Hi friends! Apparently it has been a year since I wrote my last newsletter, so I haven’t been writing them monthly like I originally planned, to say the least. I’m going to start aiming for quarterly instead. I think this is a good time for a Summer 2024 Newsletter, just as summer is coming to an end. I have lots of updates and exciting things to share, so let’s get right to it!
Life Updates
At the beginning of the year, I decided that 2024 was going to be My Year™. And you know what, it totally has been. I can’t believe how many cool things I’ve been able to do this year and there are still three months left.
I went to Emerald City Comic Con with my book bestie and we got to meet one of our favorite authors, Rebecca Yarros. I also got to meet lots more authors I love, including Tessonja Odette, Marissa Meyer, and Veronica Roth. There was a publisher present who was handing out lots and lots of free books. It was a dream come true.
I actually got to meet so many authors this year because I have been going to a lot of book signings. They are good for my mental health because it gets me out of the house and gives me something to look forward to. And it gives me something to do because I like to read as many of the author’s books as possible before I meet them.
I got to meet John Green, a lifelong dream, and you can read all about it here.
My husband and I moved into a new apartment that I’m totally obsessed with. It’s closer to a bus line so that I have more independence, and it has more windows and sunlight. It’s my dream apartment. Persephone took a while to adjust to the new space but now she likes looking out the window and judging the neighbors. (To be fair, I like doing that too.) I love when she sits in the window next to the plants. I call her a “window cat.”
My husband and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary. It has been the best three years of my life. We met in September 2019, so our “meet-cute” anniversary is coming right up. We’ve known each other for five years now! That’s unbelievable to me because it feels like I’ve known him my whole life. He is my best friend in the entire world, and I still have no idea how I landed such a cutie. We met in our college library. Is there a more perfect place for me to meet the love of my life? Okay, enough gushing, I just really like him.
We went on a trip to the San Juan Islands, my favorite place in the world. Before our trip, I got my second tattoo, which is an outline of Canoe Island on my right ankle. I wanted to get the tattoo before the trip so that I could baptize it in the Salish Sea. I’m not sure which was more painful, the actual tattoo or how cold the water was when I waded out into the water. (I’m kidding. The tattoo was more painful. I’m lucky it only took about 10 minutes because OUCH, and I have a high pain tolerance after so many years of chronic pain.) I love Canoe Island. It’s such a magical place. It was my seventh visit, and it feels like home.
I shaved off all my hair so it is now approximately 1 inch long, and I’m totally obsessed. I always thought girls with buzz cuts were hot, so it’s cool to be sporting that look myself. I was just really tired of dealing with long hair, plus my hair was totally dead from bleaching it, so it seemed like a good opportunity to check off this goal from my bucket list. Now that I have experienced the joy of washing short hair, I’m not sure that I will ever go back.
I appeared on the Waking Dreams podcast with Shane Blackheart to talk about the intersection of writing and mental health. They were very kind and insightful, and we had a great conversation. It was my first podcast appearance and I’m so grateful that I had the chance. You should check out their books if you like dark fiction with queer characters.
Recent Reads and Movies
I’ve been documenting my favorite book of the month, and here is the list!
January – Ice Planet Barbarians by Ruby Dixon
February – Unteachable by Leah Raeder
March – Dead Silence by S.A. Barnes
April – Forget Me Not by Alison Derrick
May – Under the Surface by Diana Urban
June – A Rover’s Story by Jasmine Warga
July – You and I Collide by E.A.M. Trofimenkoff
August – What the Woods Took by Courtney Gould
I had the pleasure of going to Bookstore Romance Day at my local indie bookstore, Annie Bloom’s Books. They were doing this super cool thing where for every romance book you bought you could pick out a “Blind date with a book.” I saved up and purchased 8 books and got 8 free blind dates along with it. Now I’m making my way through that stack! Some of you wanted to know all the titles, so here’s the list. (Some of these books are romantasy – fantasy romance – instead of just romance, because romantasy is forever my favorite genre.)
These are the ones that I bought:
Second Night Stand by Karelia and Fay Stetz-Waters
The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale
Enna Burning by Shannon Hale
The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur
Truly, Madly, Deeply by Alexandria Bellefleur
The Isles of the Gods by Amie Kaufman
The Wren in the Holly Library by K.A. Linde
Heavenbreaker by Sara Wolf
These are the “blind dates” that I picked:
Check & Mate by Ali Hazelwood
The No-Girlfriend Rule by Christen Randall
Practical Rules for Cursed Witches by Kayla Cottingham
The Prospects by KT Hoffman
Joined at the Joints by Marissa Eller
The Scarlet Veil by Shelby Mahurin
Don’t Want You Like a Best Friend by Emma R. Alban
Kiss the Girl by Zoraida Córdova
The authors of both Second Night Stand and Heavenbreaker were there to chat and sign their books, so that was super cool. The Second Night Stand coauthors are wives!
Writing Updates
I have been pretty quiet about my books this whole year. That’s because they have been picked up by a publisher and will be re-released over the next two years. I’m so excited about this, and I am just waiting to be able to tell you more.
How about the Year of Short Stories? That’s going great too, but it looks a little different than I originally envisioned. You see, I’ve been submitting my short stories to various publications, and many of them have been accepted! You can check them out on the “Books” page of my website. Many of them are free to read, and I would be delighted if you do. Here’s what I’ve had published this year so far.
“Stripes Are Always In Style” in the Sweet Bitter Love anthology from Cathrine Swift, which became an international bestseller on Amazon!
“The Mountain of the Gods” in Indie Bites: Wishes & Wizards (free to read online!)
“Cursebreaker” in Grizzly from January Ember Press (which is a limited edition only available for another week, so you should totally grab a copy now! the proceeds go to charity!)
“Raya’s Revenge” in Indie Bites: Forests & Familiars (free to read online!)
“Agent of Wrath” forthcoming in Pretty Girls Make Graves from River Gardner Horror
“Mortal Affairs” forthcoming in Hearthside & Heartstrings from Azala Press and co-written with one of my best friends, Keaton
And a few more that I can’t tell you about yet! I’m immensely proud of these short stories. I just really like them.
I am currently working on a novel in verse and have written about 300 pages total. I’ve also got, you guessed it, a few more short stories in the pipeline. At the moment, though, I’m trying to take it easy this month because I’m kind of burned out. That is due to chronic illness, which we’ll get into now.
Health
Okay, this is going to be long, but I’ve had a lot of health-related things happen this year. And it’s barely even September.
It’s been quite the year of diagnoses. After years of looking for the cause of my debilitating stomach pain, I finally got diagnosed with hypermobile Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. This variety of EDS is a connective tissue disorder that affects the collagen in your body. Collagen is like the glue that holds everything together, and it’s present in many (most?) systems in the body. That’s why it’s hard to diagnose, because everybody has different symptoms. My main symptom is stomach pain, which I now know is due to hypermobile intestines. Doesn’t that sound freaky?
I also have POTS, which is a common comorbidity of EDS. POTS stands for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardic Syndrome. Basically, you get dizzy when you stand up. Turns out it’s not normal for your vision to go black around the edges every time you stand up too fast. That’s been my reality since I was a kid and I thought everyone was like that. Not so much. The treatment is to eat more salt and drink a crap-ton of water. Yes, really. I’m on medication to lower my heart rate, which prior to treatment was regularly 110-130 bpm. A normal, healthy heart rate is around 60-100 bpm. (BPM means beats per minute.)
Turns out that having EDS and POTS makes me higher risk for winding up with Long Covid. And that’s exactly what happened. It would have been nice to know that I have EDS. But I probably would have gotten Covid anyway. I don’t think I could have been more careful.
I have been going to the Long Covid Clinic that’s run by OHSU. People come from all over the state (and even other states) to be seen by OHSU’s Long Covid Clinic. I believe it’s one of the only such clinics that exists. I am very fortunate to be a patient there. They’ve taken me seriously and helped me immensely. That’s why I am sharing the name of the clinic so that more people can know about it.
My doctor also confirmed that I have ME/CFS, which in my case was triggered by Covid. That stands for Myalgic Encephalomyelitis/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. (You can see why it is abbreviated.) There is a huge overlap between Long Covid and ME/CFS symptoms. That’s because ME is a post-viral condition: in other words, something that happens after you have an illness. Some people are sick for a few months after they have Covid, but then they get back to normal. In that case, it was Long Covid and not ME. You can’t be diagnosed with ME until you’ve had symptoms for at least six months. My symptoms are going on two years now. If you want to learn more about ME/CFS, I highly recommend the documentary Unrest, which you can watch for free on YouTube here.
Unfortunately, none of the conditions I have just described are curable. And although there can be improvements, most people with ME/CFS never return to their pre-illness level of health.
So yeah, Covid disabled me. It’s discouraging to see people being so flippant about Covid and saying that the pandemic is over, and that Covid is nothing more than a bad cold. It’s true that some strains of Covid are milder than others. But people get Long Covid from mild strains. Some estimates are as high as 10% of people who have Covid going on to develop Long Covid. It is nothing to mess around with. And the pandemic isn’t over for me and the thousands of other people who are now long haulers.
I will be making an appearance on a podcast later this month to talk about my experience with Long Covid. It’s not talked about very much yet because it’s still pretty new as far as illnesses go. And even though ME/CFS has been known about for many years, it is often dismissed, because it mainly affects women and our pain is frequently not taken seriously. So I want to get more information out there in case it can help somebody. I have learned so much from reading other people’s stories and they have helped me get diagnosed. I want to pay it forward.
But it’s not just that. Since I got sick, sometimes I feel like I have disappeared. I miss the healthy (well, healthier anyway) body that I had before Covid. There are so many things that I can’t do anymore. (I’ll go into more detail in a future blog post, but just for example, I walk with a cane now.) I feel like part of me is gone. I am a different person now. I know that I’m every bit as valuable now as when I was able-bodied, but at the same time I’m grieving the person that I used to be. My therapist is the one who helped me figure out that I was grieving. She’s good like that. I’ve lost so much mental and physical ability since I had Covid. Writing is one thing that Long Covid didn’t take (not completely, anyway). I think I’m documenting all of this so that I don’t completely disappear.
Notice how I just talked about physical health and not mental health? That’s because I’m mentally the healthiest I’ve been in my entire life ever since the onset of severe mental illness when I was 15. My psychiatrist and I consider my depression to be in remission. Yay! I fully expect it to come back, but I will get through it when that happens. I work really hard to stay mentally healthy. I go to therapy every single week. It took a while to find a therapist who could treat all of my mental illnesses (especially anxiety, depression, and OCD) and who was covered by my insurance, but she is a gem and I am so grateful. My anxiety and OCD are never going away (I had a panic attack literally just last weekend) so I am always working on managing it better.
This was definitely the longest part of this newsletter, but that’s because my health basically runs my life. Despite all of this, I’m happier than I’ve ever been, and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. My life looks different than it used to. It looks different than I imagined it would a few years ago. But it’s a good life. I don’t take it for granted.
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If you made it through this whole thing, why don’t you tell me your favorite autumn-themed food? Thank you so much for reading!