Hi every­one.

So I have a few updates for you, not all of them are pos­i­tive but it’s good to clear the air and be hon­est and open about things, espe­cially things that affect my writ­ing. I’ve always been some­one that over­shares with strangers, so this is noth­ing new, but I’ve veered away from being too per­sonal on this web­site. But, meh, now is a good a time as any.

I’m going on a bit of a social media break. Cur­rently, my day-job and my writ­ing job aren’t mesh­ing very well. Yes, I work 40 hours a week at an office, a posi­tion that has recently got­ten very high-stress.

I don’t han­dle stress well. Blame my genet­ics, blame men­tal issues, blame what­ever, but I don’t. There’s good stress, like when I’m writ­ing and I have a dead­line and it helps me get things DONE. And there’s bad stress where I panic and every­thing over­whelms me, I find myself  throw­ing dishes, cry­ing at work (no I’m not throw­ing dishes there), cry­ing in my dreams, feel­ing like there’s no way out.

This is silly because there is a way out and there is a beau­ti­ful rain­bow at the end of this tunnel.

How­ever, part of this rainbow’s real­ity depends on the amount of work I am able to do NOW and by work, I mean my real job. My writ­ing work. But how can I do that when I can’t seem to get out of the door every morn­ing with­out a panic attack? It’s a Catch-22. And it sucks.

When I wrote Dark­house, I was work­ing full-time. When I pub­lished Dark­house and became a cover-planning, editor-hiring, social media-guru, marketing-and-PR-powerhouse, and every­thing else that run­ning your own pub­lish­ing com­pany entails (remem­ber, I do this all myself…just me), I was NOT employed. Nor was I employed when I did the same with Red Fox, Dead Sky Morn­ing, The Ben­son and Lying Season.

Alas, I had to get employ­ment ear­lier this year and AT THAT TIME I was not sell­ing enough books to sur­vive on that. So, I thank­fully got a pretty nice day job.

Then came time to write On Demon Wings. Well, I did it in six weeks and I did it while work­ing full-time…but at a time when my day job wasn’t stress­ful or busy. And, yes, it was actu­ally HELL to get On Demon Wings out. You think it was just Perry going through hell in that book? It was me too.

I once said that it would be impos­si­ble for some­one to self-publish and hold a day job, and I think I was kind of right. Oh sure, lots and lots of peo­ple do it and do it well but I don’t think I am one of those peo­ple. I REALLY wish I was, believe me and if you are that sort, my hat is off to you. It’s one thing to try and write a book and hold down a job, it’s a dif­fer­ent ani­mal when you throw publisher/PR team/designer, etc into that mix. It is fuck­ing hard. I’m at that point where things are really tak­ing off and I need to focus on my real job, the one that makes me more money than my day job, the one that ful­fils me to no end: my writing.

But, I find myself unable to.

Like I said, there is a rain­bow but it’s going to be hell until I get there. I’m get­ting sup­port from coun­sel­lors, doc­tors who will hope­fully help me han­dle the stress in the interim. I’m get­ting sup­port from friends who are won­der­ful sound­ing boards. And hope­fully fans will be pretty under­stand­ing too about what I am about to do.…

Which is…dun dun dun. Take a vaca­tion from the inter­net. Not in total, but my pres­ence will be lim­ited. Aside from an amaz­ingly unique give­away cur­rently going on right now (more info at bot­tom), I won’t be doing any blog posts or tours or inter­views or give­aways or any­thing because I sim­ply can’t han­dle it. I KNOW this might hurt my stand­ing in the pub­lic eye, but honestly…I just can’t do it! I don’t know what else to say.

I’ll prob­a­bly be on Twit­ter less, my EIT Face­book page less…just less of me every­where. I’ll prob­a­bly read less reviews because neg­a­tive reviews and a neg­a­tive soul don’t go well together (or maybe they go TOO well together). I’ll just be…less.

This will be temporary…I can’t say how long…maybe two weeks, maybe till July? When I do come back though, I will have a sur­prise for EIT fans…so that’s some­thing. But I do need to just drop out of this world for a bit so I can screw my head on straight. I’m in full-on panic mode at the moment and when I panic, I make mis­takes. I don’t want to make mis­takes or lose my head at either of my jobs.

Also, some books are affected. Noth­ing Exper­i­ment in Ter­ror related but my adult con­tem­po­rary novel, Lost in Wan­der­lust is being pushed back until the late Fall. I just don’t have the time to fin­ish it right now. It sucks because I really NEED to prove that I can write other things than the EIT series but, thems the breaks.

ALSO ALSO paper­back ver­sions of my books will be gone — for a short while. Until now, I had been using Cre­ate­space for my paper­backs. Things went wrong with my On Demon Wings ver­sion, I com­plained, they didn’t fix it, I com­plained harder, they gave me an answer that didn’t make sense, I asked them to clar­ify, they cut and pasted the same answer as before, I sent them a screen­shot and asked them to explain what is going on, THEY CUT AND PASTED THE SAME ANSWER AS BEFORE, finally I told them to fuck off and that I am going to take all my books (which actu­ally do bring them money) off of their site and go to another POD printer (Light­en­ing Source) and…you guessed it…THEY CUT AND PASTED A PREVIOUS ANSWER.

FUCK YOU Cre­ate­Space. Your cus­tomer ser­vice is dis­gust­ing and you can’t even address that issue with­out a generic reply.

So.…the paper­backs won’t be avail­able for a while. But even­tu­ally I’ll find the time to move them over to Light­en­ing Source and get that all set up and when I do, I’ll let you know.

Also, if you’re want­ing a paper­back ver­sion, I sug­gest you buy from Ama­zon or Barnes and Noble right now while you can…I’ll be pulling them this week.

So this blog prob­a­bly won’t be get­ting updated much as well, and as such I will leave you with some tidbits:

- I did an inter­view with tal­ented + won­der­ful local author Lorna Suzuki (of the soon-to-be-a-motion-picture Imago Tril­ogy) HERE

- I did a musically-slanted inter­view with Emmy from Sin­fully Deli­cious Reads which was a lot of fun, and you can read it HERE

- Jes­sica at Hacka­roos Reviews is host­ing a cool give­away. I ordered those fucked up books from Cre­ate­space (the ODW with the funny mar­gins). While totally read­able, they look like crap inside and as such I have decided to give these defec­tive books away — com­plete with com­ments, scrib­bles, draw­ing, cut out pic­tures and what not, cour­tesy of me. Hey, I may even through in ran­dom pho­tographs of peo­ple you don’t know! Plus book­marks, EIT stick­ers. It’s all fun. Enter that give­away HERE (open only to North Amer­i­can res­i­dents — sorry, I can’t afford to ship out­side of that).

- There should be another inter­view with Sara Vallejo on her blog HERE this week

I think that’s all. Thanks for read­ing this. I feel bet­ter know­ing every­one is up to speed with what is going on in my life and hope­fully when I come back, I’ll be shin­ing brighter than ever.

Just don’t for­get about me.

And please, if you love EIT, keep spread­ing the word. I know you guys are and I really appre­ci­ate it — I feel your pas­sion and addic­tion, hell I hear it — but it all helps me get one step closer to my dream