Hello everyone!
It’s been quite some time since I updated anything. A lot has changed in the past year. Most of you follow me on Patreon, Twitter/X, or Discord, so you’ll probably already know what I’m going to cover. If not, let me explain.
The last two or more years of books from me have been extremely inconsistent, flaky, and infrequent. I’d announce that I’m going to do something, then push a date back, and that repeated indefinitely. Eventually, things would get done, but it was never at a reasonable time. Dragon Estate 3 shouldn’t have taken almost two years. That’s unacceptable.
Vixen A.D. should already be complete, and yet, here we are.
As you can imagine, this weighs heavily on me. It eventually became so extreme that I wasn’t able to continue the way I had been. Something needed to change. Either I would self-destruct all of my work, ruin multiple series, risk bombing my reputation beyond the point of return… or figure out exactly what was happening to me.
But, most importantly, I would continue to hurt my readers and fans. That is the part that most heavily weighs on me. It’s the thing that would keep me up at night and give me spells of sadness. I want to treat everyone better. Why was it so absurdly hard for me to write consistently? Why had so many collaborations fallen through, or worse? And why wasn’t I done with Vixen A.D. 2? And so on.
I am a big mental health advocate. If you follow me closely enough, you will know I have an unnamed condition that medication effectively treats. I won’t get too far into it, but this specific condition happens to be depression. I take a medication that modifies my serotonin levels, and it works wonderfully!
Yet, I still had these problems of leaving things incomplete, or unfinished, or rushed. I procrastinated everything, I predictably forgot things, I had high anxiety and would often get hyper-focused on things that I shouldn’t have been, missing deadlines instead when there was much to be done. I had tried everything at that point. Meditation, multiple supplements, the gym, therapy, several antidepressants, and mood stabilizers. I was only getting more depressed because I couldn’t finish anything.
Worse, when I would go to write, the resistance to doing it—anything, even—was becoming much stronger. Eventually, after many missed days of writing, I discovered that I could use timers to block out small portions of my day. The maximum I could get myself to focus on anything was about five minutes, and the time to recover was at least half an hour, usually closer to a whole hour at least.
Energy drinks, I thought, would fix this and give me focus. Well, oddly, they kind of relaxed me, and made me want to sleep. These were not sustainable, though, usually because they seemed to make me anxious and jittery, yet fatigued at the same time, ruining whatever focus it granted me. I’d had this problem with caffeine my whole life, and I wasn’t sure what caused it, and after realizing just how far behind I’d fallen AGAIN, I decided to take action. The first thing I did was talk to my doctor. I explained my problems to her, and told her I honestly felt like the SSRI was doing what it was supposed to—I wasn’t depressed by default, no.
The SSRI fixed that.
This was an external factor and stress from failed projects that would induce the added depression. She asked me a few more questions, then suggested another antidepressant, which also didn’t do so much for me. We stuck to the original one, and I spent the next several months looking into cognitive functions, potential missed diagnoses, neurological conditions, everything I could think of.
Except for a few mental health conditions. See, there was a couple that I assumed I simply didn’t have. I turned out to be right about not having one of them, but I was astronomically mistaken about the other. One of the conditions, OCD, I knew I didn’t have, per se. I had some obsessive traits and tendencies, which were a result of my needing to have things a certain way so I could keep focus.
Also, if my routine was interrupted, or when I was interrupted doing anything, my anxiety would spike, and it would take hours to get back into what I was doing. After some investigation, it became clear I didn’t have OCD, just some obsessive traits likely developed out of coping with whatever was happening.
But.
There was one other condition left that I hadn’t been assessed for, one which I assumed I didn’t have, and that would be painfully obvious from childhood. In my hindsight, it actually was, but it was missed due to factors outside of my control as a child. That condition is ADHD.
When I heard that phrase originally, it invoked images of a slumber party of boys slamming two liters of game fuel and energy drinks late into the night. I thought of kids that couldn’t sit still, bouncing off the walls, speed running the jungle gym and so on. It didn’t seem like that’s what was going on. Out of curiosity and desperation, and trial and error, I eventually ended up with an assessment.
Before this, we experimented with some other medication for ADHD that didn’t require a full assessment or scheduled prescriptions, but none of them worked very much, or had side effects that were not compatible with my life.
I knew there were a few more left, so I gave in and decided that it was worth it to do whatever I could to recover everything I’d destroyed and, hopefully, pave a better future
Well, the assessment came back. I scored with ADHD inattentive-type, along with depressive disorder. I stared at it, wondering what that meant, and read through everything in the report.
It turns out ADD was removed from diagnostic criteria and merged with ADHD. So instead of ADD and ADHD, it’s now ADHD with three subtypes (hyperactive, combined, and inattentive). Shocked, I set up an appointment and, within a few weeks, received treatment and… well, the results are exceedingly clear. I have severe inattentive type, and never knew it, and it was never treated, because most people did what I did: assumed ADHD is the same as being way too hyper and restless.
So, to give you an idea of what my treatment results are, I’m going to start with a pretty basic idea of how I actually wrote before. I’d maybe write every few weeks, and during that time, I would try as hard as I could to push out several hundred words a day. I did try to write daily, and I kept doing that, but it never panned out. I’d always somehow fail to complete something, struggle to focus, struggle to write anything at all, not feel “with it” and filled with brain fog.
So, assume about 5,000 words a month, with some random months producing 10,000 or more words. This meant all my books took forever to complete and publish. Some months, I didn’t produce more than a few hundred words. I was only able to write for about five minutes at a time in 50-word increments and required massive breaks following the word progression.
Task lists were never finished for the day. I failed two entire collaborations, of which I’m still ashamed, and even had to cancel a planned series because it was simply not possible to write. The maximum length of any book I wrote on my own was about 60,000 words, and it was only one. The rest were barely touching 50,000 words, and the ones that surpassed 50k were almost always collaborative projects with Misty Vixen.
That all changed when I began treatment.
Now, I’m able to write every single day I plan to write. It’s almost always at least 1,000 words, sometimes less if I am sick. All my task lists for the day are always finished, and I am following a path that implies I am releasing things in a much more reasonable schedule. I was able to set up a Discord server, update my website, and other than some loose ends, everything has drastically improved. In fact, for the first time, I wrote over 100,000 words. I could never, ever, ever write that much before.
Now, I can focus on things for fifteen to thirty minutes at a time, depending on what it is, and I only need a ten-minute break in between. It’s insane to think that the vast majority of my time before was dedicated to breaks, so I didn’t get overwhelmed. The resistance to doing anything is so much less now.
For a period of thirty days once treatment started (the end of January to the end of February), I wrote over 83,000 words. That is absurdity. I never could have ever imagined myself to be the author that would even do half of that in one month. Everyone that knows me has noticed a massive improvement, and I remember things and birthdays and other dates much more often. My anxiety has dropped to a much, much, much lower level.
I still cannot believe how much changed. I knew within less than an hour of starting treatment that this was the missing piece. The doctor even told me I would “know” if it was going to work within twenty or thirty minutes. Everything has improved. Which, I want to take a moment to address everyone reading this.
Your mental health is very important. It may not seem like a big deal, or that it’s interfering with anything, but it could be, and if it’s not in check, your life may be suffering. I would strongly recommend taking your mental health seriously, and your loved one’s mental health, and striving to keep them in good shape. It really will decide your future and the well-being of you and everyone around you.
So, moving forward, this means a lot of things: I now have a much more stable release schedule. I can successfully plan to write five days a week (or more if I want), the website will see more frequent updates, and a lot more is going to come out of me this year. Patreon updates will be more frequent, and I can even do some other cool stuff I couldn’t do before.
It’s very unlikely that a period of more than seven or eight months will exist between releases moving forward. My works are going to be significantly more consistent, and I’m happy with the way my writing flow has changed. I would love feedback on the new writing style I have (you will see it in the last half of Vixen A.D. 2 and all of Dragon Estate 4). It will be more obvious with new series in the future, or books that were written from the initial stages after I began treatment this year. It will be most obvious in Dragon Estate 4 and Vixen A.D. 3, and everything after that. Dead Freeze 3 will resemble older material and is also a collaboration, so that may not be written too much differently (expect some style differences, though).
I also established my very own writing rules I follow for every book. Read them under the GETTING STARTED or click on this link if you’re interested in glancing them over. Sometime soon, I will be releasing a more detailed writing schedule. I’ll be taking a week off after a project is available for purchase, such as preorders. Though moving forward, everything will be a preorder.
After that, I resume my writing schedule of Sun through Thursday, unless I’m unwell or handling life things, though that should be infrequent. Moving forward, I’m really excited to see where things go, as I do not think I am remotely the same writer as several years ago in that I am going to be significantly more consistent and interactive.
To everyone who supported me and continues to do so, I love you from the bottom of my heart, and I can’t wait to give you some of the best damn books I’ve ever put to paper (or e-ink and Audible).
You’re cherished, and I frequently think about you. Your support never goes unnoticed.
Let’s make 2025 the best year of my career thus far! We have kitsunes and dragon girls that need saving! And besides, there’s that whole entire city of cute, adorable babes that need a strong MC to keep them company later this year…
With Love,
Lara X. Lust
