Let’s Try a Happy Post This Week

Here’s something so freaking stupid I did yesterday instead of working and now I’m like WHAT WAS I THINKING (maybe you can guess):

Here is an article that spoke to me and is something I’ve been trying to express to people for years about why I don’t believe in therapy –> therapists can’t help you remove the stressors from your life, only help you stress-manage around them, which doesn’t solve the problem, only keeps you essentially self-medicating your psyche while the pressure from stressors keeps building. Until it literally breaks you like I am apparently broken now every time someone mentions finding a job. [Yes, I’m trying to take measures still to figure things out.]

And, the best for last! Here are a few of my favorite snippets from editing Heiress of Secrets this week:

Evander.

Seriah sucked in a breath of smoky autumn air, the smell of sharpened steel, and she met his gaze, which darkened with vengeance. His handsome mouth was compressed under cheekbones that were like a melding of shadows and knives. His figure practically mated with the night in his warrior’s leather: his dark jerkin, black boots, and the muted stealth he donned like a cloak.

AND THIS (context: Seriah is a princess who has been trying for years to make an ally of Evander, a tormented rebel who vowed as a boy to use Seriah to exact his vengeance on her father; now they are adults):

“Am I sacrificing myself tonight?” she whispered.

For a moment, he said nothing, and only the thump of her heartbeat in her ears and the emptiness of her hands offered any succor—that was, none.

“Not tonight,” he said.

“And do you think I—” She couldn’t say it out loud. The poisoned commoners…

At his ensuing silence, she curled her fingers into fists. Only the unobtrusive night harkened between them: its shiver of leaves, the plashes of a nearby fountain, leafy havens housing drowsy chirps, and a breeze enamored of the mazy curls of her hair, catching itself there and lost.

At last, Evander said heavily, “If you’re asking whether I think you’re responsible for the wagon of poisoned food, then, no, I never… But your mother—yes. And you’re her daughter, and you’re your father’s, and…” His fingers winched into fists, his eyes flinty with a weapon-sharp wrath. “I made a blood oath to spill your family’s blood. Because of that, I will still… one day… abduct you, take you to my bed, get you with child, and—” another infinitesimal pause “—kill you.”

He may as well have slit open her heart—but she should be used to this. She had lived for sixteen years with his threat.

His lips tightened, belting in his ire. “I can’t unspill my blood vow now.”

“Only spill more blood to appease it.” Her bitter-edged tone ruined any sweet taste in her mouth, souring the cherry comfits she’d gagged down earlier.

“But not tonight.” His touch grazed the lacings above her heart, a brush of his hot fingers that Seriah quivered beneath even through the brocade of her gown. His face twisted. “Tonight, let your pulse race free of fear.”

She could hardly breathe beneath the pinpricks of starlight from the miserly sky that shone on this sad encounter.

He dropped his hand and summoned a smile from his tarnished arsenal. “So my evasive quarry concedes herself caught.”

“Have I evaded?”

“Avoided,” he amended quietly, “every place I haunt. You’ve taken your own haunting elsewhere.”

Her lungs swelled with too much emotion to release. “Do I haunt you?”

“Do you want to?”

---

Yeah, they have a bit of a complex relationship. I am a bit devastated that I have been so fractured trying to deal with life things that I’ve hardly gotten more than a few paragraphs edited for weeks. But such is life in the current system.

Anyway, I’m still keeping signups open for the ARC (it’s at the bottom of the page with the first chapter) if you’re interested.

Thrice the Shadow. [Nope, I still don’t know what that is.]

I hope everyone out there is doing okay! Be kind to others this week. You never know what battle they’re fighting.

And if you want to support me, you can:

1. read my books and recommend them to those you think will like them…
2. OR sign up to my ARC list if it’s still open at the bottom of this page
3. OR if you want to throw money at me, you can ‘buy me a coffee’ via buy me a coffee
4. OR support me regularly via the patreon (though I never post anything there cuz I suuuuuuuuck)