Hey, guess what? City of Angles just celebrated its two year birthday! It’ll be smashing a birthday cake on YouTube then crying when the string on its party hat snaps any moment now.
City of Angles was born in 2012, one of the worst years of my adult life, where anxiety and insomnia and sleep apnea and mild depression were perpetually grinding me down. In January I started losing sleep, then getting anxious about losing sleep, which lead to more losing sleep. Various doctors came and went without any clear solutions. Oddly, the worst part about it all was that it wasn’t some all-encompassing doom spiral which leads to straightjackets and rubber rooms, it was JUST annoying enough to impede but leave me plenty of uptime as well. My problems let me lead a life while perpetually reminding me Hey, We’re Still Here.
By June I was starting to get a handle on it all — and one of the ways I did it was to start a fiction series ABOUT anxiety and depression and the overcoming thereof. City of Angles let me explore concepts of fear and dread in a safe space, since from an author’s perspective, you’re completely in control of the horror. You know what’s coming up and what awful things are going to happen because you designed every bit of it. It’s a bit less certain for the READER but quite comforting and calming for an author to gleefully write up various scary woogums menacing people.
My life gradually improved by early 2013, and CoA rolled alongside that. I’d like to think it helped contribute to my recovery as well. Running a successful Kickstarter, proof that enough people cared about me and my work to let it show fiscally, was quite educational in that regard.
Now we’re two years and two-point-five books in and City of Angles will be ending soon. (Where “Soon” means “Several months from now.”) It’s been a very, very strange journey. Once it’s over… I’ll have some downtime, then likely be starting a new journey soon enough. Hope you’ll come with me for that one as well.
This week we celebrate this milestone by… well, serving up a pile of scenes from the middle of a story in the middle of a book. Not exactly climactic, but hey. Read and enjoy and I’d love your feedback.
Oh, and in the comments below… how’ve your last two years been? How’d City of Angles find you and walk alongside you during that time?