Total pages in book: 128
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 123873 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 619(@200wpm)___ 495(@250wpm)___ 413(@300wpm)
No matter the reason, though, it’s…a hell of a lot to have all of that directed at you, about you.
And to know that if you defend yourself, if you speak the truth, if you engage with it at all, you’re only going to make things worse.
This afterword is getting long enough, so I’m not going to re-litigate years of harassment, trauma, lies, invasions on my privacy, rumors, smears, conspiracy theories, ableist neurotypical projections and twistings, etc. What I am going to say is that for a while, it worked. It beat me back into my place. I was writing quickly still, producing a short book a month with my Criminal Intentions serial (sometimes, I had some off months/delays here and there) plus the wordcount for my ghostwriting clients, but I had made myself small. I started doubting myself again. I fell far short of what I could actually do. I disappeared a whole arse book when I couldn’t make the preorder deadline, disappointed a lot of people, and I still haven’t finished and finally actually released it. I kept making promises to catch up with things, but always failed them, because it was always I’ll get better, get back up to speed tomorrow—yet tomorrow never came because I was stuck in today, and today was full of pain and self-doubt and all those voices whispering thou shalt not do what you love because you don’t deserve to, because you don’t deserve to exist.
So I heard thou shalt not and I said okay, I won’t.
For far too long.
But y’know what?
Yeah, no.
That’s just not who I am.
It’s taken me a while. Shaking off some bad influences. Letting go of some trauma. Cutting some things out of my life, but somehow, with this book, I’ve come full circle. I wrote it in less than a week, and it’s some 35K longer than the first book in the series. I’ve finished the trilogy, and I’m almost done with all of the companion novellas. Whatever chapter in my life these books opened, it’s now closing, and I’m ready to start fresh, to figure out where I go next, to leave this series behind with more fond memories than not. Even if the Undue Arrogance series brought me to the peak of the harassment, racism, queermisia, ableism, and transmisia I’ve faced in this industry, even if it brought me to the attention of people who live to denigrate the marginalized…
It's also brought me good things.
And I wouldn’t be a full-time author without these books.
Maybe the reason it took me so long to finally, after years, write the final book in this series is that I wasn’t ready to recognize that; wasn’t ready to shake the negative associations. I wasn’t ready to reclaim the pride I had in my ability to write quickly, with love, with joy, with rapid-fire bursts of reckless creativity.
I’m ready now.
I don’t know what I’ll do from here, but I know I’ll stop second-guessing myself and just let myself enjoy it. Let myself be. Let myself write, and not be afraid to exist in this industry in the skin I was born in—although even now, there are people in my orbit who disrespect my time, who try to slow me down, who look at me wanting to be happy doing what I do and say I’m flying too close to the sun. This book almost didn’t make it to production because of people like that; because of people who can’t fathom the joy I take in writing, and since they can’t understand it then it must be bad, has to be stopped.
People may say thou shalt not.
And to that, I say:
I’m fuckin’ gonna anyway.
The devil works hard, my friends.
But I can promise you that I work harder still.
-C