Just wanted to leave a little note here that the projects I'm involved in will be a bit slower for awhile. Specifically stories I'm co-authoring with Ashly (DarkKitten) or editing for her might be a bit backlogged, as I'm currently recovering from oral surgery. Every day is hit or miss. Like tonight I felt great, and helped her edit Punisher 1 in no time :-) But last night and this morning I could barely see straight. :-)

I've got some good painkillers though, and HOPEFULLY recovery should be pretty quick, but I just wanted to post a li'l update that I'm not being lazy or anything. :-P So look for ESWS some time next week maybe, and the rest I'll try not to slow Ashly down too much on :-)

~Zoe

I haven't posted a blog in awhile, or at least I haven't posted a serious blog in awhile :-) Like the title? It sort of came to me after talking with Ashleigh about something that's been on my mind the last couple of days: the "H" word.

Just wanted to let those of you following my medical drama know that there was apparently a clerical error/miscommunication, so no surgery today after all.

Let me just start by saying, I haven’t abandoned writing :-) I just caught a bad case of real-life recently that just won’t let go. The short version is, I’ve been sick, and my hard drive as well as backup external HDD both died on me, so I’ve been the last two weeks either lying in bed, or drugged out of my gourd on strong cold medicine while simultaneously trying to recover any data that wasn’t backed up online somewhere (Thank GOD all my stories were recently backed up on GDocs or I’d be totally screwed right now :-P)

Robinverse has basically blown up in my face, and I now have authors who previously were interested running like hell the other way because I made the mistake of making overt the fact that magic has subtly existed all along.

I promised I'd continue to post Becoming Robin here, and maybe I will eventually finish posting it, but for the foreseeable future, I'm going to step down as a TopShelf author.

Just wanted to post a quick note and let everyone know that the Robinverse is officially live!

Hey all!

Just wanted to let you know what's been holding up chapter 24 of Becoming Robin Book Three. Well, the short answer is, I have a new website, http://www.robinverse.info in preparation for launching the Robinverse as an actual universe!

Yesterday was just a little bit rough, with the combination of medicines having an adverse reaction that both made my stomach turn, and dropped my blood pressure to a dangerous level. Both of those issues were resolved safely and without need for a visit to the E.R. thankfully, and this morning I have to admit I’m feeling pretty good all in all. It probably has to do with this being the first time in two months that I’ve truly been able to “feel” like Zoe inside and out. Let me explain. :-)

Let me start by saying, I'm sorry I worried everyone. I really and truly mean that. I'm going through a lot of crap right now in the real world, but I promise it's been worth it, even if I'm more uncertain now about myself than I've ever been.

I can't promise that any of this will make any sense at all to anyone else; it sure as hell doesn't make any sense in my head right now. It's been a lot of jumbled, raw emotions.

Well, let me get the obvious out of the way first. Our vacation plans kind of fell through. It's a combination of things, but I had a minor medical emergency, and am on extremely powerful antibiotics right now. :-)

But some incredible, incredible good has come out of it. Like the title says, Hell's officially frozen over. I had a talk with my mother about my gender status.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm going to be out of pocket for awhile. I don't know how long exactly. I'm going with my parents to see the Grand Canyon, and since we're going to drive it, it's going to end one of three ways.

Wow, where the heck did my last two weeks go? Sorry everyone. I know quite a few are waiting anxiously for updates to Becoming Robin and Boys Don't Cry. I hit a bit of a creative slump lately. It's not that I don't know what I want to write; more like how to do the stories justice.

Back during writing near the end of Book Two there were times when I would write just to write. There were passable chapters with high points, but some of it just felt like it wasn't up to my usual quality, and I'm trying to avoid doing the same thing to both Book 3 and BDC.

Those of you following my main novels, Becoming Robin and Boys Don't Cry have probably noticed I haven't been very active lately. Part of that is that this is storm season, and since I usually do my writing in the evening, that's put a big halt to using the main PC. I finally got Windows 7 on my laptop though I still need to find my MS Office disc for that.

Just letting everyone know that, at least as of this posting, there's something strange going on with Google Docs. New documents are being saved, and you can link back to them directly if you share them or copy the link somewhere, but they are NOT currently being saved under your "Owned by me" area, or anywhere else that I can tell.

Some reports suggest some of the "lost" documents are appearing an hour later, but others never show up at all. Like I said they're being saved because you can link back to them, just not being added to the list. There's a forum thread at Google Support Here

I'm fairly certain I've blogged extensively in the past about how music tends to affect my muse in strange ways, but I just had probably the best example ever of this phenomenon while working on Boys Don't Cry today (Don't worry, I'm still working on Robin too :-) She'll be back soon).

Just a quick note for Becoming Robin and/or Boys Don't Cry fans, I'm still writing, and I'm still okay. :-) There's a lot happening in my life, none of it I'm really at liberty to discuss right now because some of it is business-related, and the rest of it is very very personal, and I respect the other person involved's privacy too much to say anything in public like this. ;-)

What I CAN say is that if all goes well, in the next six months:

So as I'm staring at my stories page, I noticed that Becoming Robin is 4 hits away from 10,000. The next closest is chapters 2 and 3 at around 6.5k so of course hits don't mean much :-) But since Robin is technically one year old at this point (Though her 1 year anniversary is in a couple of weeks) I thought I'd post something appropriate.

Alright, so I'm not going to just post a picture of myself for anyone who clicks on TopShelf to have access to, but is there anyone out there with experience in color flow charts that would mind taking a look and telling me if my assessment (Deep Winter, though I used to be more of an Autumn) is far off?

I'm not just talking about things like "Men hunt, women clean and have babies" here, either.

Growing up in the South, in a very small, backwater community, I was exposed to a lot of what look in retrospect, to be downright stupid social stigmas.

What got me thinking about this was reading a popular story on LGTales about a boy who starts practicing ballet. If I had had that open to me - i.e. if I had been born a girl here, or just plain born anywhere else, I would be in a lot better physical shape today.

Don't worry; I'm not rewriting it! At least, not yet anyway, but when I saw the beautiful cover art Piper's created for it, it did make me want to go back and do some rewriting, to bring it up to par with the new image.

I can distinctly remember a time not so very long ago, when I had myself utterly convinced that I was absolutely incapable of writing short, one-shot stories. I guess, in a way, I was incapable at the time, but not for lack of ability.

In retrospect, I think it was more a combination of facts. One of those was that I was just so laser-focused on writing my novel/serial. In the past, writing has been my therapy. I wrote for the exclusive purpose of writing what I needed to write, what I needed to get out of my system.

I can't begin to describe what I'm feeling right now. Relief? Understanding? I don't know. I like it. It's like a weight's been lifted off my shoulders. I finally know the exact moment when I realized I was a girl, and why I fought it for so long.

WARNING: This is going to be long, and perhaps a little nonsensical/cyclical. I'm pouring it all out into text to get it out of my system, but I promise it has a happy ending.

Depression sucks. I know that's stating an obvious fact, but I ended up giving myself a swift kick in the rear today, so I needed to write about it because that's why I started blogging in the first place, over two years ago. I want to be able to look back at this and laugh someday. Call me conceited, but I also want to stand as another reminder to others that no one suffers alone.

There are several ghost stories surrounding both Gettysburg battlefield and Gettysburg college. Most notably, the girls' sorority house, Stevens Hall, has some bone-chilling stories like The Blue Boy.

The story that grabbed my attention years ago though, and has stuck with me all this time, was about a female ghost that supposedly is completely taken with modern fashion.

While on a fruitless search to figure out what I've done with my digital audio recorder, I started to run across stuff I've been holding onto for absolutely no reason. Most of it was just useless junk not even worth mentioning, but it eventually turned into spring cleaning. And then I noticed my old "I'm just a crossdresser, really!" stash.

A Letter From the Author:

Hi everyone,

I'm going to start by saying that Book Three is by no means finished. I have the first six chapters pretty much 'ready' after two months of hard work. As I move forward, I'm going to be taking greater care in my writing than I have in the past.

Referenced here. Ordinarily I avoid these things because, in the past they've all been the same awful depictions (I'm not kidding when I say one featured a TG prostitute/possible drug addict in Vegas), but this one is different.

I wouldn't be ashamed to be one of the people on this show

So, something's come up in my life as potentially very, VERY positive. I just don't know if it's a step in the right direction or not.

I found out through, of all people, the mother of someone I went to school with and haven't seen in years, that there are special services for the blind for adults now, who can teach me a trade and help me get a job with the US Government. It would apparently all be paid for too.

The caveat is that I'd have to live in Little Rock. ;-)

In case anyone's been wondering what I've been up to lately, I've finally moved from the pre-planning stages to the actual writing on Book Three of Becoming Robin.

I already have the first chapter down, and the first page of chapter two to give myself a jumping-off point when I sit down to start writing again. It's still pretty rough at this stage, but I'd rather be writing and going back to change things later than spending anymore time planning.