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.

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October 2021: A time for Ghosts, Ghouls, Death, Updates and…

Sorry, 2021 has been on track to be one year for the books for me. In many ways.

 

I have had little time for writing. While in most years I have had time to get writing in on most days, even enough to squeeze an hour or two on most days, I have been having enough trouble even getting mind in a state for fifteen minutes of medidtation most days which is a problem when i try to find time to write on a given day. I have to set a calendar reminder to tell myself to write otherwise I am going to forget to write in a week and that is bad for my state of mind.

The good thing about my writing slowing down means that my backlog of books has not grown as my books going out to published has gone down has gone out the door as well. However, I would have wished I could have gotten my books out to you at the expense of being able to write instead of lowing down both books coming out of my head as well as books coming out of my backlog. I would rather have nothing in the backlog and that to blame for nothing new hitting amazon than it because of my personal life…

Speaking of that.

The end of September hits and That seemed to be the perfect time for My family to start spilling the beans about my past. I won’t go into details about my past but suffice it to say, A lot of things that had been told to me throughout my troubled life have been wrong. Not about what happened to me or about my ancestors per se. But about circumstances surrounding my birth and a couple of details around that. Close people to me know more about that.

Suffice it to say. In one week, I went from being an only child to being the only surviving child of my father. my background went from being normal to being stranger than one of my characters I created. My life started to turn into a conspiracy and the adult members of my family were in on it. the surviving adult members of my family decided that now was the time to tell me. The children of my family, now my age, didnt really know about it.

It is a rare thing to have your entire world crashing down around you. We all have our own world narrative and that personal narrative seems iron clad. everything else seems flexible to an open mind as long as we have some firm ground to stand on. That firm ground being our own identity. Usually that identity, if we don’t have some strong sense of family to stand on, is our own experience and where we came from. before September I thought I knew who I was and where I came from. As of this post, I can’t be sure of that anymore. The only thing I can be sure of now is everything I have made for myself since I became of age and became independent.

They originally told me I was born Kenneth brooks, an only child, then they said most of this was a lie.

I am Kendra Brooks, A druid, A writer, A system Engineer, A Chimera. A strong and independent little sister. 

Rant Wednesday: Why do characters hijack stories?

So, I used to be a part of a discord writing server (it was disbanded because a lot of people left the server. It was too bad because there were a lot of fun and talented people left on the server but when it went from 150+ to 50 people the owner called it quits). But a problem that was commonly asked was “why do my characters hijack my stories?”

To be clear, they wouldn’t state it that way. they would state it in text as “I was writing and I wanted to take the plot this way but my character started to write the novel that way…” Or “I was going to have the plot go down this road but my character completely broke the novel and I don’t know what to do. Do you have this problem?”

When I am asked if I have a problem with the characters taking over the novel, hijacking it and start “Writing it themselves” as it were, I always answer: “No.”

There is a simple explanation for this: These people don’t know their character. They haven’t fleshed out their character, they don’t know the background, they don’t know what influences the character and what the character would do when put in a situation.

Some of these people that had these problem were planners: The ones that plotted and outlined their novel and had some character profiles or basics down. Most ere “Pansters.” You know what a Pansters are: The people who fly by the seat of their pants when writing a novel. There is nothing wrong with that, rumor has it that Stephen King is a Panster and he writes great novels. But you HAVE to know your characters.

The way around this is to have a robust character profile. I suggest to write a background story on the characters. A novel would be good taking the character through their life so you know what the character will do. you will see what they do through their life or in life situations (and build their background at the same time) and get to know the character as well. This builds up their dossier. you don’t have to do more than a rough draft and it doesnt have to be pretty. you can “pants” it to. no major plot. No one has to see it. It is an exercise to know the character and get a feel for them.

Lone Wolfe, Jena, and Angela have dossiers and those were used to write Children of Legend and Second Semester. Those two Prequel novels added pages to their Dossiers too (As it expanded on information already there, never forget to add to the profiles as you write your novels…)

 

Side point: I worked for a couple of companies that built dossiers on me. I am not sure if HPE built a Dossier on me (i wouldnt put it past them though) if you want to know which ones I know did, you will have to email me. One company just out right told me because of a fiasco that happened with upper management (site director and my manager, makes for good IRL like plots….) and the next guy coming in said he had dossiers on everyone in my department. awkward. Now, I don’t have those but if you work for a company that might spy on you, if you are lucky enough to see your own dossier, you might get a good glimpse on how to build a good character profile.

Good Vacations and Bad Vacations

 

Sometimes we all need to get away. I don’t know if we subject our characters to this (my characters do go on trips but i don’t think they have ever been subjected to things as a main point of the plot) but we have been on vacations that make us feel like my poor six year old daughter on the way back…

We all have good vacations, we ight plan them out and have things change on us, but we also have bad vacations. you know these pretty soon after you start them. it could be something with the weather (although if you live in Colorado and are vacationing in the mountains in February you discount that one because the weather is a thing you expect) or it could be the quality of the accommodations.

In our experience this time, it was the where we stayed as opposed to what we were there to do and not a weather thing.

We rented a cabin at a resort. What can I say about the cabin…

Should I start with the good or should I start with the bad?

I will get with the good, it is good to get that out of the way. It is a shorter list. it is sad that it a shorter list.

It overlooked a small stream and gave us a wonderful view of the mountains. it was about the size of my living room (don’t get me wrong, my living room is actually quite huge so as far as hotels, resorts and cabins go, that’s a good thing)

It protected us from dying from exposure (Useful when it dropped to -16 at night)

It had a kitchenette so when our girlfriend cooked she provided the most amazing meals (she could be a 5 star cook so that is mainly a shout out to her)

Gave the kids bunk beds which was an interesting experience.

In door toilet and a “shower” (see bad for details)

a bedroom for the adults (see bad though)

“Running” water

“Electricity”

The Bad

When you see a quote in the good area, there is a always a story on it

 

Let’s start with “Electricity” This refers to the single circuit that dominated the cabin. This is the (I can only assume) 120volt 20amp circuit that powered the place that blew 2 times while we were there. this had to power the fridge, 2 baseboard radiator heaters, the microwave, the lights, the extra radiator heater they gave us, the tv, and the electronics they gave us.  After it blew the second time, i put my engineer brain to work, looked up the wattage and calculated the load on this circuit to see the max load that was being placed on the circuit. if everything were to pull a startup load at once on the circuit, it would come out to 5920 watts! that is enough wattage for nearly 5 circuits of power! all on one circuit designed for carry 2400 watts… the fridge should have had its own circuit. the heaters should have had their own circuit, the lights should have their own circuit, and everything else left for the guest so we arent constantly blowing everything out so when we do things like turn on the lights and plug in that extra heater the resort loaned us, the circuit doesn’t blow. also, we shouldn’t have to worry about the circuit blowing when we see the lights dim every time we hear the fridge kick over or when we hear the baseboard heaters kick on. i had only one light kick on and watched it dim as the baseboard heaters kicked on, finding out that their full load was 1000 watts per pop looking the model up when at max  and the cabin needed them at max during the cold snap…

 

Running water. The sign by the sink in the kitchen said to leave the hot water running at a drip when we arrived and so we did. this worked until our first power outage. with having no heat for half an hour our cabin got really cold. the next day we woke up and noticed the hot water was no longer working. we called maintenance and they told us our pipes froze. we even went the extra mile and left the hot water dripping in the bathroom trying to make sure the pipes wouldnt freeze inside the cabin itself. when turning on the hot water all the way, we would get a trickle. well, there goes showering in the cabin for the rest of the trip… we still had toilets and cold water, magically enough… somehow… just not hot water. for that mater, the fact that the bathroom door didnt latch or lock is another issue all together.

 

The bedroom: They could be nice and do two things: One, not park it behind a sliding closet door, and two: give a king sized bed! you know, there might  be people living an alternate lifestyle that need the extra space… at least a door that could lock would go a long way. when we were planning on going to the resort hot spring pool and having to change to our swimsuits, one of the adults would have to corral the kids and get them into the bathroom instead of running into the bedroom while the other adults were changing.

 

Remember that heat issue from the electrical issue: The cabin had no insulation. We could hear the comings and goings of our neighbors and the place had vents which looked like heater vents but were there for decorations? we asked management about them thinking that they must be there for some purpose but they told us it was just there for air ventilation (WTF!!!). the only source of heat were the baseboard radiator heaters which did nothing to keep the place heated during the cold snap. this is coming from a Colorado native that lived in Estes Park in an apartment that used baseboard heaters to heat an apartment during some brutal winters! The Cabin was constantly cold. we couldn’t do anything to keep the Cabin warm and when we found something, we blew the circuit.

 

Cooking. To add insult to injury, there was the propane stove. Not only were you supposed to turn on the range hood, there was that sign that said to OPEN UP THE ADJACENT WINDOW to keep down the carbon monoxide buildup. WTF!!! if we didn’t have problems keeping the place warm already, we have open the window every time we cook and let out what little warmth we had out the window to cook. I came to find out we didn’t have to use the fridge for a lot while we were there. the soda we brought stayed cold without taking fridge space, sigh….

 

Then there are the mice…. The first night i was there i heard something, a chewy scratchy noise. I figured, “Nah, i must be dreaming about the pet rats we used to have. that’s got to be it. I passed out from the cold.” I smelled something that smelled like a dirty rat cage. I also figured, “I really must be in a deep sleep, I know what mice smell like from my childhood. this smells like a rat cage that needs to be cleaned. I must really miss my pet rats, Snow was so cute as a baby!” It wasn’t until the second night, when I was writing that I noticed the smell again, and why. There was a mouse that climbed out from under the stove. It headed right for me and it was bigger than an average mouse but smaller than a fully grown rat. I glanced over and it paused for a moment. It DIDNT RUN! it stood there and it wasnt until I glared at it that it decided to turn around and run back under the stove. this mouse became so well known to us adults that my wife and girlfriend each gave it a name. it is now Henry the mouse. An adventurous mouse that seems to not be afraid of humans.

 

Now, I didn’t come to this resort expecting room service but I did expect toilet paper during a 5 day stay. so when we are about run out of toilet paper and call the resort asking for more, it shouldn’t take a whole day to get another roll. we ended up going to the store and buying our own before they decided to come down and bringing by two more of their rolls. not sure what they were expecting.

 

They did end up knocking off 15 percent off our price for the experience BUT at this point, the next time I go up there, I am going to stay at the hotel I stayed at the first time I stayed in that town and just go to the resort hotspring to visit the pool.

 

 

In the end, everyone felt like they needed a vacation from this vacation. We all passed out when we got home. The kids magically didn’t fight which was a small miracle but i think that was from them being wiped out from the weekend than from them getting any vacation joy out of this. They went back to school yesterday as their 5 day teacher in service days have come to an end. The best part about the vacation is getting out of the house. in the COVID era, i guess that is what this is about. but next time, we are going to go some place different, some place that maybe I don’t know about. someplace my wife doesnt know about, some place my girlfriend doesnt know about. some place where we really have to dig at the reviews and see what we are working with instead of going “well, the hotsprings pool is wonderful, the cave is wonderful, club mud is wonderful, staying here should be good too, as long as we arent in the tiny rooms inside the main building….”

welp….lesson learned. Maybe I can put this in as some sort of prequel or as filler in a book or something. it seems like the worst day ever that could really set Jena on edge before dealing with a noble or lord and tearing that person’s throat out. I can even hear her saying “Even Henry has more manners than you!” just to hear the poor noble wonder, “Who is Henry?”