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I am currently working hard to edit Hair of The Wolf (which I hope to get out soon), so I haven't been posting on social media much. I am still planning to make all those changes to my blog and social media that I talked about, but there is something that has come to my attention and I feel that I need to address it now. Earlier today I posted on facebook under a like for like post. I shared my page and this man wrote a long ad for his book (while assumptions about my book that he'd never read). He wasn't a fan of my page, just as passerby who wanted a free ad for his own book. I'm sorry, but as an author I am working hard to edit my next book and make it better than the last. I will be struggling to find new ways to promote myself and my work, which means that I can't always promote everyone else's. My facebook and twitter pages should not be seen as free ad space. Although I am open to promoting authors after I have read their books, I don't want to promote a book that I haven't read. I don't mind people tweeting me a link to their book or sending me a message, but I don't want ads on my facebook page. Sorry, I just felt that I had to address this.


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Why did I decide to write about an abusive relationship?

A few years ago I got the idea for this character that I thought was awesome. She was someone who had been through a lot and been forced into a life she'd never imagined possible, a life in captivity. I also decided to make this character an FBI agent which made it able for her to get out and investigate crimes. The first crime I wanted her to solve was the murder of one of her ex-boyfriends. I wanted their relationship to have ended badly, but I couldn't figure out what would make her feel so conflicted about working on his case. I tried making her ex a cheater, but something about that didn't feel right. I decided to put the project away for awhile, and moved on with my life. I met the man I thought that I would spend my life with, but in reality I was in a very abusive relationship. I don't think most people realize how easy it is to get suckered into an abusive relationship. It started out with little things (like him telling me that I couldn't put that we were in a relationship until I changed my facebook picture to the one he liked), and grew into something bigger. It got to the point where I was afraid to tell him no whenever he wanted something and I couldn't eat in the same room with him. He would yell at me until I was in tears when I didn't give him his way and do other things that I'm not posting here because it feels too personal. I wasn't happy in the relationship, but I felt trapped. He took away every resource I had to get away from him. When things ended I didn't think of myself as having been abused by him. It took months before I finally saw that the way he was treating me was wrong. I found Hair of the Wolf on my laptop not long after and it just clicked. It made sense for my main character, Anyssa, to have been in an abusive relationship. With every word I wrote she became more real, someone that I could relate to because I had been there.

How writing helped me heal

I have always found writing to be something that helped me to feel better. As a teenager and young adult I found myself keeping journals or letting my life experiences shape my short stories and other works of fiction, but in 2015 I stopped journaling and almost stopped writing all together. In January of 2016 I found myself going through the roughest break up of my life. I thought that I had lost the love of my life, but I had really lost an abusive jerk who was the reason for my lack of writing. It seems kind of funny that the man who drove me away from writing was the same man who drove me back to it. He left me in a state where I felt worthless, a state that reminded me of my teenage years where I used to write songs and poems to make myself feel better and so I dug up one of my empty journals and began to write again.  I began writing daily, but I still didn't feel so great. I was still detached from the person I used to be before I met him, a person with goals and ideas for the future. I started to revisit old projects, first was something I'd written a few pages of called Reaper's Quest. It was a mess of a novel, but I still published it. I took it down about a month later, and I was grateful that no one had bought it. I came across the file for Zombie Bite about this time, surprised to find it had a backbone and could make a great story with a little editing. I began to spend all of my free time typing up new scenes or editing old ones and soon became so engrossed in the novel that I was no longer thinking about how much of a failure I might be or how bad the jerk I'd dated made me feel. I was engrossed in the rather depressing world of Zoey and Eli. Would they find the cure? Would they die trying? I wasn't even sure yet. It seemed to take me forever to come up with an ending to the short story. I wrote and rewrote, scraped an entire ending that had to do with new characters. Although Zombie Bite is far from my best work (I may go back over it someday and make it longer so I can release it in book form), I do feel like it shows where I was at during the time that I wrote it. It's not a happy tail, and I wasn't a happy person at the time. I owe a lot to Zombie Bite, and although it will never be my favorite work, it is the book that made me a better person.

What is Hair of The Wolf About?

Recently I have been editing Hair of The Wolf. I hope to publish it soon, but it seems like I never have enough time to sit down with it and edit. I'm grateful when I have the time to go over a few pages, but when I don't I seem to be beyond disappointed. I need to find some kind of balance, like getting up earlier or going to sleep later. Maybe I should cut out watching YouTube videos, but I need to find a way to manage my time better. With that being said I wanted to move onto another subject. I realized that I plan to release Hair of the Wolf soon and there is pretty much no information out there on it. Sure, I've realized the first two paragraphs ages ago (before they were in final form), but I've never really said what it was about. Parts of Hair of the Wolf were based on my own experiences with an ex-boyfriend who wasn't very kind to me. He used to do things to me like make me ashamed to eat, steal my phone when I slept and send messages to people that I cared about, and sometimes he would do physical things to me like slap me or drag me down the hall. All of those things had an impact on me, an impact that I carried over to my main character (Anyssa Marshall). Anyssa is literally a caged animal. She's a werewolf and a former FBI agent, but now she's more like a consultant. She gets locked away after a video of her transforming into a werewolf goes viral and she is only allowed out of her cell whenever the FBI needs her help.