The Other World

Going solo with spelling errors

Site is back up: But with issues, I know… I know… — September 28, 2022

Site is back up: But with issues, I know… I know…

Sorry for the down time, The data center still has issues but we have narrowed it down to a potential ISP issue. as soon as the datacenter move is complete, the issue will be resolved. Until then, we will have the backup site running normally. until then a lot of links are broken and linked to the old site (unfortunately). i will try to get to them when I can but a lot of things are up in the air and if I am to get to publishing during the moves, i may not have time for a lot of site fixes.

Until then, the main site and the posts are up at least (whew).

Advertisement
GPFridays are Back! — June 24, 2022

GPFridays are Back!

For those of you who don’t know what GPFriday’s are, there will be a blurb down at the bottom of the blog. Suffice it to say, GPF’s will be coming back soon and I will have other surprises in store as well. This is just going to be a short blog post as well as a quick Hi for Alban Heruin (Ogham or Druid language for Light of Heruin, the mid summer holiday we celebrate for Summer Solstice).

What a holiday it has been too. The site and the data center experienced some glitches on 6/22/2022. Believe it or not we had Solar Flares that day too so if you happened to be complaining about the unusual speed of the internet, your eyes happened to be burning because it was unusually bright, or if you were having problems with your phone, tablet, laptop, or TV that would be related to the solar flares and the electromagnetic interference they generate. The power of the sun is truly awesome; even from a scientific perspective!

The interesting correlation between science and religion during the “bad day” brought back funny memories of my time in R and D and when I came up with GPFridays as well. GPFridays was meant to relieve stress for me after a friday when one of the prototypes I was working on in the datacenter lab at the job I worked at kept throwing up General-Protection-Faults (GPF’s) which are usually not good errors if you are working on servers. It means something is really screwed up on the back end of the server, especially when you are working on what is called a “bare-metal” system which means the system has no traditional operating system. (As a hint, even the chips onboard have operating systems but since everything was in prototyping, you can guess what my problems were; cant say anything like equipment, where I was or what I was doing other than I had to resolve the GPF’s to move on which felt like banging my head against a brick wall). This also happened to be on a Friday afternoon.

After I and my co worker made some jokes about me writing and maybe experiencing my own crashes in my personal datacenter/lab in the weekend, I came up with the idea and wrote a few chapters for the website Essentially combining the first few backgrounds of Lone Wolfe, Angela, and Jena into the story Children of Legend, the reach of that web novel was well despite it being a short 40k novel.

I resumed GPFriday’s again the next year with Second Semester, Anika’s Vengeance, and the first alternate timeline or Turn C novel that covers a portion of the Templar: Spirit Killer timeline, named Spiritis’s Semester. All 4 novels have links on the website.

I will attempt to have Friday posts as often as I can, but I cannot make any guarantees. I may start with cleaning up some of my old poems from high school (I found these amongst my archives recently) and post some of them on the site for some weeks, or I may write the sequel to Spiritis’s Semester and post those Chapter’s as well.

Thank you for listening to my Rant. You have been great!

“I wont be in your book!” #OpenBook Blog Hop — June 20, 2022

“I wont be in your book!” #OpenBook Blog Hop

I used to have two writing shirts. one black one with a caution tape montage saying “I’m a writer, if you aren’t nice to me I might kill you in my next book.” and a white one with a typewriter that said “I’m a writer, I make the voices in my head work for me.”

I have no clue where both went, if I had to replace only one, i would get the second one as I think that truly describes me more. However, people sometimes react more like I am going to do the first.

 

The first Question that I get asked when people find out I am a writer is what do I write and that is fairly standard. I’m published, just not successful. its usually when I have word pulled up on my tablet and am typing away on my keyboard that people ask what I am doing. Apparently, it isn’t anywhere close to normal for someone to be using a word processing program in public anymore. does no one do any homework? No one has that important report due on Wednesday?

The times that my novels jsut naturally come up in conversation, that is more understandable (oh cool, what do you write about)? But that “what do you write about” is also a loaded question too. My logic likes to kick in and give an answer as to the immediate chapter I’m working on, but since only like 7 people read my stories, that goes over about as well as a fart in an elevator. Even if you are known, you don’t want to just say “I’m at the fight scene between the MC and the Antagonist,” we don’t even go for the title and the first attempt (or  knowing any other writer as our novels usually need that descriptor anyway, the thirteenth) at the synopsis, we just go for genres.

We usually try to keep it vague to “I’m a sci-fi writer” or “I write fantasy” or the like. For me, I’m not even a decent single genre girl. I have to go into dark-fantasy which is its own little cluster of things from Urban fiction to fantasy to some horror rolled up into a nice little package. The only thing about all these new Netflix series that have been coming out post COVID is that a lot of them are Dark-Fantasy. It is easier to say the Templar Saga is close to “The Protector” in style if people bothered to see Turkish fiction on the platform, or “Wu Assassins” as another example even “Warrior Nun” is close as these all thrust normal people into a thankless job protecting society, without even any acknowledgement from the general public. The world doesn’t change if they succeed in their job, but it definitely gets worse every time they fail. I hate to say it but sometimes I get to the point where i get jealous because I was publishing that in 2016 before most of that even hit Netflix, and I was working on it since I was 15. However, it is merely a case of me needing to polish up my own work and work on myself more. it has nothing to do with anything else.

If you are still here, you might have wondered “Why the title?” It’s because of the shirt and the second question people usually ask. that is “Do you use real people for your characters?”

Other than maybe elements of myself which is impossible for a writer to get away from, No. I purposefully avoid using real people as characters in my novels. There are too many times I have named a character, thinking that the name was all original, only to realize that I knew the person later or (in a couple cases) meet a person with a name that matches them and has their personality days after I posted several Second Semester chapters with her character in them. (For those who bothered reading Second Semester, try explaining to Robin that you wrote her character profile and published chapters about her…. that was nerve wracking combo. The only thing I had going for me was the real life person was ALSO a writer).

What is unavoidable is that you will probably use a name (if you write characters that exist in a world like ours and use names like ours) that will match someone else. I try to avoid using names that are tied to people close to me at all to avoid the accusations of “you are using my likeness!” and the such. Most of the time, we don’t or we don’t mean to and that is an honest truth. what we are using are our on facets of personality and our own trauma to make characters. Jena Beckhart is born out of several tragedies in my life and part of her character is born from something that I wanted a lot: a leadership friend in adulthood that would stand between me and the fire of life when that fire threatened to consume me. There are some serious stories of childhood abuse behind the genesis of Jena, Lone Wolfe, Angela, and a few others that will come to the series as I publish them.

So, we try to avoid names that are common in our life but it isn’t avoidable. At someone point I am sure an Angela will come up to me and say that I must have been spying on them. I know a few Angela’s. I chose that name because I wanted that character to blend in, like most of my characters especially since she doesn’t know all her parentage yet.

In short, No, we don’t put people in our books, unless someone specifically says “Put me in your book!” and we somehow agree. Trust me, we don’t want to kill off unnecessary characters, that’s too much paperwork.

 

What do people think about you when they hear you are a writer?

Rules:
1. Link your blog to this hop.
2. Notify your following that you are participating in this blog hop.
3. Promise to visit/leave a comment on all participants’ blogs.
4. Tweet/or share each person’s blog post. Use #OpenBook when tweeting.
5. Put a banner on your blog that you are participating.

June 2022, Dealing with Death, Divorce, Chaos and moving on. Attempting to continue with publishing but no promises — June 14, 2022

June 2022, Dealing with Death, Divorce, Chaos and moving on. Attempting to continue with publishing but no promises

I will have to clear the air behind my malaise and how it spread so far into the near collapse of this online site. It is owed an explanation by now.

Since February of 2021 i have been going through of separation with my soon to be ex-wife. and my father died in early April of 2021. In may of 2021, my soon to be ex-wife filed for divorce in court. if you followed that time line correctly, she filed for divorce after my father died. I was in Arizona with my mother when she filed for paperwork in court.

She has a habit of doing this, if you think this is libelous, this is backed by court paperwork, my father died on April 9th, 2021. 2 days before his 80th birthday. This sticks in your mind when you have celebrated 37 birthdays with your father and was looking forward to the next birthday, and with covid restrictions keeping you from getting into the nursing home to see your father for his birthday, you get to feeling down quickly. I flew out to Arizona on April 16th to see my mother to mourn my father’s loss and she files the paperwork the day before my plane touches down.

My girlfriend at the time and my step sister/executor was present for the reading of my father’s will when my ed-wife presented me with the divorce paperwork.

a year later, on April 7th, 2022 my grandfather died. 2 days later i get another letter from the court showing my ex-wife is petitioning for full custody of the children. It is knife sunk into my chest. 363 days separated the death of my father and my grandfather and yet there is no decency to allow me the time to mourn the loss of either one, after all the divorce is still ongoing, I have not had the chance to carry out the last wishes of my father yet.

The pain of losing my grandfather is still fresh. The pain of knowing that most of my mother’s side of my family still does not approve of my transition also stings. That pain mixes with the old pain of the loss of my father knowing that he was the last of the older generation of the Brooks family, the last of the older Turkish generation. He passed the leadership of the family to me but the family is demolished. A few cousins on my family line scattered to the wind. One disowned me and My cousin in Wales. Another one in a hospital in poor health. The one in Wales and the one in Poor health I love deeply and have fond memories of. I wish I had recent pictures of us together but as you can imagine, it is rather hard for us to get a family reunion together.

My father’s death brought up a turbulent wave of skeletons in the closet, controversy and files, as well as accusations and grabs at things by my ex-wife. It felt like I was being hit at left right and center. The first of things to fly out was my identity. The one my father painted for me when I was growing up. He painted me as an only child (biological child if you were wondering about my step sister. we are not related by blood and my father did not get the chance to adopt her. However, we still consider each other family for the most part. She is considerably older than me and had already moved out of the house when I was born so I was raised as an only child). The reality is much different.

My sister set the record straight. When my father was married to her mother, she became pregnant with his child in 1973 and didn’t realize it until 9 months later (this does happen). but it was an ectopic pregnancy that went wrong and it was miscarried and other things went bad too. you don’t need to know the rest of the details other than her mother came out of it mostly okay but my brother was still born. My father never told me about it. So there is something my father never told me about. Talking with my current girlfriend and my mother, they said my father was pretty sure that wouldn’t have affected my flow of life at all and he didnt think i needed to know. My girlfriend is a marine and knows his mindset as he was a marine too, and my mother knew him obviously. I don’t know what anyone else thinks.

I don’t know how to process a lot of information that comes to emotions, and this comes from a childhood of abuse and neglect. It takes me time to work a lot of stuff out. But I am pretty good at divorcing things like weird food facts and weird food and things. so some people look at me with the “Why are you so emotional face?” When I freak out over the dead brother I never knew. For me it was a case over the spiritual landscape of my life and the fact that I was no longer the only child but the only surviving child. However, after some meditation I could see where everyone else came from.

But my mom, or one of her personalities, and my father through some of his paperwork had some other news. My dad had a blood test card for me on it which showed my blood type. Okay, they did that inn 1983 and I knew my blood type. it also showed i had three chromosomes. which they could test for back in 1983, the question i had was why they needed to. I called my mother and she again sounded really weird which told me I was talking to someone other than my mom.

She has multiple personalities. But most of her personalities navigate through life for her and have memories of what happened during that time. she told me about an event that happened and during her early pregnancy with me she was pregnant with twins. after the event, she lost one of the twins, one of the twins incorporated the other and she may have had an image at one time. whenn i talked to her the next time, she didn’t remember telling me this but she sounded normal….

However, in her wedding photos, she looks much larger than my dad, my cousin in wales who used to live her remembers hearing about the chimera twin, me, and how no one was supposed to talk about it. while I know it was weird for me to overreact to the dead older brother thing, it is totally not weird to blow your top to various family knowing about you being a twin-less twin, being intersex, and being a chimera! Those three secrets were all rolled up into that one medical test that I found and really was something I needed to know.

This had made it too much to focus on to write. It had made it too much to focus on to edit for a time. I let the site go. I apologize for that. Focusing on the kids became hard. Focusing on self care became hard. I suffer from seizures and am disabled from it. It is hard to keep fighting to make the Migraines from the post concussions from the repeated falls from the seizures to go away and figure out the cause of the seizures because it isn’t epilepsy. The doctors say it’s stress, its been happening for over 4 years. however, after they put me on thyroid medicine, the seizure intensity and frequency has fallen off a cliff, as in gotten better, and so has the dizziness which means they were connected. Stress always makes things worse and leaving things in such a sorry state so long causes brain damage, but myxedema, a syndrome that is the polar opposite of a thyroid storm, is also a cause of the seizures.

as my thyroid disease improves, i hope to recover from my disability. knowing about it and trying to account for it sometimes throws my life into chaos, winter is hard because cold sensitivity throws my body into chaos while summer is the time when I can shine. However, if you dump a lot of stress on me, i short circuit like some sort of broken robot. It makes me want to cry because I remember when I could take on the world in college. Now I can’t manage a website I built in my own datacenter, my family, and my home without losing my brain. I used to work for a global conglomerate in R and D and took on 4 or 5 projects before lunch, come home to a family, clean house, manage the site, write a novel, edit it, and publish it. Just thinking about that now makes me feel pathetic.

It’s humbling to put that comparison into words. knowing that you had a checklist of large projects at work to backfill a rotating pile of large high priority projects, then a family, then house, then site, then novel, then editing, then publishing. now you cant handle 3 things without breaking. makes you feel like you went from doing things with a smart phone to doing things with a land line phone, pen and paper,  and a calculator. you can technically get everything in life done that you need, but it is a hell of a lot harder and no one understands why it feels so hard. You also feel useless at the same time. One moment you can easily check everything you needed to check online, hail rides, play games, call people whenever wherever, never lost, order stuff, whatever, reserve flights, are always connected. The next thing you know, you can call the people you remember, write down info, and calculate stuff, and draw. Your phone book is only the numbers you remember and remember to write down. Hope you don’t have dyslexia like me. There is no internet there. you can spell boobs on your calculator by typing in 58008 and flipping it upside down. there is your daily joke for your magic combo to replace the smart phone for your downgrade.

I am hoping that as the divorce draws to a close as it will next month, life will return to normal. most of what is stirring up emotions right now are tied to that. most of the things that keep me from my old routine are tied to that. my father’s last wishes are another one. A lot of chaos will die down once those are alleviated. Once that is done, I should be able to continue with regular updates to the site, maybe regular content additions to the site as well as editing, and continue to do regular writing. as of right now there is too much up in the air for me to promise regular things. I will at least try to maintain the site, even if I have to offload it from the data center and onto a cloud solution if I cannot maintain the equipment if other things in my life get too chaotic.

however, things have been calming down locally. stay tuned.

%d bloggers like this: