huge sense of relief and a new sense of clarity about myself and my life, but that sense of clarity has brought with it an onslaught of confusing, overwhelming realizations about the hard work ahead of me in the coming weeks and months, as well as other, more emotionally draining realizations about things I think I’ve known deep down for a while now that I have to do to truly move forward with my life, but finding the strength and the right opportunity to do with is monumentally hard.

And of course, tied up in all of this is the near-simultaneous revelation that so many of the difficulties I’ve faced since as far back as at least 8th grade may or may not be due to the fact that I might’ve been living with undiagnosed ADHD all this time. I still don’t know for sure yet, as one of the hard things I’ve been putting off for a long time has been going back to therapy (and I know I probably shouldn’t have been OUT of therapy of begin with, but that’s a whole other can of worms). The hell of it is, though, I don’t know if my extreme procrastination of that issue is an ADHD thing, or if it’s just the fact that the thought of opening up about my personal issues to a whole new therapist/counselor exhausts me just thinking about it, or if it’s a little bit of both. And maybe I don’t even have ADHD at all, that it’s just my regular old anxiety talking, that I’m concocting this excuse in my head to make myself feel better for being a lazy, unmotivated deadbeat who’s going nowhere in my life. Or maybe that nasty voice that’s telling me I’m a lazy deadbeat is just my depression telling me to hate myself. After all, no one thought to diagnose me with it before or suggest I might have it… but then again, maybe I was also downplaying those particular symptoms, or attributing them to other issues… I’m just a whole mess right now, ok?

And yeah, for that alone I know it’s obvious that I do seriously need to get that professional help no matter how hard it is to reach out and ask for it, regardless of whether or not I end up with a new diagnosis and potentially new, better methods of coping with it. And yes, I do plan on seeking out a therapist very soon. But with all the other thoughts fighting for attention in my head–applying for jobs, knowing that I’ll be moving sometime in the near future but not knowing exactly where or when, worrying about money and the fact that I practically have none after some high expenses in the past year, possibly applying to grad schools, worrying about the election and the pandemic and my mother’s health issues, AND THEN SOME MORE ON TOP OF THAT–it’s been a little hard to get my priorities straight. And unfortunately at the moment, the priority that’s come out on top has been my job search.

Needless to say, between all that and a few other factors I’ll likely get deeper into in that future blog post, it’s been extremely difficult to focus on writing. And getting into the right emotional headspace to write a romance in particular (or even read one) has been next to impossible, I’m afraid to admit. It’s so hard to put into words right now without getting too deeply into things that I’m not quite ready to talk about, but I’ve just been feeling so alienated from my characters and their emotional journies right now. I want to badly to just dive back in and fully immerse myself in their world and forget my own very unromantic problems, but finding the capacity to do so is a slow and frustrating process, and given all the more pressing concerns taking up room in my brain recently, I think it was ultimately for the best that I took a step back from writing for a couple months.

I really don’t have a good ending for this long-winded, rambling word vomit, other than to apologize, thank you for your eternal patience, and promise you that I haven’t completely lost my romance mojo. A huge part of me is itching to finally release my next book, and although I can’t promise you an exact date, I do want to assure you that Flying High will be out soon. By the end of this month, if I can manage it. If you made it this far into the blog post without your eyes glazing over, thank you so much for listening to me get a few things off my chest, and I’m sorry that so many of the details were so vague. I hope none of what I said was alarming to you; I can assure you that while so many things are up in the air for me right now, I am relatively safe and secure. And I apologize as well if I’ve harmed or appropriated the struggle of anyone who does have ADHD by the things that I’ve said. I’m working through a lot of confusion right now, and if I stepped out of line in any way, I’m truly sorry, and I want to learn how to do better.