Balancing life. When my muse is full-force, it becomes impossible to concentrate on anything else. I lose weight and find myself unable to sleep. It's exhausting but necessary.
Almost every aspect of the story is an extremely distorted version of something that's happened to me that I needed to find a way to deal with. I alter the situations until they are virtually unrecognizable and make my characters work through it. An example is when I was 21, a stack of paper revealed my mom was not my birth mother. I gave one of my MC's a different, more shocking discovery of relation, and I forced them to work through the feelings it inspired. The Shattered Lives Chronicles is also the only reason I survived sexual assault. Within this universe, I had control. I could escalate what really happened until it was bigger than what I was suffering and then force my MC to deal with it for me. All characters and situations in the book are 100% fictional. But a lot of scenes were driven by the need to purge what was eating me alive when I wrote it.
