Whoa, guys! It’s been a while, I admit. The holidays are an atrocious time of year for me, full of depression and crippling sadness. I am happy to say I completed my NaNoWriMo goal of 50,000 words coming in at 50,012. I’m a winner. Yay!
I also was under immense school pressure, trying to settle my school loans so I can be up and out of my small tired city by summer. Unfortunately, it won’t happen until December. Such is life, I guess.
The purpose of this post after such a long and sometimes deliberate absence is to tell all you readers that the focus of the content will be changing. Kristen Lamb’s book, We Are Not Alone: The Writer’s Guide to Social Media helped me decide how I was going to market myself, and took me on a long journey of writer soul-searching, trying to find my true intent for my social media efforts and blogs. Instead of writing a writing blog- which is great, for the most part, if your audience will consist of mainly writers and you are willing to languish at the bottom of Google’s search engine- I am focusing on my book’s content and the readers. I will no longer be posting about writing techniques and encouraging writers to keep writing, which I may have writing posts scattered throughout the blog. But the focus is changing, and that’s a good thing.
The plot of my book is simple:
A lonely, loveless, mentally ill girl lands herself in a group home, where she meets her opposite equal, in a quest for position, love, compassion, and understanding. But things get intense when the two headstrong girls clash over everything from boys, girls, and themselves.
Writing the story with the complex subplots and subtext is anything but simple, the relationships in the book are complex and intertwined and connected by severe mental illness, such as Avoidant and Borderline Personality Disorders, as well as Schizophrenia and Schizoaffective Disorder. I have a DSM IV on my desk. 
The reason for me writing the book is also simple- these kids in this story were my life at one time. I am a sufferer of mental illness, a few of the ones listed as well as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Suffered most of my life (my real mother had a penchant for using cocaine while pregnant with me. She, too, may have suffered the 200 lbs gorilla on her chest as well, thus self-medicating and making me also cerifiable. I am trying to forgive her.) So this blog’s content will be for readers to find out more about my characters, why they suffer the way they do, mental illness links, information on group homes and care for the younger generation who may suffering, cutting and other not-so-kosher topics. It will be handled with the love and care and humor of one who had suffered severely and come out the other side.
I hope you stick around. You may find something useful or of interest. You may know someone suffering and maybe something I say can lead you in the right direction to find them help. I’m just a vessel, a writer, trying to tell the world that suffering is real. I’m not sure how I’m going to do it, but I will. You can count on that.
