Friday, I finalized the last chapter of For Blood and Flame and sent it to be proofread. All that’s left is to fix any small grammatical errors.
Because of this, I’ve been an emotional wreck all weekend. I even thought about not publishing The Weekly Wrath. Usually I try to come into your inboxes with surprises and a bit of cheerfulness, but today feels like a day of reflection.
I want this to be an honest space between author and readers — the good and the bad and everything in between. I don’t want my books to just be products I’m trying to sell you, but worlds and characters we all want to share as a community.
So get cozy. Have a coffee with me, friend. I’ve brought my heart to you, today.
That said, I will be openly discussing mental health. If addiction, depression, and anxiety conversations are triggering for you, then maybe skip this newsletter. <3
I spent the last four years writing For Blood and Flame. It’s draft zero was written in 2020, right after I finished writing For Mist and Tar.
Gods, thinking about 2020 has my head spinning. I was newly 23, had just spent the last year of my life between glasses of whiskey, and I’d never felt more uncomfortable in my own skin. It genuinely felt as if a doctor was telling me to pop a different pill every other month to help me fix my brain, but with each new medication, I slipped further into different masks.
Sometimes I was happy.
Never was I writing.
Don’t get me wrong. The meds do work. In the beginning, around 2018 when I was first diagnosed with major anxiety and depressive disorders, the first meds made me a zombie, whereas the second helped me smile more. My creativity was stripped, but I didn’t want to hurt myself. I had to accept a loss somewhere, and my dreams were too big to give up on life quite yet.
I wanted to be an author. I never wanted anything more in my life or anything else. 6 years old is the first time I remember falling in love with storytelling. From then-on, I couldn’t be stopped.
I had stacks and stacks of journals piled in the corner of my teenage bedroom; floppy discs with first drafts towering like the menace they were; and sketch pads of monsters and character charts and realms.
It was like I was fucking possessed. I. Could. Not. Stop. I was obsessed with the bliss of crafting realities where my brain wasn’t a hinderance to my living but the glory behind the lives of fictional characters.
Writing didn’t make my brain turn off or the thoughts go away, but it did make things so noisy that BOOM I couldn’t hear the negative bullshit because it was coming out of my fingers and into a 50 cent lined notepad from the convenience store.
But somewhere around college, depression took me for a wild ride. It wasn’t until a doctor explained that because I was obsessive compulsive in most of my tendencies, so anxious it was crippling to ever feel ‘normal’, and that anxiety was left ‘untreated’ for so long (my fantasy multiverse throws down a gauntlet), that I had inadvertently bred a depression stemming from it.
And let me tell you, if you aren’t someone who has experienced depression and anxiety living side by side, then you may not understand how absolutely fucking crazy it can make you feel.
Because I knew I shouldn’t hurt myself. In fact, I had compulsively built an entire database of all the reasons why hurting myself would do more damage than not.
But my newfound depression took that database, latched to my need to create things, and asked, “What if instead you did nothing?”
And down the rabbit hole I went. My brain was at war with itself. Half of it wanted to drown, and the other half was perplexed as to why that was even an option. That’s when I sought help. I was having trouble existing, much less completing college coursework on time. I was desperate, and when a doc said, “Take this, honey, it’ll make it all go away,” I didn’t hesitate.
Then things were good for a time. I was able to write a little bit, and they weren’t bad pieces. They were all literary fiction (really, that should’ve been red flag number one that a pill had body snatched me) and they all surrounded a first person ‘fictional’ woman who didn’t understand why she didn’t understand herself or her life or anything in between.
Eventually, those pills quit working. Then so did the next ones and the next and the next — until I was graduated, living on my own, wasn’t pursuing my dream (I was so tired, even at 21), and I realized alcohol provided me the bliss writing used to.
I realize this is all a lot, and you may be thinking it’s too much information, but I’m sharing it for a reason, to explain why finishing the Alchemight Duology is such a big deal for me. It may even be the most monumental moment of my life thus far.
I traded crutches my entire life. Whether it was writing or pills or booze, I didn’t care. Anything was easier than wandering into the shadowed crevices of my brain and wondering if I would ever dismantle them.
Sure, bad shit happened in my life, but to justify the way my brain was? My brain had always been and likely will always be this way. It took me years to accept that just because I am different and I don’t react the way other people do, doesn’t mean I need to be chained down or reigned in.
My brain is different for a reason, and rather than trying to subdue it, I needed to reassess my life. I needed to learn how to live with myself.
So I did. The pandemic came crashing into the world, I got quarantined with a guy I met on Tinder literally only a week or so before (we’ve now been together for the last 4 years, and he is my everything), and I decided to quit the meds, quit the booze, and read. Just read. I’d written books, and I loved books as a teen, but I hadn’t really sat down and read a book since high school.
I fell in love with fictional worlds again, and all the journals I’d held onto that collected dust began to appear as shiny new toys. My shelves began to fill, but the more I read, the more I found I couldn’t completely relate to many of the characters. The women always had this innate fierceness; this ability to know themselves. It made me jealous and confused, but it was perhaps the first time that things began to click.
Every author has a voice. I knew I had one, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. It hit me, while reading about characters who were fun and loveable, that I wanted the opposite. I wanted characters who had brains like mine. I wanted them to be naive but intelligent; quiet but strong when it counted most; and yeah, okay, maybe a little crazy. I wanted them to be anxious, depressed, and to have the world shoved on their back only for them to crumble and fall.
Not because I hated my characters, but mostly because that’s how my life had felt, and I just wanted to know I wasn’t alone.
So I sat down, and I wrote the first drafts of the Alchemight Duology.
At the core of For Mist and Tar are strong themes of mental illness, but more importantly, it features two main POVs from flawed individuals both desperate to know themselves and their voices.
I found pieces of my voice as they found theirs, and in For Blood and Flame, I embraced my fierceness, my love, and my loyalty just as those characters grow to do.
In some ways, this duology felt like a very long period of mourning, carefully carving my heart from my chest and gluing together all the shards it became while growing into a woman.
That’s not to say the darkness is cured. It’s very much not. It’s also not to say any of these characters are me, they’re just renditions created from the brittle bits of my soul.
Yes, I know I’m being dramatic, but that’s how it feels. It really, truly feels like publishing For Blood and Flame will be just as much a celebration into a new phase of my life as it will be a funeral for the things I lost along the way.
Don’t get me wrong. I hope you find solace in these characters and all their flaws. But these books were just as much for me as they are for any other reader who feels a little crazy sometimes. I hope to one day write happier endings, but today isn’t that day, and the Alchemight Duology aren’t those books.
This multiverse will be a journey, but I’ve never felt more passionate about what I’m writing moving forward. I am putting a focus on stories like these, and I am finding myself along the way.
Maybe you will find peace in these dark realms, too.
Thanks for letting me share a bit of a personal story today🖤 You are more than welcome to share your own journey with books and mental health in the comments, just keep in mind it will be public facing.
Next week, I have a huge exciting unveiling for the multiverse, so we will be moving into more upbeat territory. If this is your first time here, sorry if it was a bit dreary, but maybe you found some solace in it too if you’re someone who uses fantasy worlds to aid in your mental health. 🫂 Please check out Wrathos Books to catch up on the things you may have missed the last few weeks🔥✨
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