Well hello my friends. I honestly feel guilty about just how long it has been since I've been in contact with you.

So first and foremost, allow me to offer a sincere apology for that. And if you don't even remember me, no hard feelings. With how long it's been, I totally understand if you'd rather just unsubscribe and never hear from me again.

For anyone else, clearly an explanation is in order.

So first, let me just say that I am back in the game. It is going to be a while yet before I publish anything new, but I've been hard at work on producing new material and I'll be sharing more about that as soon as I can.

Now, for the explanation;

I apologize for the length of this. There's a lot of history to go into. I'll be getting pretty vulnerable here as there are a lot of details that I've kept private for a long time so I hope you'll bear with me as I pour out my heart.

So, we're going all the way back to early 2021 here. It's been a little over four years since the last time I sent out an email.

In early 2021 I ended up taking a promotion at my day job and it ended up being a lot more of a commitment than I had intended. To the tune of about 70-80 hour work weeks on top of the hour and fifteen minute commute each way. And to make matters worse, I went for months without ever having a full day off.

There is, of course, a whole lot more detail I could go into about all that, but I doubt it would be of interest. Suffice to say that it didn't take long before I started to burn out, and on top of that my marriage and my relationship with my children were suffering.

Unsurprisingly, I wasn't able to maintain that for very long. It was maybe six months before I had sought and found another job, but that position fell through at the last minute. So I had to scramble to find a replacement. I ended up having to resort to Doordash for income and supplementing with credit cards to make ends meet until I secured another position.

Which ended up being for a company that I couldn't stand working for. The short version is that, while it was rarely directed at me, I could not tolerate the way the ownership treated their employees. So I quietly found another position.

I was once again commuting an hour each way and was typically working 60-65 hour weeks. But at least I felt I was being taken care of and that I worked for someone I respected. It was actually a really good position and a really good company. I really couldn't have asked for anything better.

Of course, my marriage was still struggling. But, amazingly, my new boss was deeply into leadership training and subscribed to an idea called Servant Leadership and had a lot to teach me, some of which I was able to take outside of the workplace and put to work in my relationship. I had some major breakthroughs with my wife during that time.

Now, I have to make a bit of an aside. For those who don't know, not only do I deal with ADHD but I'm also on the Autism spectrum. My then therapist suggested it was most likely Asperger's, though apparently that is not a valid diagnosis anymore. Anyhow, it can make life difficult as I sometimes find it difficult to navigate interactions and relationships with other people. Over a lifetime of Masking I've learned to pretty accurately identify what people around me are feeling, I'm just not good at figuring out what the expected response to that might be. Especially if it's a situation I haven't encountered before. I've lived most of my life by just emulating the responses I see other people have in similar situations. It also has the unfortunate side-effect that I often come across in ways other than I intend, which has caused me no end of trouble in professional settings in the past. I'm fond of saying, "I can't control what my face does when you speak," and it's just about the truest thing I can say to people.

Okay, now that that's out of the way. So, at this new job, after a while complaints about me as a leader started to come in. Things like I was being rude or condescending to people, especially the younger employees. Well, this was an absolute shock to me. As anyone who has interacted with me directly can attest to, these are pretty much the last things I would ever do intentionally.

Anyway. Long story short is that after a number of these complaints my boss comes to me and basically tells me that if he gets one more complaint about me then we're going to have to "part ways." I'm not dumb. I know what he's saying. And since there is absolutely no way I can 100% guarantee that no such complaint will ever come, I did what I had to do. I found another job. I didn't want to. It was torturous and painful to have to leave that company. But it was better that I do it on my own terms rather than at the whim of whoever happened to complain about the way I came across to them on any given day.

And what does all this have to do you with, my dear intrepid reader? Well, I was stressed out and overworked and desperately trying to save my marriage, so I really didn't have the time to devote to writing, even a newsletter or (for the most part) even social media.

I'm sure you can guess the next part of my story. This puts us about mid-2022 and once again, the new job that I found fell through at the last minute. Which left me once again scrambling to find a job while I spent my evenings delivering for Doordash to try to make up the difference after paying most of the bills with credit cards.

After more than a month unemployed with most of the credit cards approaching their limits, things came to a head with my marriage. After doing everything I could for years to try to make things better and atone for mistakes I made years earlier, I finally came to a realization. Interestingly, I figured it out because of an employee that had worked for me at a previous job. She and I had talked about it a number of times but it never really clicked for me until that summer. After talking with my therapist about it to ensure I wasn't jumping to conclusions (and taking a lot of time to really think through my life and how I had lived it and what it all really meant), I had a talk with my wife about my Autism and how it affected me and the way I had Masked it my entire life. And the kicker, the one that I think really caused the biggest issue for her, was my realization that I truly do not know where the Mask ends and the real me begins.

She had a breakdown. I lost my cool. It became a fight.

But we weren't really able to come to any sort of resolution. It just lingered. For days. There were little spurts of skirting the edges of the issue. We both talked with friends and family about it. Not to spread it around, but just for advice. Neither of us really knew what to do or where to go from there.

Over the course of things, I did a lot of soul searching and thinking through our history. I ended up coming to a conclusion that it honestly took me a while to be able to admit, even to myself.

At the end of it all, she and I were just not compatible. And what's worse is I don't think we ever really were. What we had, the thing that really held us together as long as it did, was mutual stubbornness and refusal to concede defeat.

Which, I'm sure you know, is no solid basis for a marriage. We had already been in couple's counseling for over two years and it just wasn't helping. Things were not getting better. If anything they were getting worse.

And please understand; I'm not blaming her for this. I accept my part in what happened. I know I wasn't perfect. I made mistakes. Alot of them, if I'm being honest. And we went through so much together. So many tough times. So much hardship. So much trauma. And the conclusion that I came to was that at the end of the day, we had just become never-ending reminders to one another of all the trauma and pain and tragedy that we had gone through together.

So I felt I had to walk away from my marriage. And I stand by that decision. She and I were not right for one another. We never were.

After that I moved to another state for a while. I needed to get away and I had someone who offered me a place to stay. Over the course of events I came back about a month later. It took me a while, but I finally got a place of my own and have been living on my own since then.

And then I finally found another job, this one closer to home and paying more than I'd made in a long while. At this point, I spent a lot of time thinking about writing but my life was in such utter ruin that I just couldn't focus enough to actually do any. I kept meaning to reach out to my readers to let everyone know what was happening with me, but I just couldn't bring myself to actually do it.

I hope you can understand and forgive me for that.

I've had a fair bit of upheaval since then. Lots of things going on in my life. Some major upheavals and a few blessings. Until about the last year when the upheavals really started to dwindle in the shadow of the blessings, and my divorce was recently finalized

During this time I ended up having a major shift in my belief system that I won't go into here unless ya'll tell me that it's something you would really like to hear about.

To keep things relevant, I've been slowly carving out time for writing for the last few months. Back in October, I went to a local writer's conference in Tulsa, OK called The Craft of Writing and I ended up meeting with an acquiring editor for a publisher. I pitched a book to her that has been sitting in my drawer for years and she was super interested. So I've been working on revisions to that before I submit it to the publisher!

So that's pretty exciting.

And more recently, I was in New Orleans for the WriterMBA conference, created by Russell Nohelty and Monica Leonelle, which was an absolutely fantastic experience and has got me all kinds of fired up to get back into writing and publishing and has given me a ton of ideas for how to go about getting my books in front of more people.

So. I'm thrilled to be back and I look forward to chatting with you all as things progress.

The biggest change that is going to immediately affect you is I have pulled my books out of Kindle Unlimited (sorry if that's something you appreciate) so I can get them out into the wider published world.

If you've never read anything more than what I have available for free, one of the more exciting things I'm pursuing is a new platform called Curios, which allows you to support me more directly. Rather than giving 30-70% of the purchase price to Amazon (or another retailer), 100% of it (minus a small fee for their operational costs) will go straight to me. I don't have my store there fully set up yet, but you can check out what's there and give me a follow, if you'd like.

https://marketplace.curios.com/creators/kpotter-BKKN9Q

In addition, I found a new platform to host my newsletter called Substack, which has the added benefit of combining the features of a reader/writer-centric social media platform and a subscription platform like Patreon.

Now, don't let that part worry you. My newsletter will always be free. But for those who would like to support me with a paid subscription to Substack, you'll be able to be part of what I hope will become an active, thriving community with live chat, as well as being the home of my own sort of "mini-Kindle Unlimited" where you'll be able to read all of my work as long as you're a subscriber. There's also going to be a premium subscription for those who would like to actively participate in the creation of my forthcoming books in the future.

Now for the weird part. Or maybe not so weird, now that I think about it. Because this newsletter hasn't been active for so long, Substack won't let me just add you as a free subscriber there. So here's a form you can use to subscribe to my Substack, if you'd like to continue hearing from me:

Now, as I said at the outset, no hard feelings if you've decided you don't want to hear from me anymore. I freely admit it has been a very long time and I've probably broken your trust more than once at this point.

But if you're willing, I would love to have you along as I continue my author journey into the unknown. Thank you so much for sticking with me through all of this. God bless you, and I hope to see you soon on Substack.

Kevin Potter The Val-Harra Saga Demons & Dragons Press