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Category Archives: Blog
Fund In/Exhale Cover on Ko-Fi!
Hi, everyone! I know I haven’t been updating that much this year. Without my medication, it’s been a rough one.
However, I did find a very talented artist to draw the cover art for the In/Exhale – Season 3 ebook!
Since I offer the entire series for free, I would really love some support in paying for the artwork.
If you enjoy my writing, I would really love if you could take a few seconds to donate a few dollars toward paying for the cover art.
You can donate as little as $3 on Ko-Fi!
If you can’t do $3, or Ko-Fi isn’t your thing, you can also donate via Paypal!
Even if you can’t afford to donate (I realize 2020 hasn’t been kind to a lot of us), if you could share the link, I would really appreciate it :).
As of right now, S4 will probably not come out until 2021. I’m very sorry about that. But I am still posting S1 on AO3, and I can hopefully have the S3 ebook finished before the end of the year.
Thank you so much to everyone who has supported my work in the past!
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I’m still alive
I know I haven’t been active on here or twitter lately. There are a lot of reasons for that but I am not going into it here right now.
I have been posting regularly on Tumblr: http://plague-of-insomnia.com and AO3: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chiealeman/pseuds/plague%20of%20insomnia
I am not abandoning any of my original work. I am still planning to finish the first draft of Love UnSeen (hopefully by the end of this year if not sooner) and I will continue In/Exhale, with Season 4 most likely being pushed into 2020 (sorry). I don’t have any plans for the ebook of S3 right now, but that will definitely happen. (I need to find a new cover artist as mine had to take a leave of absence.)
I’ve added a KO-FI button! I’m going to try to use it to raise money for the cover art since I need to pay an artist to make one. If you enjoy In/Exhale, I would love if you could spare $3 or more toward the cause!
Anyway, that’s just a super-quick update. I’m going to see my specialist in NY in a few weeks, and I’m hoping he’ll consider adjusting my meds. We’ll see how I do. Thanks to those of you who still follow me. I appreciate it!
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Happy International Disability Day
Today is a day to spread awareness about disability and the disability community. Obviously, this is an important topic for me, dear to my heart, but there are so many great disability activists out there than can address it better than I can.
Still Here!
Hey, everyone! I know it’s been ages since most of you have seen me around (unless you follow me on twitter). I’m really sorry for not updating this site in all that time, but the past couple years have been really rough on me. In addition to losing my father very suddenly last year, I’d also gotten sicker, and so updating was the furthest thing from my mind.
However, I was recently diagnosed and have a new treatment tailored for my specific disease that I should be receiving for the first time soon. I’ll post a more detailed update(s) later, but just wanted to leave a quick note for any of you who might actually see this, lol.
In addition, I’m nearly done with the final two days of Season 3 of In/Exhale, and I’m going to make sure to post here the remaining days that are missing and have been posted so far. I’m also trying to get back to finishing Love UnSeen. My hope is I will start posting both this summer.
Additionally, my publisher closed its doors on May 7, 2018. I will be re-submitting UnConventional on Amazon soon, although I most likely will not have it available on other platforms (at least not immediately). However, I should be able to offer a paperback version for the first time ever, so those of you who like having something to hold in their hands can do so.
Thanks to all of you who have continued to follow me despite my long absence. I still have a long road ahead of me, but there’s finally a light at the end of the tunnel.
Share:Reworking Last Year’s NaNoWriMo
So it’s hard to believe that NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) is almost here. I’ve been thinking lately of reworking last year’s project (Love UnSeen) as my current (unofficial) NaNo project for 2016.
I’ve been stuck on this story for months, and I thought about how easily In/Exhale comes to me (relatively; I still do plenty of rewrites and shuffling of scenes there) and thought maybe it was worth rewriting Love UnSeen and posting it on a regular basis (not sure if I could manage weekly, but that would be my goal), then taking your feedback to help me shape the story until I got a first draft finished.
The problem is that the blog where I post I/E won’t allow a single author to post on more than one day of the week, and I honestly am not sure if I could manage posting both I/E and Love UnSeen at the same time, especially with having to actually write and format each episode of each story weekly.
However, historically I haven’t gotten a lot of feedback here, and I don’t know how helpful the process will be without it.
So I’m kinda stuck. I’m also stuck because the current way I post stuff here (via a google docs plugin, that little window you see when you read an I/E chapter here) doesn’t play well with mobile, and I know that nowadays most people actually use their phone/tablet more than their computer.
So if I DID post here, I’d have to figure out some way to make it more mobile-friendly, too.
Sorta rambling to myself, I guess, but just wanted to give a kinda heads up that these are the things I’ve been working on lately, in addition of course, to continuing to work on I/E as always.
Share:Dump the 1-10 Pain Scale for the “Netflix” Scale
When you suffer from chronic pain, the 1-10 pain scale is a joke. (Rate your pain from nothing to your worst ever, from 1-10, in case your fortunate enough not to be familiar with it.)
In reality, that scale is a joke anyway because it’s totally subjective. Someone’s ten might be someone else’s five. In fact, this ridiculous scale is part of what makes it so hard for chronic pain patients to “prove” we’re really in such significant pain. When you’re in pain all the time, especially when you’re in a situation like mine in which the pain level doesn’t vary much, asking me to rate it is kind of like asking for me to tell you what my leg feels like without touching it with my hands. It’s just there. Always there. I can’t rate how “present” my leg is in a practical way. One of my friends with chronic pain jokingly said that every time she’s asked to rate her pain it feels like she’s taking a test she’s about to fail.
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Betrayal: My Doctor Ignored My Chronic Pain
“Do no harm,” is part of the oath that all medical students must take. It’s supposed to be an essential part of being a doctor–to not do any injury to their patients. But it’s a sad fact that too many doctors forget that by ignoring or not treating their patients’ pain, they’re actually doing just that–harm. And not only is untreated chronic pain detrimental to a patient’s health and quality of life, it also affects them emotionally.
I’ve had a lot of bad experiences with doctors as I have several health conditions, but recently, I had perhaps my worst.
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Posted in Blog
Tagged Bad experience, chronic pain, do no harm, NPDH, Pain management
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Painsomnia: When Pain Steals My Sleep
Update: A version of this post has been published on The Mighty website!
This morning I sat at the kitchen table and cried.
Alone, while my dogs were napping after their breakfasts and my husband was in the shower getting ready for his day.
Those quiet, yet powerful sobs I’d mastered as a child growing up in a household where any show of emotion would be turned and twisted against me.
About a month ago, I wrote about how sleep was my only escape from the relentless pain. I’ve lost that, too. It’s been a couple weeks since the medicine I used to take to help me sleep through each pain-filled night stopped working. Now, no matter what I do, I wake up multiple times a night, in terrible pain, praying to fall asleep again. I usually do after an hour or two, but it never lasts until I’m again ripped awake.
Being in pain all the time was bad enough. Being sleep deprived and exhausted–which, lucky me, also only makes pain worse–feels like winning the FML (fuck my life for those of you who don’t do the acronym thing) gold metal.
So sometimes I sit and cry, in pain, exhausted, and wishing for a few uninterrupted hours of sleep.
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Hello, Darkness, My Old Friend: An Update
I don’t talk about myself much, especially what really goes on in the depths of my mind, except for what comes out in my writing. Kai and I are a lot alike in that way, although he sometimes is more open than I am as my way of expressing things I feel I can’t in real life for a lot of reasons. But I felt like I needed to update you all on what’s going on with me, so here I am, baring my soul a little. It’s scary, but life is scary, and I’ve already shared as much as I have already, so why not? It may also help you to understand more of where I’m coming from in the next section of In/Exhale.
Google Drive Error Fixed
Hey, everyone! I apologize for those of you who ran into errors while trying to read the most recently posted episodes of In/Exhale!
I neglected to change the permissions in Google Drive, but that has been fixed. I apologize for the inconvenience.
I’ll be posting more of S3 soon and hopefully restart the season within the next few weeks.
Thank you, and happy reading!
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