Edit: Changed the title to be less... chaotic ♥

Ugh, like, seriously, can we NOT have another year like 2016? Ever? The Sweet Witch is back, more or less ♥

This is going to be long and kind of gritty, but I promise there's good stuff at the end. If you want to just scroll down to the last paragraph, please feel free :-)

So I've talked endlessly about this on Twitter, and probably mentioned it a few times on the Book of Faces as well, but I'm not sure if I mentioned anything here. It's so easy to just assume everyone checks the usual social media outlets, which is really funny considering, up until recently, I despised FB. I still don't trust it, and keep a couple of ad/script blockers active, and I'm careful what I post, but that's beside the point.

Hatter looks in. "What was the point again?"

Uh... Oh yeah. The drama over the holidays. Ho-lee-

"Hey you can't say that, there are children watching!"

Cheese.

"Well that's better then."

Okay, silliness aside, basically a whole lot of crap piled up at once. The short, short, VERY short version is, there's this side of my family, a clan if you will, who continues to blame me and my parents for their mistakes. They can't pay the rent, it's OUR fault they spent all their money on drugs (Not. Even. Joking.)

We got in the middle of it to save two of my cousins from being put into foster care while their dad got his crap together. They blamed us for their mother having the sheriff come and collect them from our care because their father didn't want them. They tell us they want nothing to do with us ever again. We say "Fine", and that's that.

Then the patriarch of this backwoods crack den suddenly dies. They come literally beating our door down asking us to pay the $5,000 for funeral arrangements. Oh, by the way, my dad's very sick. He was already hospitalized twice, so we've got mounting medical bills, and now they ask us to pay for a funeral we can't afford because we can barely pay for food at this point.

You can guess how this went.

Dad's a whole other issue. He's somewhat stable, now, but basically what happened was that a few months before all this, he decided to switch cigarette brands. Two months later he's on an oxygen machine, and can't go five miutes without it or he suffocates, due to the massive damage those cheap cigs did to his lungs.

All this, on top of the Anti-LGBTQ government that's been put in place, has had a very negative impact on my stress levels. I have social anxiety disorder anyway, so it really just caused me to withdraw a lot more than usual. But things are stabilizing. Finally.

The good stuff :-)
This is why Left at Eden, Magic of the Kingdom, etc all ground to a complete halt. Ashly and I still collaborate constantly. Honestly if it wasn't for her, I don't think I'd be here right now. She is my lover, my soul mate, my sounding board, and my best friend. We've written, I don't even know how many partial stories, short pieces, and full length epics together ♥

There's one story in particular that I really, really want to finish though. We tend to be a little ADHD about writing, working on one story one day, anotehr one the next, but I'm hoping we can stick with this one until it's finished. ;-)

Don't want to say too much until we're further along, but I will say this: it's one of the only books I've ever worked on that had people from outside our community reading it ♥

Edit: By the way, I updated my author page with a better bio and social links and stuff. :-)