Language reasoning has always been the highest point of my skill profile. Even in second grade, I had a vague understanding of what remedial meant, and it both embarrassed and angered me to be stuck in those classes despite understanding I had more trouble with reading than my peers. I was determined to get out of those classes and improve my reading as quickly as possible, so I started reading absolutely everything, no matter how it was oriented. Right side up, upside down, sideways, mirror image: it didn’t matter. If there was something to read, I would read it.

It would be nearly two decades before I discovered what those classes were actually about through my husband’s training in the Orton-Gillingham method. Remember, the school system didn’t tell my parents I was dyslexic. They just said I needed extra help with reading. But, as he practiced administering the test and working through several of the exercises using me as the student, I recognized them. The realization of why some other family members also struggled with reading and spelling dawned on us both, pushing us to test our children and later homeschool them to ensure they would get the help they needed to work with their minds instead of fighting against them. We didn’t always succeed in that, but we gave it our best and adjusted as we learned better.

Throughout it all, I continued to read daily and write when and where I could fit the time. Mental skills are the same as physical ones, after all. You have to keep in practice, or you will lose them. This is doubly true if you have a disability linked to those skills, so I’ve always been somewhat terrified of losing the ability to read. Between homeschooling, job upheavals, and health scares, writing has taken a back seat for the past couple of decades. Actually, losing the ability to read came far too close to coming true for comfort, thanks to serious health complications in late 2021 until I began working on this latest version of this website in early 2025. I did end up losing the ability to write altogether throughout much of 2024, and I am currently in something of a mental rehabilitation program as this website goes live in May 2025. 

You may notice “Tales from the Supers Verse” and the second edition of Right of Succession have links where you can follow their progress on Royal Road. I am posting work there serially and some of the work I have done over the years, but not officially published in book form, on Inkitt to try and build a readership and community, gain feedback, and encourage myself to keep going as I chip away at these projects a few hundred words at a time. Writing a novel is daunting as it is. Doing so when your body will throw a fit if you write more than six or seven hundred words in a day is even more so, considering how quickly people expect books to be finished nowadays, with the advent of things like AI.

I hope daily work at writing in these drips and drabs will eventually rebuild these atrophied mental muscles, and I will be able to return to my former levels of productivity in my fiction. (I have a list of about thirty-five or so novels and other books I want to write before I die, after all.) Until then, I have continued with other forms of expression, particularly as my work homeschooling is virtually done, and I am left quite physically limited in what I can do thanks to EDS, complex migraines, and the neuromuscular issues that come with the combo. I need something to do to keep myself busy, so I am resurrecting my old YouTube channel, where I will do arts and craft videos with voiceovers. I hope to do some Let’s Plays again eventually since I still love the storytelling elements of The Sims, and I would love to do a full Let’s Play of both of the legacy challenges I wrote, but I need a newer computer first, as the current one can no longer run OBS.