Who's Featured in Booklife? Me!

I was going to put off the newsletter another week, but then it would throw off my usual schedule, so I decided, you know what, fuck it! Let’s just have the newsletter this week, despite the extra one last week! Go crazy like that!

And I do have a funny story to tell you. And it just happens to fit in the new section…

INDIELIFE: Who’s the bitch who got featured? 😁

Just as I was starting to pull together the Blood Eternal marketing stuff, I saw a note from Publisher’s Weekly Booklife, offering authors a chance to submit a piece for their new segment, “Behind the Story.” So one afternoon, when I had an awkward period of time between my mom’s appointments, I bashed one out, polished it up, and sent it over.

And then I didn’t hear back. Not even a confirmation of receipt. Ah well, I thought, I can find a way to recycle it. Such is the life of an indie author. We write stuff that gets rejected all the time, and eventually (and often unexpectedly) find a good place for it.

And then the next issue of the Booklife Report comes out. In the header it says, “A Vampire Series Evolves.”

“Godammit,” I mutter to myself, “Who’s this bitch author who got featured when I never even got a confirmation of having received my piece?!”

And I open the email…and they actually had run the piece I’d written and hadn’t bothered to let me know it was accepted and running in the next edition 😂

I’m still chucking about that. Who’s the bitch who got featured? Me, I’m the bitch who got featured 🦚

And now, poll time! You know you wanna…

Don’t forget to go grab your copy of the Blood Eternal audiobook, which is available on Audible, Amazon, and Apple Books:

Where in the world is Caaisho?

I am indeed cranking along as best I can with Blood Depths. Caaisho has left Trinidad now—in less-than-willing company with our favorite Trinidadian pirate—and is now half-way across the Atlantic. I’m so excited about Caaisho’s part of the story. And Noosh’s. This is going to be such a good book!

RAVENLIFE: Ironical beginnings…

So, since I’m now feeling really free to talk about my life with a chronic illness (and thank you all again for wanting to hear the good, the bad, and the ugly—it means so much to me!) so I wanted to start in with an early story about becoming chronically ill.

At first, no one knew what was wrong with me. Almost one had heard of CFS, and the formal title of Myalgic encephalomyelitis was a decade off. When I first got sick, there was actually some senator somewhere in the middle of the country who was trying to put into law that CFS was hypochondria, not a “real illness.” My father informed me that I was “afraid of life,” and so I was staying in bed pretending to be sick so I wouldn’t have to face my fears. (I didn’t bother to tell him that since I was 17, all I wanted was to be out of bed—and out of the house!—and going on dubious and unwise adventures and living life to its teenage fullest.)

Being 17, I didn’t want to have some stupid, boring illness. And I certainly didn’t want anyone to know I had some stupid, boring illness. I’d been getting so many blood tests that I had track marks on the insides of my elbows, so I started wearing short-sleeve shirts to school and walking around with my arms twisted slightly outwards, in hopes that people would think I was a junkie, because that seemed “cooler” than having some stupid illness.

Eventually they ran out of blood tests. The last one was for Epstein-Barr Virus, which is one of the viruses that can set off ME/CFS (like COVID can end up as Long Covid). The doctor actually said to me, “Let’s hope it’s not this, because there is no cure for it…”

Ding! Ding! Ding! I won the door prize! A lifetime of uncurable illness! Woohoo! 🏆

You can imagine, since I thought being a junkie was more acceptable than being chronically ill, that I did not tell anyone about my diagnosis. I just showed up to school twice a week for half-days (when I could do even that) and tried to be as mysterious as I could be. “No illness here! I’m just inexplicably absent a lot. I’m skipping class! Yes! I’m a juvenile delinquent! Or becoming a vampire…! Something cool!” 😎

Meanwhile I did my schoolwork from bed, and my grades turned to straight ‘A’s—it turns out that I was both distracted by being in class and bad at tests, but if you gave me the books and left me alone I could basically teach myself. (I needed a math tutor, but that was it.) And since I was too sick to walk to the library, and I’d already read everything in the fantasy section of the home library, I hit the science fiction section and fell head-over-heels in love with Robert Heinlein and Samuel Delany and the genre in general. Indeed, I had always planned to write a science fiction novel, not a vampire novel at all! 🙄

The amusing conclusion to this story comes from when I went to my five year high school reunion—to do what I called a “victory lap,” since I had moved to San Francisco, was at that point married to a woman, and felt like I was far, far cooler than the people who had bullied me in middle school.

I went to check in as I entered the high school cafeteria, and the gal looked up at me and said, ‘Oh! Raven! Hi! You’re the one who was chronically ill, right?”

So, despite all my best efforts to come off as a juvenilely delinquent junkie (which since I knew there was a rumor that I’d slept with every guy in the school*, seemed like a do-able rumor goal), somehow people had known all along about my damn illness. The thought that I’d hadn’t gotten away with being anything but sick shook me.

(*at the time I was having trouble getting a boyfriend, so the irony of that rumor was truly not appreciated. I felt that if I was going to be called a “slut,” I should at least have the enjoyable sexual experiences to go along with it.)

But I only stumbled for a second. Soon I was sauntering around the cafeteria telling everyone about my glorious life in sin-tastic San Francisco. In the end, the illness hasn’t kept me from achieving the “coolness” I longed for at age 17. I wish I could go back and tell that poor sick girl it was going to turn out OK, at least in that regard.

It’s been a few emails since I expressed my appreciation for you all. Thank you for staying subscribed, staying engaged, and staying supportive of my author journey. It’s because of YOU that I am able to keep bringing you the stories of the am’r. You are the bestest and I routinely brag that my readers are the finest readers any author could hope for 💝

OK, I’m going to now leave you alone for the usual period of time—and I really mean it this time! 😂 See you in two weeks…and as always, be good or be good at it! 😘

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