Where Have I Been? Where Am I Going? Why Am I Posting Here?

...clarity on the bullshit that's been the first half of my year

This is long overdue and as I type this, I’m not 100 percent sure how it’s going to go or what exactly I am going to say. I don’t even remember what my last few blogs said before I noped out of shit almost five months ago. I’m not even going to read them because it’s not important, the path ahead and where I am at today is what’s important.

Crazily enough, this is the first thing I have written since that last Substack post on January 27th. I didn’t even want to come back to Substack but I decided to write this here because I have nowhere else to put it, and I refuse to pay $22 (or whatever it is now) for Premium+ on X just to write an “article”. I also know that after my long absence that no one may read this or even care about my whereabouts, as time in the online world moves even faster than my publishing schedule before my Great Crash Out of 2025.

This “crash out” has a lot more to do with my personal life, mental health, physical health, and overall well-being. The immense time I spent writing ended up becoming a shield for myself to occupy my mind in an effort to not deal with some real deep things I needed to both feel and sort out. Granted, the writing and some character arcs did actually help me process things, even when I wasn’t aware of it. But let me kind of run through the timeline of things.

I felt like I was reaching a pretty okay place two years ago, then I was forced out of the condo I had been living in for over a decade. It happened very fast and I wasn’t prepared for it or having to be ejected out into a world where I could no longer afford rent in my area for even the worst options. While I was close to buying a house a year or so before that, the Florida housing market was destroyed and my investments tanked - these two things essentially happened the same week, wrecking my life for the foreseeable future.

The forced move also forced me to have to give up roughly 80 percent of my possessions. I downscaled greatly and had to move into a mother-in-law suite in a shared house with my rent almost doubled. This would turn out to be a terrible arrangement for me due to sharing a house with kids and dogs that would often times wake me in the middle of the night and just make a ton of noise whenever they were home. Also, the chimney leaked and the house was in danger of flooding with any heavy rain. I live in southern Florida, there is always rain.

After a year of that, I moved to my current situation, which is better but also worse in different ways. I currently live in a fifth wheel RV on the edge of the Everglades. While I like the view from my windows and the romanticized idea of RV life in the woods, everything beyond that just isn’t ideal and it has been hard on me in different ways. But at least I am able to sleep peacefully, as long as my nearby neighbors aren’t having a fiesta in their front yard till 3am.

Now while I am still in the RV, rent is starting to drop significantly in my area and I have been looking for a better option, especially since we are now into hurricane season. Also, home prices are dropping and I am hoping that I can find somewhere better to stay for another year (or two) until I can finally buy a house.

But let’s move past the home life bullshit and talk about the other things that led to the crash out.

A few years ago I discovered that I have some health issues. The thing is, I can likely reverse all or most of it if I lose weight. I have been doing just that, but I haven’t been as consistent as I need to be. This is because of several bouts of pretty brutal depression over my living and work situations the last few years and the lifelong mental issues I’ve had since I was a child.

My writing schedule that I forced upon myself sacrificed some things that I probably should have prioritized like my health. These almost six months off of not writing Barbarians of the Storm stories has had its benefits on my physical and mental health. I haven’t talked about this other than to real life friends, but I have lost 65-70 pounds from my peak fatness. I still have a long way to go, but I am pretty driven to fix the problem and for the first time in a long time, as I also work through the darker mental shit I’ve been avoiding, I kind of want to live and feel that I deserve to live, even though that’s not really something that I have felt before. Fuck, this is probably getting too dark for public consumption. So, I’ll just stop with this right here and move on to the path ahead.

As far as Barbarians of the Storm goes, I don’t know exactly when I am going to pick it back up and that is why it has taken so long to give an update. There are days where I feel like I am just on the verge of getting to work again, but then a day or two passes and I slip further back down. The reason for this is not just the issues with myself that I have already outlined. The biggest factor in this is the fact that I feel intimidated and overwhelmed. I think on some level I can understand where a guy like George R.R. Martin is and why he is distracting himself with everything other than finishing his book series. No, my intent is not to George R.R. Martin my audience, but I can sympathize with where he is at. And what do I mean by that?

Well, I have reached the end of my saga, and so much has happened among so many characters that there is a literal fuck ton of stuff to sort out over the course of what may be one or two books. I keep leaning towards a two-part finale ala Infinity War and Endgame in the MCU, but I may just do one double-sized book. I don’t think I will really know how it will be presented until I am very deep into the writing process.

Additionally, as I’ve gotten deeper into my series, I receive a lot less feedback than I have gotten with the earlier books. Now while the sales numbers from volume to volume appear to be good, I have little to no idea how people even feel about the saga at this point. It is hard to find the motivation to power on when you don’t have feedback. However, I always remind myself that I wrote Dan the Destructor and crafted the Barbarians of the Storm saga for myself. I set out to write what I wanted to see in the world and ultimately, I have to finish the job in the way that I think is best. Trying to motivate yourself is much harder than finding it in the words and praise of others, though.

While I have already written a few chapters in the next book, I did that way back in January. I could completely scrap this stuff and start fresh, I am not sure yet. One thing I intend to do before I set out to write the ending is to not just rely on my mountain of notes and my memory, but to re-read all nine books and take a mountain of new notes as I organize my thoughts and figure out where every character and plot thread needs to be. I also want to do this in hopes that it will make me fall in love with this universe in a way that I haven’t really felt since the first arc. Although, I do think the second arc books are better in most ways. I think that Inferno of Madness, my latest, could be the best thing I ever write.

But, I guess this kind of sums everything up.

I am currently dealing with incredibly debilitating nerve damage in my neck, right shoulder and arm. Typing all this has made it worse, so I kind of need to wrap this up and allow it to heal. I’ve had multiple sleepless nights and even got attacked by a frog once I did fall asleep last night. So, if any of this blog sounds off, I blame the fucking frog and my stupid, shitty nervous system. I did easily pick up the frog and threw it outside, though. I did not hurt the suicidal psychopath.

Okay, that’s it - I hurt!

Bye!