Trout Nation Posts

Remember a few years ago when I wrote three books for an app called Yonder? Well, the rights embargo has expired on one of them! HER BROTHER’S BILLIONAIRE BEST FRIEND is coming to ebook and paperback in February, and it’s gonna look like this:

He’s perfect for her. She’ll perfectly destroy him.

Charlotte Holmes doesn’t fall in love; she falls into bed. And car. And cruise ship stateroom. Matthew Ashe falls in love way too easily; he’s a sucker for a pretty face. And falling too fast. And getting impulsively engaged. The only thing the two of them have in common is their mutual love of kinky, casual sex….and the fact that Charlotte’s brother is Matt’s best friend.

All Charlotte knows about Matt is that he’s the billionaire heir to a hospitality empire. All Matt knows about Charlotte is that she’s bound to break his heart. When a destination wedding fling turns into months of long-distance flirtation, Matt invites Charlotte to Ascend Red, his private resort where guests live out their wildest fantasies. Even limitless indulgence and abandoned inhibitions can’t satisfy his craving for something deeper with Charlotte. And Charlotte is beginning to think Matthew Ashe could be the one man she doesn’t want to walk away from…

Also important to note: It’s queer, it’s filthy, and there’s a fun little cameo from some of my other characters in it. Pre-order links will be coming soon, and if you’re on the ARC team, keep an eye on your inbox!

“It’s surreal to pop over to Instagram and see all these creators with their Christmas crafts and holiday recipes like there’s not a care in the world,” the Threads post read. “No, Jessica. I do NOT want your instructions for making a gingerbread garland. Do you not understand the shit we’re in, Jessica?”

The replies were, like the original post, equal parts smug and morally superior:

“Jessica, we need instructions on overthrowing oppressive overlords FFS”

“Listen Jessica I’m more worried about my friends being thrown in concentration camps than Christmas crafts atm.”

“People like Jessica are part of the problem.”

“Typical Jessica! Her and her friends think the election isn’t a big deal and Melania is a classy First Lady.”

“I feel like this almost anywhere right now where people are bustling around getting ready for the holidays. Inside I’m screaming, ‘Do you know what’s coming? Do you understand how fucked we are?'”

Of course, there were other replies, too, countering that perhaps we should not preemptively surrender our joy to a constant cycle of impotent rage and news-driven despair. These prompted the original poster to turn off replies.

I’ve read far too many social media conversations like this since the election. Everything from people moaning about others callously promoting their small businesses in such a trying time, to others suggesting that excitement over the Wicked movie is somehow preemptively resulting in violent deportations. The message from that faction is clear: if a single moment of your day passes without horror, you are part of, nay, the cause of, the problem.

As an Xennial, I’ve been on this carousel a time or two before. Obviously, not in these same circumstances—we are truly living in unprecedented times, and social media has never been quite this big before. But I remember the televised hand wringing after 9/11, when late night hosts adopted somber tones for a week before cautiously attempting restrained humor. There were only two emotions allowed for several months: patriotism and sorrow, and woe be unto anyone not showing the proper level of grief. Any personal happiness at all was downright unAmerican.

In 2016, when that man was elected for the first time, left-leaning Americans feared exactly the same thing they do now: mass deportations, the destruction of critical infrastructure due to massively under qualified cabinet picks, a third World War, and the end of democracy as we know it. It’s tempting to reassure ourselves that this is just the same as last time, and we all survived that. It’s not. This time, they have a nine-hundred page document organizing their intentions, and we didn’t all survive the first go-round. Americans are, absolutely, in the very deepest of shit. But, exactly like the first time, social media outrage demands that all of us adopt and welcome unending anxiety as a test of moral purity. If you made a gingerbread garland in November of 2016, you caused all the problems in our country with your naivety and denial. If you make a gingerbread garland in November of 2024, you caused all the problems in our country with your naivety and denial. Everything old is new again.

But as someone who spent November of 2016 in full time despair, I can confidently state: my panic didn’t do a damn thing.

If it had, we wouldn’t be on the cusp of fascism. Half the country wouldn’t have gleefully embraced the Fourth Reich, because its operatives would have been dealt with after the treason of January 6. If 24/7 hopelessness had been an effective tool then, no one would need to demand it now. Turns out, unrelenting fear isn’t the most effective motivator; all it does is cause exhaustion and compassion fatigue.

I don’t believe the person who posted the inciting thread turned off their comments because they were afraid to be disagreed with. On the contrary, I think those people arguing in favor of joy and simple distractions were too easy to agree with. If someone has bought into the lie that the only effective resistance is misery, happiness is a base temptation, a rejection of everything they believe in. It’s difficult to keep wearing a hair shirt if your martyrdom isn’t appreciated.

There’s also a deep, infuriating cowardice beneath all that bluster. Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century advises, “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.” Maybe people are interpreting this sentiment to mean that we simply shouldn’t enthusiastically embrace the incoming fascists, or that we shouldn’t preemptively purge our home libraries of challenged books; that interpretation is the easiest. It’s easier to make a public declaration of suffering and insist others follow one’s lead than it is to navigate a daily life that has to be split between comforting normalcy and terrifying uncertainty. By choosing panic and rejecting joy, one is obeying in advance; demanding others join one in that obedience is aiding fascism.

I don’t want to say that this attitude is unique to white, cis, abled, heterosexual people; there’s plenty of evidence that individuals outside of those groups are capable of exhibiting the same behavior. But it does seem that the closer one is to those demographics, the easier it is to throw up one’s hands in surrender. A response to the Jessica post bemoaned the fact that a friend continued to share memes after the election. Meanwhile, trans shitposting is at an all-time high. Black women have effectively maintained social media discourse about impending authoritarianism while also critiquing the Wicked publicity campaign’s focus on Ariana Grande over Cynthia Erivo. A Latina acquaintance of mine shared a video to Facebook poking fun at the inevitable Trump deportations. The most marginalized groups in the country are the people living their most normal lives and seeking humor and distraction in defiance of their enemy. Meanwhile, those with more privilege are choosing to opt into despair, despite knowing that no matter how bad things may get for them, they will never experience the worst of it. It’s appealing to them to dress up in the costume of oppression by performing sorrow and directing anger toward those of similar privilege who aren’t choosing that path of least resistance.

Snyder also states, “Be as courageous as you can. If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.” That’s a terrifying statement, and frankly, many of the more-frightened-than-thou types aren’t willing to make that sacrifice. Their sadness and fear are all they’re willing to offer; it will be those who have more at stake who actually die in resistance of tyranny. The social media rebels will honor them as noble dead, but continue to do nothing but wallow and point fingers at those who aren’t wallowing enough.

Some of the Jessicas in the country absolutely are the problem. They voted for Trump. They did embrace trad wifery. They refuse to discuss the harmful policies they support because they don’t want to be held responsible for them. But for every one of those Jessicas is a Jessica who types frantically in her recipe blog after a particularly contentious school board meeting. A Jessica who films a craft tutorial because she learned her lesson about outrage and fatigue the first time around. Jessicas who have done the research on actual resistance, who acknowledge that joy has always existed in dire times and who refuse to let evil steal it.

To those Jessicas: make your gingerbread. It might not grind the wheels of fascism down, but it’s better than letting those wheels grind you down.

This is cross-posted to Patreon, so if you’ve read it there, you’re up to date.

Hey, everyone! A couple of months ago, I posted about the abysmal state of the self-publishing market and my desperate search to get a job so that I can continue to pay for stuff like rent, food, electricity, and my husband’s sudden need for numerous medical tests. After months of apply for any job that I’m qualified for, I finally got an interview. It was at the grocery store up the street from my house.

I didn’t get the job.

I was heartbroken and feeling beyond worthless. If it took half a year to get a single interview, when would the next one come? And when it did, would I fail again? Our savings are gone, Mr. Jen is still going in for a bunch of invasive and expensive medical tests, and out of the countless applications I’ve submitted, only one of them was impressed enough with my resume to interview me.

Then yesterday, out of the blue, a place I applied to got back to me. I got the job, no interview required. It’s a high-end chocolatier’s shop in the city, so there’s a commute, but that’s better than no job at all. And I don’t have to work with customers. I work in the back!

So, yesterday, I got a job. No! TWO jobs! Because right before I found out I got the I Love Lucy-esque job, I found out that I got a temporary job: directing a production of Dirty Rotten Scoundrels! It’s been one of my bucket list musicals for a long time, so getting the chance to be involved is a dream come true, and having that involvement come with a paycheck is an awesome bonus!

This autumn and winter is going to be hectic. I’ll be working three jobs, but obviously this one will always be my main focus. I just ask for some patience as I try to juggle the new jobs with the old job. I may need to find a new schedule or adapt things, but we’re gonna take it all as it comes. It might mean regular Patreon posts come on different days than usual, or later in the day than usual, but I’m aiming for as few changes as possible.

Now, to rebuild after all the bullshit of the year!

I’ve been tossing around the idea to write a post about the 1985 sitcom Charles in Charge—specifically, its theme song—for a few weeks now. It’s always struck me as sinister:

New boy in the neighborhood
Lives downstairs and its understood
He’s there just to take good care of me
Like he’s one of the family
Charles in Charge of our days and our nights
Charles in Charge of our wrongs and our rights
And I sing, I want, I want Charles in Charge of me
Charles in Charge of our days and our nights
Charles in Charge of our wrongs and our rights
And I sing, I want, I want Charles in Charge of me.

When this theme song became inexplicably lodged in my head in September, I couldn’t stop thinking about how much it makes Charles sound like a cult leader. It is a known truth that Charles is there to care for you. That he’s as close to you as a blood relation. Charles sets the order of your days and your nights, and you want him to do this. You no longer need your moral compass; Charles will be that for you. And to prove that your participation is voluntary, you will sing that you want Charles in charge of you.

I was feeling very smug and self-assured when I sat down to write this, based on that premise. One, because I enjoy being ridiculous, and two, because Scott Baio has me blocked on a lot of social media platforms and I miss cyberbullying him. Cyberbullying Charles seemed just as good.

But then I started remembering things about the show that I never questioned when I was a child. Mainly, the fact that Charles appears to be locked into some kind of domestic slavery or indentured servitude situation to the two different families he works for over the course of the show.

It all started when Michael Jacobs (Dinosaurs, Boy Meets World, the criminally underrated The Torkelsons) and Barbara Weisberg (an author of nonfiction and children’s books) sat down to develop a new television show for the Scholastic Corporation (that book fair you never had money for). The premise they came up with was pretty simple: a broke college student accepts a job as a live-in housekeeper/nanny for an upper-middle class family with three children. In other words, a well-off family dupes a desperate college kid into being a nineteen-year-old single dad.

The show had all the ingredients required for a sitcom in 1980s: an affluent white family with precocious kids and a pristine house, a handsome leading man (Scott Baio, coasting into a second series lead on the fumes of his fading Happy Days good will), a wacky best friend character (Willie Aames, who shares a birthday with me and Forest Whitaker), and a premise that becomes troublesome as fuck if you think about it even a little bit. Because Charles isn’t actually being paid for his services to the family. They’re providing him room and board. He lives in their house, cooks their meals, does their chores, cares for their children both materially and emotionally, and he doesn’t get paid. All because he needs a place to live while he attends college.

If this happened in real life, the arrangement would violate labor laws. And it gets even stranger when season two starts. Charles, returning from the longest hiking trip ever (there is a three year gap between season one and the show’s revival in syndication), finds that the Pembrokes, the family he originally worked for? They don’t live in that house anymore. They decided to move to Seattle, knowing that Charles would be returning to college and, presumably, to work in just two weeks. He bursts through the front door of the house he assumed he lived in, only to startle the young girl reading on the sofa, whom he mistakes for the Pembroke’s daughter despite acknowledging that she has “a different head.” This girl is obviously a different child from the one who was in his full-time care for twenty-two episodes. How much attention could he possibly have been paying to these children?

Mrs. Pembroke is, for some reason, still wandering around the house, as is one of the Pembroke children. Charles is totally thrown. He keeps wandering into rooms and there are people he doesn’t know. His best friend, Buddy, is no help, because Buddy is the kind of guy who’d bring an air horn to cheer you on in a chess tournament. The cheerful, boyish lights are on, but there are only ghosts of thoughts at home.

Mrs. Pembroke explains to Charles that her husband was transferred to Seattle, and the new family, the Powells, are subletting the house. The biggest shock to me, upon rewatch, was finding out that the Pembrokes are renting in the 1980s, when houses cost roughly thirty-six bucks. The second biggest shock was that the son cheerfully announces that they’ve not only sublet the house, but they’ve sublet Charles as well. And yes, they absolutely say they sublet another human being: “We sublet you, too.”

With no prior discussion, the Pembrokes have decided that Charles will transfer to the new family, in the same arrangement. And Charles is like… uh, no. I’m getting an apartment with my friend Buddy. He decides that there’s no reason to stay at the house and start chilling with the Powells, until the boy-crazy oldest daughter announces that she’s already lined up dates for herself and her sister, the bookish and jaded Sarah, who looks exactly like the human character from the 1980s My Little Pony cartoon. He resists his natural urge to parent when Sarah begs him to bring her along while he and Buddy try to woo girls at the local pizza place, but he ultimately can’t help himself. The kid needs help learning to meet new people and be popular, and if anyone knows about popular, it’s Scott Baio in the 1980s. And Mrs. Powell is totally okay with sending her daughter off to watch a strange man trying to pick up women, so… that’s cool.

What I find so bizarre about this series reboot is how casually the Pembrokes sold Charles with the house. Mrs. Powell doesn’t find anything wrong with this arrangement, either. She’s heard nothing but good things about Charles and has taken it for granted that he’ll come work for her. The kids are even excited to meet him, and Sarah is disappointed that he doesn’t initially want to get involved in helping her become liked and popular.

Who the fuck are these people?

The only person in the family who initially appears to have a lick of sense is the grandfather, a retired Navy curmudgeon who prevents two unknown men from leaving the property with his thirteen-year-old granddaughter. Charles and Buddy do not make a great first impression on Mr. Powell, who is shocked when two civilians don’t know the names of famous admirals. Also, the fact that they are, and I cannot stress this enough, two strange men expressing an interest in hanging out with his thirteen-year-old granddaughter.

Charles and Buddy take Sarah to a pizza place, where two girls are immediately all over the guys. We’re talking breathy voices, leaning up against them, hand feeding them pizza, all in front of a child they have zero questions about. Neither of these girls say, “Um, why are you hanging out with this literal child? And why is she on our date?” Meanwhile, back at the house, Mrs. Powell explains to her father-in-law that sure, they don’t know Charles at all, but she trusts Sarah’s judgment and thinks he’ll be good for the family.

I need to impress upon you how absolutely beezonks this plot point is. This woman is going to entrust the full-time care of her children to a strange man because he took her thirteen-year-old daughter along on his pizza date. This is the type of storyline we all just accepted in the 1980s.

When one of the horny pizza girls explains to Sarah that she, too, used to be interested in books and nerdy pursuits, Charles takes Sarah home and away from such slutty influences. Jamie is miffed that Sarah doesn’t want to go out and meet boys with her, but Charles puts his foot down, saying that Sarah is not ready, and that deciding when to date is her choice. And this leads to Charles realizing that he needs to stay with the Powells to make sure Sarah doesn’t get led down the garden path by Jamie, and to prevent Jamie from growing up too fast (we won’t get into the allegations of Baio’s real life sexual predation toward actress Nicole Eggert). The episode ends with Charles informing Buddy that they have a date later that night with the two girls from the pizza place, and the credits roll.

It seems like Charles has made the decision to stay with the Powells. He’s entering their employment as an equal, albeit on the same terms as with the Pembrokes. But what choice does he actually have? He’s been working for room and board. While Buddy finds them a potential apartment to live in, Charles has no money. He’s in debt to the local pizzeria. Do you know how fucking broke you have to be to finance pizza? Is moving out of the Pembroke/Powell situation even achievable for Charles? He’s still going to college, and now he’ll be responsible for parenting these new children (despite the grandfather being retired and at home full time). And the Pembrokes were fully prepared to skip town without informing him that they were leaving. If he hadn’t arrived home that day, at that time, he would have just missed his former “employers”; within minutes of him receiving the news of their departure, Mrs. Pembroke and her son are loading their suitcases into a cab. They didn’t even count on him being there to drive them to the airport. They were fully prepared to up and leave and never see Charles again or explain to him what’s happening.

As if the entire premise of simply selling their unpaid housekeeper to a new family wasn’t upsetting enough, the first episode of the reboot ends with a tag wherein the children sneak into Charles’s room to watch him as he sleeps.

Jamie: I wanna see what we got here.

Adam: He’s going to teach me how to throw a knuckleball. And to drive a car!

Sarah: We’re going to read all of the poetry books together!

Jamie: He’s gonna do my math homework. He’s gonna clean my room! Look at him. Isn’t this great? We own this guy. He’s gonna do whatever we tell him.

Of course, the gag is that Charles is awake the whole time. He barks at them to go back to bed, and they scramble out because, no matter who signs his checks (no one. No one signs his checks because he doesn’t get paid), Charles is the one truly in charge.

Upon rewatching this episode, I realized exactly why the theme song disturbs me. It isn’t an assertion that Charles is in charge. It’s an argument for the innocence of the people exploiting him. They’re not culpable. They’re not responsible for that exploitation. Charles is. Charles is in charge, and if he wanted to escape, he could do so at any time. The theme song makes us, the viewer, complicit in his abuse and captivity.

Charles is not in charge. Charles is a victim, and God has looked away.

December 29th, 2002, was the most terrifying car ride of my life. I sat in the backseat, knuckles white as I grasped the car seat, silently praying that the unthinkable would not occur while knowing in my heart that it would. We would get into an accident and never make it home. And I had no way to protect the brand new human riding beside me.

Looking back, I know that it wasn’t actually a scary ride. The speed limit on the expressway through Grand Rapids was still fifty-five back then, and it was a Sunday afternoon. Practically no one was on the streets, and we were only traveling eight miles. But I was a new mom, and everything in the world was designed to harm my child.

The car ride we took on September 21st, 2024 wasn’t nearly as scary (even though the early morning fog created a very real danger that we hadn’t faced twenty-two years before), but everything about it should have been. Because I was driving that very same baby to the airport (an airport three miles from the apartment to which we’d made that first, harrowing post-natal journey) to send him two-thousand miles away from me and my biological imperative to make the world safe for him.

My son is a grown person now. I can trust (within reason) that he’s not going to eat a thumbtack off the floor or drown himself in the toilet. He has more money in the bank at twenty-two than I ever had at that age (of course, I was twenty-two on that Sunday morning terror journey and therefore my capital was tied up in diapers). There’s an apartment waiting for him, with a girlfriend and a roommate, and the whole city of Los Angeles to find work and build a life in. He’s been raised to be independent, despite the fact that I cut his meat and poured his juice for far too long (my fed-up husband slammed his fork down during dinner one night and roared, “For god’s sake, Jen, he’s fourteen years old!”). My son knows he can call us for help with things, and he also knows how to find answers to problems on his own. But as I watched him maneuver his three suitcases and giant backpack through check-in, I thought: this is wrong. This is all wrong.

To my heart, I was failing. I was being neglectful and reckless. Who just lets their child go to California by themselves? Who would allow their precious baby to go off into a world that’s already cruel, to a place currently surrounded by fire and under constant threat of The Big One?

At the same age my son is now, his father and I were heading home to our two-bedroom basement apartment with thirty dollars in our checking account and a brand new human to care for. The evidence points to our son’s new situation being entirely survivable, on a pretty low difficulty setting in comparison. But none of that matters to my irrational, forever-altered-by-pregnancy brain. While I can logically accept that he’s safe, he’s well, and everyone leaves the nest at some point, and I can even be proud of him for making such a big step, I can’t reason with the tight, squeezing feeling in my chest that leaves me suddenly breathless or the burning wet in my eyes that I have to hastily blink away. This is what kids are supposed to do. My job as an active parent was always supposed to end. With some exceptions, the goal of raising a child is to see them eventually leave you.

I don’t think people are entirely honest about what it feels like for a child to leave home, even under perfect first-time-home-leaving conditions. Parents with three kids in high school dream of what it will be like “when the kids are out on their own.” When those three kids peel off the exit ramp to college or marriage or adventure, those parents are supposed to tell everyone about how great life is as an “empty-nester.” The house is cleaner and quieter, they can drop whatever they’re doing and traipse off for the weekend if they feel like it. They don’t have to hide snacks anymore and they can have sex right in the middle of the day and make as much noise as they want. It’s like parents with adult children seek out parents deep in the throes of soccer practice commutes and puberty mood swings specifically, just to gloat that one day, the kids will be gone and your life will be as great as theirs are.

I think they’re mostly lying.

Don’t get me wrong; it’s going to be nice to have all our forks back in the kitchen, rather than strewn around my kid’s bedroom. And I’m looking forward to a larger share of our sparse internet connectivity. But the mainstream, nuclear-family-normative culture around me didn’t prepare me at all for the sadness I feel. I spent a whole day in bed. I told my usually stoic husband that I’m sad. He said, “Me, too.” For anyone who knows him, that’s the equivalent of falling to the ground wailing. We still have one child at home, but she’s sad, too. “Now our portions are going to be weird,” she said when I turned on the oven to make dinner. Our son didn’t just take our Nintendo Switch along with him. He took our normalcy.

Maybe it isn’t right to describe this feeling as grief. After all, we didn’t lose our son. We know where he is. He’s in Long Beach. We have his address and everything. But it feels like a death: the death of the way our family operated for two decades. And just like when an actual death is expected, it’s still a sudden shock when it actually happens. There’s still an adjustment that has to be reckoned with, a hole where the person used to be every day. The difference is that unlike a death, I can reasonably say that I will see my kid again, without a bunch of anonymous internet trolls quoting contradictory bible verses at me to explain why my coping method is “illogical.”

We should be more honest with parents about a lot of things. How really fucking expensive kids are (two gallons of milk just lasted four days straight for the first time in ten years and I almost wept). How everyone will give you unsolicited advice in a tone that suggests you’re failing, and worse, you’re the only parent alive who’s failing. We should be honest about the doubts we all feel. And we should be honest with each other about the grieving aspect of watching your family transition from a couple of kids and a couple of parents to an adult, a teen, and a couple of parents who spam the group chat hoping for proof of life. Because the amount of time you have to prepare to let your baby go is the time between that ride home from the hospital and the ride to the airport. And it goes faster than anyone ever expects.

I want to thank literally everybody who has donated to the Ko-fi or joined the Patreon or gave me advice and suggestions as I transition back into “Author With A Day Job” after twenty-two years out of the workforce.

I still haven’t got an interview anywhere that I’ve applied. Either I get form rejected a day after submitting my application, or no one returns my follow-up calls and emails. I feel like the people saying “no one wants to work anymore” should start saying, “no one wants to hire anymore.” You’d think that I would be at least as qualified as a kid who hasn’t graduated high school yet when it comes to running a smoothie machine, but that is not the outlook prospective employers seem to have. I couldn’t even get an interview at a dispensary. A dispensary. That might be the only job I’m over-qualified for.

But I do have some inside intel on a local grocery store. One of their employees will be leaving soon. Much sooner than he told his mother, initially. My son is moving to Los Angeles on September 21st and I am absolutely going to try to snipe his job. But I’m still trying to come to grips with the idea of one of my children leaving. I’ve been a parent for almost twenty-two years. Two whole decades of worrying about these kids, shaping my entire life around making sure they’re provided and cared for, and suddenly it just… isn’t my responsibility anymore? Suddenly, one of them is 2,000 miles away? And totally capable of living on his own?

I’m processing a lot of emotions here. Mainly, that I’m somehow being a bad parent by not taking care of my adult child. Which is bonkers, I know. I was supposed to my raise my kids for them to be independent and capable adults. Mission accomplished. But I guess I never realized that the job actually does end.

There is other, Shonda Rhimes-level drama happening in my life at this time, as well, that has me thinking about parents and children and what families owe to each other. No, seriously: I’m living through something that was actually a plot line on Grey’s Anatomy. But of course, not one where I get banged sideways by a hot surgeon or someone builds a romantic blueprint out of candles on a misty, green-screened Seattle night. Because that’s my luck. But I am on day three of the instant stress headache I got from finding out, so don’t say the universe never gave me nothing.

While I usually say stuff like, “Don’t use writing as your therapy,” and “nobody wants to read your therapy,” I’m breaking my own rule. Because I don’t want to go to therapy. They make you confront your emotions there, and I feel like it works much better to just push it down, push it down, put it in a box and throw it in the sea. Those are the lyrics, by the way, to my pushy-down song. And it’s getting a lot of airplay. So, I started writing a new Sophie book, after swearing the series was over. I have a lot of unresolved trauma that happened between the last book of that series and now, and I need a comfort write. In between my work on Fablemere and my update of Blood Ties Book One: The Turning, I’ve been noodling around in Sophie and El-Mudad and Neil’s world. I don’t have a release date planned yet, or a title. I have more books coming out this year; a paperback of A Kingdom of Pleasure and Torment, the e-book and paperback of The Vampire’s Willing Captive (Fablemere #2), and Her Brother’s Billionaire Best Friend. I’ve also been logging words on The Business Centaur’s Virgin Temp and some various dark romance and fantasy projects.

How have I become so suddenly productive? I stopped taking a medication that I’ve been on for a decade. Turns out, long-term use can cause cognitive impairment and brain fog. And boy, did it ever! Now, instead of struggling to work for an hour a day before getting tired and frustrated, I can actually work and keep track of what I’m doing. It’s incredible. I wish I would have discontinued it long ago.

When I do have news about books and such, I have set up a new Abigail Barnette mailing list. I lost access to my old mailing list a while ago, so if you were on it and want to be on the new one, here’s the link to visit. I’ve learned that promotions and events sometimes require you to advertise them on your email list. I promise, it won’t be a non-stop email fest. I’m not going to be like Impala and try to get you to buy a new pair of rollerskates every day.

That’s about all that’s happening in Trout Nation at the moment.

UPDATE: AMAZON ONE-STAR REVIEWS VISIBLE THROUGH FILTER.

Discord member Themyskira found a way to access the critical reviews that are not linked to the main product page. By scrolling to the bottom of the product page and clicking “see more reviews,” then scrolling down past the top two reviews, the filter system drop downs are working. So, while you can’t click through to one-star reviews from the pop-up or drop down, you can ferret them out that way. However, I think it might depend on how you’re viewing Amazon. I’ve only had a chance to look from my tablet, and mobile Amazon is not giving this option.

There are two reasons this could happen:

An algorithm. I assume that when the percentage of one-star reviews dipped below 1%, the site automatically turned the link to one-star reviews off.

Amazon is doing something shifty. Is it possible? Oh, yeah, absolutely. They’re a fucking evil corporation. But is it more likely that it’s math creating a fuck up? I think so. However, they need to fix this issue, because this being a problem on a book is one thing. They sell fucking medical equipment, food, supplements, car seats, all that stuff that really needs to have easily accessible critical reviews, too.

I’ve heard reviews have been left mentioning this post. Please, do not post one-star reviews you didn’t intend to post. We’d already sent up a test balloon. I did not mean for this to become a call to action. Plus, mentioning me in the reviews puts me in a position where people can come at me in bad faith. There are always drama hounds like drug sniffing dogs, and inevitably someone will intentionally misconstrue this blog post as me encouraging review bombing and hating on Fourth Wing, when it was really a post made from a place of deep distrust of Amazon. Let’s not give people a chance to do that; I already lived through it with Fifty Shades of Grey. If you’re leaving a one-star review, do it because that’s how you feel about the book. If you wanted to leave a one-star review because you read the book and felt it was a one-star read, that’s your prerogative. I just don’t want anyone naming me in those reviews.

MOST OF THE INFORMATION PAST THIS LINE IS REDACTED, EXCEPT FOR THE PARTS ABOUT THE FOURTH WING FANDOM BEING BLESSEDLY NORMAL, REBECCA YARROS BEING BLESSEDLY NORMAL, AND THE PART ABOUT IT MAKING NO SENSE FOR PUBLISHERS TO SUPPRESS REVIEWS. ALL THAT STUFF STANDS.

Imagine that you’ve heard of an incredibly popular book. Like, sweeping the nation popular. People getting tattoos of it and naming their children after the characters popular. Film adaptation announced less than six months after publication popular. Sixty-nine weeks on the New York Times Best Sellers list popular.

Your curiosity is piqued, right? Everyone is talking about this book and how amazing it is. And it must be incredible, because at 4.8 out of 5 stars, it’s one of the highest-rated books on Amazon. In fact, out of over 230,000 reviews, not a single one of them is one star!

Wait, what?

This is not an imaginary scenario. This is what’s happening on Amazon right now with Fourth Wing by Rebecca Yarros:

I noticed this phenomenon a couple of weeks ago. I’ve recently started reading Fourth Wing to recap it on Patreon, and the experience has not been what I’d describe as a five-star read for me. I needed to look something up in the product info and stopped dead in my tracks. Surely, it was impossible that this book had absolutely no one-star reviews? And not in a “I’m not enjoying this book, so no one could have possibly enjoyed it” way. It seemed impossible in a “you can’t get ten people to agree on something, so how do over 200,000 people agree on this?” way.

If you’re familiar with Amazon as a book retailer, then you’re aware that sometimes, one-star reviews can’t be relied upon as an indication of story or writing quality. While some one-star reviews criticize elements and themes, many of them complain about things that are out of the author’s control, like late shipping or torn dust jackets. Sometimes, a one-star review will contain a weird political or religious screed that’s totally disconnected from the book’s content. Other times, a glowing review that lavishes praise on the story is inexplicably (and, I assume, accidentally) rated one-star. But Fourth Wing doesn’t have a single one-star review like that. It has no one-star reviews or ratings on Amazon at all.

I went to the Trout Nation Discord server on August 30th with my confusion:

I will NEVER AGAIN believe that publishers can’t control reviews on Amazon. Out of 233,502 raitings for Fourth Wing, NONE OF THEM ARE ONE STAR.
I’m sorry, that’s just statistically impossible.
It is IMPOSSIBLE that out of the millions upon millions of people who have read that book, EVERY SINGLE PERSON WHO HAS REVIEWED IT LIKED IT ENOUGH TO GIVE IT TWO STARS.

After some discussion, server member Venabler said:

I bought my copy through amazon, I could review it. I am not particularly eloquent though. I suppose I could just leave a one star

And on September 6th, Venabler returned to report:

Apparently the review was approved, but i can’t find it on the page. :/

And on September 7th:

I checked again this morning and it’s definitely not there. What a load of horseshit.

Today is September 9th, and there is still no sign of the approved one-star review from Venabler, or any one-star reviews at all.

So… what’s the deal? Let’s walk through some possibilities.

Fourth Wing really is just that universally beloved. This might seem like the scenario that makes the most sense, right? The book is just so amazing that everyone who has reviewed it has organically felt that it was a two-star read or above. This theory doesn’t hold water, though, once you go to other retailers, where Fourth Wing is still highly rated, but also has one-star reviews. For example, Barnes & Noble has Fourth Wing sitting at 4.6 out of 5 stars, with a much lower overall review count of 327 published reviews. Of those, fifteen are one-star reviews. GoodReads, which is coincidentally owned by Amazon, shows over 18,000 one-star ratings, over 6,000 of those attached to full reviews. Plus, we know that at least one person has had a one-star review of Fourth Wing approved at Amazon. It’s just not showing up on the page.

The publisher is suppressing reviews. There’s a rumor out in publishing spaces claiming that traditional publishers have the power to force Amazon to remove bad reviews. Though I initially had the knee-jerk reaction that this must be the case with Fourth Wing, after thought I began to doubt that deeply. If that were the case, none of the Big Names would have any one-star reviews on their books. It would be baked into people’s contracts at that point: “The publisher agrees to waste resources policing reviews of the work at online retailers.” Nobody is going to do that. Not even Red Tower, who have driven their books to proven success through huge marketing budgets and painfully obvious hype methods.

If the publisher was behind the lack of one-star reviews, or if they were somehow paying Amazon to remove those reviews, wouldn’t we see the second book in the series get the same treatment? After all, when Iron Flame, the sequel to Fourth Wing, was released, it was an utter disaster. Copies came with missing pages, sections glued in upside down, and the wrong title on some spines. So many of the one-star reviews of Iron Flame are complaints about manufacturing quality that it would make more sense for the publisher to somehow suppress reviews of Iron Flame. And no other Red Tower titles seem to be benefiting from this theory; only Abigail Owens’s The Games Gods Play shares Fourth Wing‘s lack of one-star reviews, and that book was released on September 3rd of this year. Fourth Wing has had since May of 2023 to earn even a single one-star review, and it hasn’t.

As an imprint, Red Tower has excelled at manipulating the market. If eliminating the reviews on one title worked well enough to reach Fourth Wing levels of success, then they would be doing it, shamelessly, across every title in their catalogue. Even if it were possible for a publisher to pay Amazon to remove one-star reviews, it’s unlikely that this is the case with Fourth Wing.

Fans are mass-reporting one-star reviews. At the bottom of every Amazon review, there’s a link that says “report.” When you click on it, this happens:

It’s 2024. Everyone on the internet knows that massive sites use an algorithm to determine what does and doesn’t go against community guidelines, and that “community guidelines” often means “vague rules, arbitrarily enforced.” Is it possible that Fourth Wing fans are so obsessed, so petty, so righteously outraged by the idea of anyone not liking the book that they would mobilize en masse to falsely report valid one-star reviews? I suppose so. But if any fandom were going to do that, would it really be Fourth Wing‘s fandom? Fourth Wing fans are passionate, but they’re not as vitriolic in their defense of their favorite series as some other stans are. It seems more likely that a wave of diabolical consumer malfeasance would come from a much larger fandom, one with a reputation for being the Mean Girls of the reading world.

Look, what I’m saying is: if any fandom were going to do something like that, it would be Sarah J. Maas’s fandom.

It’s also just not that easy to get reviews removed from Amazon. If it were, we wouldn’t have seen Fifty Shades of Grey receive one-star reviews (do we all remember just how deeply untethered from reality and reason that fandom was at its height?). A Court of Thorns and Roses has about the same number of Amazon reviews as Fourth Wing, but 1% of them are one-star. Other popular “BookTok books” have one-star reviews, and fandoms who become deeply offended at any whiff of criticism.

So far, Fourth Wing fans in bookish spaces don’t seem united in some kind of imagined victimhood when it comes to people not liking their favorite book. I believe a lot of that can be credited to Rebecca Yarros, who focuses on the positive and discourages the negative. She hasn’t thrown public tantrums about criticism (E.L. James), or stayed silent about controversies relating to her work or public image while her fandom has time and again crusaded against “the haters” (Sarah J. Maas). When Yarros received feedback about her appropriation of a dying language, she immediately addressed it and promised to do better. When she was questioned about her “both sides” stance regarding Israel and Palestine, she donated books to an auction raising funds for those suffering in Gaza. While people can and have questioned her motives behind both of these actions, no one can reasonably argue that Yarros has ever encouraged her readers to ride at dawn, her banner raised high, against even criticism of her work or person.

With all of this in mind, it seems unlikely that Fourth Wing fans have mobilized on a large scale to intentionally suppress reviews. And if they did, it’s even more unlikely that they could have somehow kept it hidden from the book world at large. There is no central hub for Fourth Wing fans with a gated entrance, as there was for a prominent romantasy series whose author kept a riddle-guarded private Facebook group until the readers were disappointed with an entry in the series and the group was immediately nuked. There is no universal gathering spot where a plot like this could be hatched, and even if there was, to misquote Ian Malcolm, haters, uh… find a way. We would know about it by now. But no one seems to be talking about the lack of one-star reviews on Fourth Wing at all, much less campaigning to protect the series from reviews.

Amazon is suppressing Fourth Wing reviews to protect their own interests. Ultimately, only Amazon has the power to remove or suppress reviews. Only Amazon has the power to tell customers like Venabler that their reviews have been approved, only to keep them from posting to the site. And Amazon, coincidentally, is producing a Fourth Wing television adaptation, so they have a real stake in its success.

MGM Amazon Studios owns the rights to several fantasy series, though, and you can find one-star reviews on the actual shows they’ve already produced. Why does Fourth Wing need this type of protection? What is it about critical Fourth Wing reviews that would have Amazon so terrified? The book isn’t full of offensive stereotypes (aside from the inspiration-porn angle of the main character overcoming a serious disability through sheer determination). It isn’t controversial. It just… is. It exists, some people like it, some don’t.

There doesn’t seem to be a single, plausible explanation for why Amazon isn’t allowing one-star reviews of Fourth Wing to stand. But even if a reason were presented, this is still a huge red flag. How can any Amazon product review be trusted if we know that they’re simply not making one-star reviews public? If they’re doing it on Fourth Wing‘s product page, then where else might they be doing it? Toys? Vitamins? Baby formula? Are they only carrying out this practice where it’s basically harmless, like reviews on popular but not controversial books and films? Is this a glitch, or a feature that companies are able to exploit? Where does Amazon draw the line between making money and duping consumers?

Unfortunately, that’s not something Amazon is ever likely to answer. It’s an open secret that compensated product reviews run rampant (and undisclosed) on the site. There’s also a theory, supported by some in the publishing industry, that bad reviews can sell books as easily as good ones do (see, again: Fifty Shades of Grey). Others feel that Amazon reviews have very little effect on a book’s overall success at all. Did Amazon miss this memo? Or did the publisher?

We may never know what or who is behind the suppressed one-star Amazon reviews of Fourth Wing, but this situation should at least sow a few seeds of doubt in the rational consumer’s mind. At present, it seems that where Amazon-affiliated products are concerned, discerning customers should seek out product reviews elsewhere, and critical reviews of media, books in particular, should be backed up at a separate platform in case this becomes a site-wide trend.

EDIT: Within seconds of posting this, the book went live on Amazon! Here’s the link, please read the content warnings in this post!

Hey everybody! First of all, I just want to thank everyone who has reached out to me with kind words and encouragement in light of my recent announcement on the main blog. Please pardon me for cross-posting/self-plagiarizing a bit between here and the Patreon.

As always, I’m so grateful for your support. The donations to the Ko-Fi have been incredibly generous, and I appreciate each one. The road ahead seems a little less hopeless. And again, I appreciate the tireless cheerleading so many of you do when I’m down.

That said, I’m calling into work for this next week.

Because of the stress of the past few months (which has eased up considerably with your generosity on Patreon and Ko-Fi), my mental health isn’t great. I’m safe and supported, but doing a lot of sleeping, not showering, and not eating. Mr. Jen had a ton of PTO banked up, so I’ll be at my cousin’s cabin in the woods for a week, no internet just chilling, and generally just unplugging from life to get my feet back underneath me.

Shitting in an outhouse and bathing in a lake are weirdly good for a reset. And also why my kids did not take us up on the offer of coming with us. Which is fine; they don’t appreciate why it’s cool to see a woodpecker up close yet. One day, they will be middle aged, and then they will know what they have taken for granted re: birds.

I’ll probably also crochet and make friendship bracelets the whole time.

I will be checking in on social media now and again when I have signal (i.e., when I sneak up to the Holiday ten miles away to put our trash in their dumpster), mostly to promote A Kingdom of Pleasure and Torment. Oh… did I not mention?

In the interest of experimentation, I’m soft-launching A Kingdom of Pleasure and Torment this weekend. Wanna see the cover?

That’s right. A Noun of Noun and Noun, friends. Because I want people to know EXACTLY what they’re getting when they buy this book. Is it a literary masterpiece? Not at all. It’s a thinly veiled excuse to write nasty, fucked-up sex scenes and pretty costumes, 100%, no apologies. Check out the blurb:

How far would you go to have your revenge?

Shattered by the murder of her faery mother, Cenere knows that she, a lowly human, is powerless to avenge her, until her faery guardian, Luthian of Mithrax, offers her a deal… and a crown. As a queen, Cenere will have the power to bring her mother’s killer to justice, but the fae give nothing freely. The price Luthian asks is total surrender to his every passionate whim. 

Exiled from the Court of Pleasure and Torment, Luthian seeks to return to his life of hedonism and perversion. Cenere will become his way back into the graces of the sadistic King Arcus. She need only pledge her body and will to Luthian. Under his tutelage, she’ll be able to infatuate the court—and the King’s rakish second son, Prince Cassan. Her guardian will do the rest, and place Cassan on his father’s throne with Cenere beside him.

But when the doomed king  sets his sights on the human woman who will be his undoing, her guardian can no longer keep her safe. Cenere finds herself protected by Prince Kathras, the heir to Arcus’s throne and a faery far more dangerous than his father. Torn between her guardian, a cruel prince, and a kind one, Cenere knows her fate is out of her hands. And Luthian has his own secrets. When his true motivation is revealed, it will change the course of Cenere’s life forever…

A Kingdom of Pleasure and Torment is a Dark Romantasy with strong themes and graphic imagery that may disturb some readers. Please consult the extensive content warnings inside.

What are these content warnings?

• Non-con/Dub-con/Consensual Non-con
• Violence/Gore
• Death
• Suicidal ideation
• Pairings and groups of multiple genders
• Piercing
• Sadism
• Foot torture
• Exhibitionism/Voyeurism
• Fluid play
• Humiliation
• Domination/Submission
• Sex with mythical creatures
• Sex with tentacles and vines
• Knotting

This may, in fact, be the most fucked-up book I’ve ever written. Which makes it perfect for what I wanted to try out. This book is debuting…any time now, actually, as it’s in “publishing” status on KDP as we speak. No prior advertising, no ARC (although, if you are on my ARC team, keep an eye out for an email when I return), and it’s not distributing wide on day one. I’m trying out a soft-launch, making it available exclusively on Amazon and in Kindle Unlimited for a period of time before taking the e-book to other retailers. There will be a paperback version available on other platforms soon, but my much needed mental health hiatus has pushed it back just a bit.

Why am I releasing it this way? Because I’m trying to figure out what will work best for my books as I go forward, in terms of maximizing their potential, finding new readers, and cementing a publishing process that will work while I’m also working a day job. And you know why I’m able to experiment like this? Because I fully believe that I will have a day job soon. Yes, it has been months. Yes, I haven’t received any responses to my resume or follow-ups. Yes, it is demoralizing that one of those ignored applications was for a Subway sandwich store that felt their ideal applicant for “sandwich artist” would have an MBA. But I continue, in the face of “Nobody wants to work!” and weird postings for minimum wage retail jobs that want you to have advanced degrees for $11/h. But my optimism continues. I will get an outside-the-house job, and therefore my entire life doesn’t ride on doing just the right thing to make this book successful, so I can try a new publishing model and see what happens. Because I have the safety net of the job I know is going to happen. It’s gonna, damnit!

One of the things I hope will happen will be that the people who read the book will either love it or loathe it. I wanna see people so passionately divided on this book that it’s all five stars and one stars on GoodReads. Well, in theory. I’m not gonna go look at GoodReads. That way lies (more) madness.

I plan to be fully functional and back with another Fourth Wing recap on the 26th. Thank you all for your patience, support, and understanding. I’m so happy and proud to have attracted a community of readers and jealous haters who “get it” when it comes to mental health.

So, bye-bye for now, grab my dirty book from Amazon if you book shop there, and here’s hoping I return to tons of messages about potential employment! [Extreme Sally Bowles voice] It’s gonna happen! Happen sometime! Maybe this time!

As I type this, I have -$267 in my checking account.

Yup, it’s me again. Asking for financial support. But this time, it’s not the same kind of appeal. This one comes with the reality of being a working writer.

Within the span of a few months, it is no longer viable for me to be a full-time writer. My sales have plummeted. I was unable to recover a large amount of money from the Facebook hack. We were already reeling from the money we lost in our failed move. And while the Patreon support continues to be incredible, with rent, utilities, car payment, gas, food for a family of four plus pets, a thousand dollars a month isn’t going to make it, even with my husband’s pay (which is over $15/h, but still not a living wage). I’ve applied for jobs, but until I hear back from anyone, we’re faced with having to get through August, September, and realistically into mid-October, when quarterly royalties will start trickling in.

For the first time, I’m not viewing going back to working retail or food service as a failure. I’ll be frustrated at how a day job will cut into my publishing speed, both for books and content here, on Patreon, and YouTube, but I won’t be going to sleep sick to my stomach anymore. I’m not asking the universe for a seven-figure bestseller or a fat traditional publishing advance. What I want more than anything at this moment is for one of these many jobs I’ve applied for to contact me and say, “Yes, we will give you money to work here.” I want to be able to know that my paycheck is going to arrive, instead of being the nebulous “maybe?” that it has been for the past twenty years.

Instead, I’m looking at a negative bank balance and no certainty that I’ll be able to secure employment. There are other ways to make money. I can sell my books, for example. I have an event in September that I committed to months before Facebook hackers stole thousands of dollars from my business, but I can’t afford to buy books to sell there. If I don’t go to the event and sell the books, I can’t make much needed income, let along make back the money I spent on the nonrefundable hotel room. If I could afford to sue PayPal in small claims court, I could get back the rest of what the hackers stole, but I don’t have the money to file or a way to appear in court in California. Everything that could make money at the moment costs money. Soon, I’ll have a Shopify store up and running to sell signed books, but not in time to deal with the immediate problems that I have. Like the negative bank balance and over a thousand dollars worth of bills still due to come out of it.

It’s so frustrating to come here for the second time in a year and shake the tin cup at you. But if you feel like you have the resources and/or spoons to lend a hand, here are some things that I would very much appreciate:

Direction donations via KoFi. When someone likes my work and wants to toss a tip my way, it’s always appreciated, no matter the size of the donation.

Patreon subscriptions. If you’ve been meaning to check out my Patreon, this would be a great time! There is so much content over there, from recaps to videos to weekly chapters of the Fablemere series. Plus, sometimes there is real life drama that is too juicy or wild to share with no paywall. Like my trip to the opera.

Word of mouth. Telling people about my books and my Patreon is so much more effective when it’s not coming from me. If you enjoy my books or my content and want to tell people about it, that’s rad.

Job-getting Witchcraft. Manifest me actually getting a call back from some of these places I’m applying. I’m not going into some highly competitive field here; it’s just sandwich shops, dispensaries, and grocery stores. Nobody wants to work anymore, is what I’m told. From my experience over the past couple of months, that means hiring managers, too.

Patience. Things are going to slow down in Trout Nation when I get a job. Please, I’m begging everyone: don’t forget me. I don’t want to give all of this up. I just need to be able to eat and put gas in my car and have electricity and feel like I can breathe without stress-vomiting. Unfortunately, I’m still disabled. I don’t know how much energy I’ll have to dedicate to writing. My hope is that absence will make the heart grow fonder. Just don’t forget I exist.

Things have picked up before. They might pick up again. I might go back to being a full-time author and blogger someday. I might have to work until the day I die. Who knows? But I’m proud of myself for separating my self-worth from my monetary worth for the very first time since the beginning of my career. Granted, that’s an easier mindset to get into when the catastrophic career and financial downturn is just a natural consequence of an election year, plus the nature of publishing, rather than someone actively sabotaging you. The first time I had to stop being a “full time writer,” I thought I was a failure who was letting someone else “win.” Now, I just think I’m a writer and this is how it goes sometimes.

I care about being able to live comfortably more than I care about my ego.

I wanted to make a much different post, though. A post where I would come on here and wax poetic about my new job and this new era in my life with positivity, probably with some asshole words like “transformation” or “freedom” or whatever. I really wanted to not have to ask for any help at all.

But on the other hand, asking for help is what ultimately got The Boss published and saved my ass the first time. Maybe asking for help will generate the energy to get the job I need. Maybe humbling myself like this will shift some kind of vibe in the universe for me.

I’m beaten down, but I’m not beaten. I’m still going to be a writer until the day I die. I’m not quitting. I’m taking care of business.

Keep on rocking in the free world.

It’s time for Dear Trout, a magical time when you can ask a real, living human disaster to give you advice, and that human disaster tries to answer in a way that won’t ruin your life if you act on that advice.

I’m not actually expecting an answer, just throwing this out in the universe like a message in a bottle. And maybe it’s easier to phrase this as if I were talking to a person who ‘gets’ mental illness and self-sabotage.

(Uh, rereading this – if you do read this please don’t take offense at the self-sabotage thing. I don’t mean it as a judgement or anything. I think you’re fantastic. I meant, you write like someone who gets having to work against our own brain)

My partner is wonderful, and I think I want a divorce. I have ADHD, diagnosed, but unmedicated because it’s not an option where I live and moving is hard. I managed to have a successful career… But sometimes it feels like just existing in the vicinity of another human is too hard.

Items don’t stay where I left them because there are two of us in the same space. I can’t not have snacks at home (best way for me to not overeat) because he’s allowed to want snacks sometimes. We have horribly mismatched sex drives (in that I have none, she packed her suitcases one day years ago and went AWOL and I don’t think she’s ever coming back). Partner is super understanding about this and never pressured, but just the fact that I know he’s there and hoping for this state of affairs to change is like sandpaper on my nerves.

He gave up his job to follow me halfway across the world, and he picks up a lot of the slack at home. He puts more trust in me than I have ever put or will ever put in another human.

I love this man to bits, but I don’t know if I can still be with him. I’m exhausted, every day, all the time. It would be easier to live alone, I think. But I can’t tell if this is just the chronic depression talking.

Do I want to walk away?

No offense taken at the self-sabotage thing. It’s a little late for me to start denying that now.

I could answer this in one sentence: It’s the chronic depression talking. But I’m not gonna leave it there because that would be unhelpful.

I’m gonna focus on the two complaints you made in the beginning, about snacks and not being able to find stuff. These are annoying, but not insurmountable. If he wants snacks and your issue is your access to them, why not ask him to keep the snacks in a locked cupboard or drawer and not give you the combination or key? And not being able to find things because people pick them up and walk away with them? If it’s an important object, the two of you could make a weird little game of it. If you use, for example, a pair of scissors (I picked this because it’s the thing that always goes missing in my house), take picture of where you put it when you were finished using it. You can both do this. “Where are the scissors?” “The last time I saw them, I left them here,” and show each other the picture. You’ll either find it in that place, or one of you will see the picture and go, “Waaaait, I did pick it up from there and use it…my bad,” because it looks familiar. Like attracts like, so the probability that your spouse isn’t also laboring under some kind of spectrum or spectrum-adjacent disorder is narrow. You might both be picking up and wandering around with stuff and mutually frustrating each other.

Moving on to the sex thing, because it’s the biggest tell that your depression is driving this and not reason. You say he’s very understanding and never pressures you, but just you knowing that he’s there, hoping for things to change irritates you. If he’s not pressuring you, but you still feel that pressure? That’s internal. You’re feeling disappointed with yourself and projecting your disappointment onto him. Because you feel this way about yourself, obviously he feels the same, right? Unless he’s told you explicitly, “I’m waiting for this to resolve itself and I’m very impatient about it,” or is asking often, “Is your sex drive better? Is your sex drive better? Can we have sex now?” these are internal thoughts and feelings you’re creating for him.

That’s your depression.

You’re “exhausted, every day, all the time,” and think it would be easier to live alone, but he does a lot to contribute to the household. Will your exhaustion decrease if you, with unmedicated ADHD, suddenly bear the responsibility of the entire household, from chores to finances? I’m sure that your depression thinks so. Because it plans to make you avoid all those tasks, anyway, and then get even more depressed than you were in the first place.

I would never say that someone should stay with another person just because that person contributes a lot to managing the household. Anybody with a credit card can buy a dishwasher, you know? But there isn’t really anything in your question that reads like it isn’t being written by your chronic depression. If I had just read, “I love my husband but I feel like we’ve grown apart over the years and our visions for the future don’t align,” my answer would be a lot different. What I read, though, was a person saying how much they love their partner, the stuff their partner does for them (aside from a couple minor clashes about how the house should function), and describing a major symptom of the mental illness they have: the desire to isolate, even from the people who are closest to them.

If there’s other stuff going on that you didn’t include because you were thinking out loud in text and didn’t expect to see the question answered, obviously, that might change my answer. And some people are happier just being alone. But based on what I read, from one mental health struggler to another, it seems like your depression has you in a bad place. For what it’s worth, I’m sending you all those healing vibes people post about on Facebook when they want to be helpful but don’t know how to help from afar. It sucks to have to constantly second guess our own brains and reach out for reality checks and wonder if our thoughts are our own of the product of some dipshit mental illness we never asked to have. So, please don’t interpret all of this as me saying, “You’re wrong for wanting to leave your marriage.” What I’m saying is, “Your depression is bullying you. Please don’t make any major decisions without considering whether or not you feel the same way now as you’ve felt in the past before depression has sabotaged you.”

I wish you luck with whatever road you go down.

What three pieces of advice would you give to someone planning to self-publish their work?

My first piece of advice: never read your reviews. Unless someone sends you a link to their five star review gushing about how much they loved your book, do not read your reviews.

Second piece of advice: don’t self-publish as a back-door way of getting into traditional publishing. The odds of sales being so phenomenal that agents and publishers come scrambling for you books is exceptionally low. Even should you get picked up that way, publishers will not give you leeway to have a even a minor sales dip on your second book with them. You will have to be viral, every single time, with less room for forgiveness and future planning that traditionally acquired authors are given (which isn’t a lot, anyway).

Third piece of advice: If you see someone social media say, “Authors, stop doing this thing in your book,” or “Authors, we’re getting tired of this incredibly specific thing,” ignore it. Write what you want to write. What’s the point of self-publishing if we’re writing for other people and not ourselves? Plus, you’ll never please everyone, and those “PSA FOR AUTHORS:” posts often contradict each other. Your audience is out there. If BookLoverBrenda85 doesn’t want another book with a heroine who sword fights, and your heroine sword fights, then you’re not her audience. But someone out there is.

That’s what I’ve got for the week. Need advice from someone who barely has their own shit together? Ask your questions here.