I’ve been tweaking my book covers, so here they are anew! Available at https://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/evacaye and http://www.amazon.com/Eva-Caye/e/B009F50NF8 although it will be a day or so before the new covers show up on Amazon.  And it might take some time before I can get the sliding bookshelf here to match!

Evan’s Ladies consists of four novellas between books six and seven of the To Be Sinclair series.  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/317944 has several file formats; http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00CX76ZC0 is the direct Amazon link.

Science, sex, sorrow, solidarity, scandal, sympathy, and sense deprivation are hallmarks of this add-on novel to the To Be Sinclair series! Prince Evan Sinclair may be a brilliant stargate scientist, but his love life has soared to incredible heights and plunged to unbelievable depths. Who will stay by his side forever?

Is true love more than attraction? More than compatibility? More than fascination? More than friendship? Prince Evan Sinclair finds out the hard way, with highs beyond high and lows beyond low!

These four novellas chronologically take place between Loyalty and Nobility, books six and seven of the To Be Sinclair series.

Part I: The Cremian Dance

Part II: Good Enough

Part III: Breathe

Part IV: Treasure Your Words

Note: this book describes sexual situations

Since LOYALTY (book six) just went live last week, I thought I’d share my author pages for people to find everything quickly:

http://www.amazon.com/Eva-Caye/e/B009F50NF8
http://www.smashwords.com/profile/view/evacaye

My main blog is http://evacaye.blogspot.com/

The saying goes, “Write what you know.”  I am an author who has suffered depression most of my life, though I was long unaware of it.  After being diagnosed and treated for it these past ten years, I believe I can now speak with some authority, though I do not have a degree in health sciences.

Here are some authors who have suffered depression (by no means a definitive list):  Samuel Johnson, John Keats, William Blake, Edgar Allen Poe, Charles Dickens, John Stuart Mill, Hans Christian Anderson, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, Guy de Maupassant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, William James, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, William Faulkner, William Carlos Williams, Sylvia Plath, Winston Churchill, T. S. Elliot, Anne Sexton, Agatha Christie, Tennessee Williams, Hunter S. Thomson, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., J. D. Salinger, Woody Allen, Anne Rice, Bob Dylan, Amy Tan, J. K. Rowling.

Just looking over the list will likely give you plenty of ideas on some possible ‘causes’ of depression.  Born in dire poverty?  Orphaned?  Alcoholic parents?  Horrific diseases?  Lost loves?  Brutal and lingering post-traumatic stress from wars?  The pervasive abrasion of a culture of hate on a sensitive soul?  Political exile?  Loss of religious faith, or faith in any institution at all?  A tragic accident taking years of recovery?

Regardless of the causes of depression, I feel there are two specific reasons why writing and depression seem to go hand-in-hand.  First, what other legal methods can tortured human beings pursue to release horrific burdens and devastating offenses to their soul?  Very few.  Joseph Conrad’s vivid atmospheres were painted with the gloom and pessimism of his subjective life, like many of the authors mentioned above.  William Blake’s poems not only burgeoned with mystical symbolism, he infused many of his personal beliefs in elusive allegories, chock-full of rebellious notions on the authoritarian attitudes of science, religion, and even of marriage laws, fueled by mystical visions and a childless marriage.  And who could deny that any philosopher’s views of how life is, or how it is supposed to be, are based directly upon the inconsistencies they see around them, trying to organize them to make sense, once and for all?

Writers have things to say, not all of them pretty, but nevertheless they feel an internal pressure to expose their insights.  And writers suffering depression, daily clawing their way out of the maelstrom, battling demons in what I dub The Silent War, must acknowledge their existence, must make their mark, lest they be swallowed up by the darkness with no hope to claw their way out.  This leads to the second reason being an author is so often associated with depression, and I am uncertain how many other authors with depression will resonate to it, but it is the only understanding I feel I have personally made that I’ve seen nowhere else.

I think of it as The Paradox.  The expression ‘mind over matter’ tends to make you think of telekinesis, hugely regarded as a scientific impossibility, so most people do not analyze the expression for meaning.  Yet, is that not what living in a body is about?  You think, “I’m thirsty,” and you get up and head for the kitchen.  Your thoughts drive your will, and your body usually obeys.  Our minds command our bodies in subtle and surprising ways, too.  The Placebo Effect springs to mind, but consider this — if someone were to tell you that your best-beloved has just been killed in some tragic way, you may be in a bit of shock at first, but the tears will start, you may drop to your knees, and you may suffer a depressive episode that lasts months to years.

The Mind-Over-Matter-Over-Mind Paradox doesn’t stop there.  Think of every human-created item you possess, the house you live in, your society, religion, and government.  They were all once simply ideas.  Humans use their minds to control their environments all the time, whether they be direct physical environments, political environments, or psychosocial environments.  If you are not perfectly content with all those environments, the disappointments niggle at your mind.  You may disapprove of many things that offend your soul.  And some changes might do more than offend you; living in a war zone can produce profound psychological and nervous damage.  Shell-shock, PTSD, or even knowing yourself to be a warrior in The War on Drugs (on either side!) affects you physically from psychological stresses that can build up to actual nervous system disorders.

This is what I believe happened to me:  I worked in an environment in which I pushed myself every day to be ‘on my toes’, ready to react to confrontation or combative situations at every moment.  From this vantage of time and understanding, I personally feel as if I kept my body pumped with adrenaline for seven hours straight, every day.  Adrenaline triggers the fight-or-flight response, for perhaps 20 minutes of explosive action, and it does not get metabolized all that quickly.  Forcing myself to live on adrenaline for so many years, forcing myself to achieve X, Y, and Z despite my depression, I’m sure it will come as no surprise that I had a nervous breakdown.  Utter alpha-female superbrain egotist that I was, I spent 1 1/2 years off work and tried it again for another 2 1/2 years, which culminated in a second nervous breakdown.

This is what depression is like for me:  I force myself out of bed every day and do the utmost minimum maintenance in life.  If I have energy to spare, I sit with my computer to distract myself from the maelstrom.  If I have energy to spare beyond that, I do housework or yard work.  The way I determine whether I have that kind of energy is if I have not dropped a plate or glass, and if I can stand and walk without wobbling.  Let me assure you, nervous breakdowns are PHYSICAL.  I could not watch TV or ride in a car with my eyes open for six months because the moving images would nauseate me.  And not only was this all caused by not taking care of my depression, it has exacerbated my depression to horrific proportions.

I recently watched a documentary on mind science in which one scientist stated the average adult’s body voltage was 50-100 millivolts, whereas people suffering severe depression have readings as low as 5-7.  I did not doubt that statement at all.  Imagine waking up from a general anesthetic after surgery, when the nurse urges you to cough to avoid pneumonia.  It takes a great effort of will.  Not only that, you cannot perceive anything beyond a few feet from your body; it’s all ‘white noise’.  Now, imagine every day is like that.

What happens then?  You get stuck in your mind.  You try to move, you try to tell your body to move, and it doesn’t.  Your thoughts spiral:  What’s wrong with me?  Why can’t I do anything?  Since you are the authority on your life, and since we are programmed to think there must be a cause to everything, you end up focusing on all the most terrible things that have ever happened to you or that you have ever done, because nothing good could have caused this situation.  There is no logic to this, naturally, just the human need to explain things away.

So you cry.  Some people cry because they cannot escape their guilty thoughts, no matter how small.  I would cry because I could not figure out what was wrong.  For a period of about two years, I figured I simply had a brain tumor and would keel over someday.  After those two years, I realized that must not be the problem, for I would have been dead long before.  The problem is that depression is a nervous system disorder, plain and simple, whether it be caused by environment, trauma, or that mind/matter paradox wreaking its devastation upon you.

You cry because of all the things you want to do, but you don’t have the energy.  You cry because you feel worthless because you cannot do anything, for we are raised to define ourselves by what we can get done, what we can achieve, not for some inherent goodness of our existence.  You cry because you realize you have no more friends, because you’ve turned down all their advances, all their requests to go here and do that, because all you want to do is lie in the darkness because even lights and colors are painful to interpret, much less doing things in a moving environment.  You crave input, yet you fear input because the overstimulation of your raw, weak nerves makes you miss what people say, or stumble over things you didn’t perceive, and they ask if you are drunk or sick or just don’t like them anymore because your behavior is embarrassing them.

Ah, but the computer!  The computer is your perfect companion.  It is within your perceptual zone.  It takes little effort to use.  You can control how much input it gives you.  You can read a sentence three times if it takes you that long to process the information.  You can avoid videos if the images move too fast.  You can avoid bright, flashy websites, and if you are interested in such a website, you can take an hour to read one page.  You can use your tiny ounce of energy to do productive things.  For example, you can write.

You can write at your own pace!  You can look over something you wrote three days ago, and rewrite it!  You can save every version if you wish, or trash all the old versions!  You can edit your manuscript a thousand times!  You can improve upon your work, every time you re-read it!  If you are a self-published author of ebooks, you can even upload your newest versions, any time you want!

You can even… *the words whisper themselves* earn money.  You have probably lost your job by now, so that appeal is undeniable.  And you have things to say, important things burgeoning out of that black pit of despair, especially because you’ve figured out a thousand things about your life and your past, though you’ve not yet figured out the depression.  Those things you would say, the distillations of your history and experience and spirit and observations, may even help someone someday.

You can even craft them into a story magnificent beyond your own paltry, inexplicable, down-trodden life.  You can imagine worlds and people and lives of such richness, they would blind you in your current limited perceptual matrix.  You can live as many lives as you can create, and ignore being stuck in a body that won’t do what you demand of it.

You can write stories THAT MATTER.  You can MAKE A DIFFERENCE in someone’s life.  You can be PRODUCTIVE ONCE MORE and earn a living, no matter how small.  You can be a WORTHY HUMAN BEING again.  You can be AN AUTHOR.

When your mind can nominally control your body, as in depression, you have to turn away from the sucking maelstrom and reach for life once more.  When you are inspired to write, you can use your thimble of energy to reach for vast universes, promulgate them, call yourself an author, and feel like you are living a normal life.  The most brutal part of being an author is the rejection, the apathy of others, and the criticism, but to reach for life once more, in whatever form your imagination may take, makes it all worthwhile when you see you have made a sale.  And to get a letter from a fan or a five-star review is like getting a brand new life.   To someone out there, you exist, you are worthy, and you have made a difference.

It will take me a long time to revamp this website, but for now, here are my newest book covers (for the four books already out; books 5-8 are in various stages of editing):

Those of you who have read my blog understand how Miz OCD, the editor-in-my-brain, takes over on occasion.  She’s given me a heckuva ride this week!  The issue:  since I have 7 (8) books in the To Be Sinclair series, she insists that every book be formatted exactly the same.  So all I’ve done this week is reformat mss for consistency!  If you have already purchased a Kindle version, please be sure to re-download it for the new format.

Updated versions of my first two books, as well as my newly published third book, FEALTY, are up!  Please buy them and leave a review — an author can never get enough reviews!

In order, they are:

DIGNITY:  http://www.amazon.com/DIGNITY-To-Be-Sinclair-ebook/dp/B0093NW9BI

MAJESTY:  http://www.amazon.com/MAJESTY-To-Be-Sinclair-ebook/dp/B009QNKSD6

FEALTY:  http://www.amazon.com/FEALTY-To-Be-Sinclair-ebook/dp/B00AI01W9U

In addition, I’ve uploaded them to Smashwords so you can download them to Nook, Sony, iPad, and just about every other device, as well as Kindle!

DIGNITY:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/263198

MAJESTY:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/245347

FEALTY:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/263201

And, last but NOT LEAST!  I have uploaded the first two books to CreateSpace, waiting on proof copies in the mail.  They should be available for purchase as 6 x 9 softbound print books (about the size of a regular hardbound) within a week, or at least by Christmas!  Here are the title numbers, and you can be sure I’ll squee all over FB and Twitter when they are ready to order:

DIGNITY:  4033815

MAJESTY:  4051060

I would put up the number for FEALTY, but I need to get a couple of reviews on Amazon so I can put them on the book cover I’ve designed. So please, purchase FEALTY and leave me a review!

Whew, I’m tired! Still, I’ve basically put up three books in three formats within four months. If I keep going like this, I’ll have all 8 books done within a year, now that I know all the fiddly things you have to do to reformat for different versions! Come on, peeps, give me a Merry Christmas and buy some books!

I have to admit, I do not understand why starting a new novel drives me to drop everything else in my life I possibly can.  I have always considered “obsessive-compulsive” to be an interesting combination of moods.

Note, please, that I did not call them emotions.  The obsession is some kind of mental faculty, a curiosity so strong that you actively think of ways to rearrange your life as efficiently as possible so you can focus on the goal, understanding.  The compulsion is some kind of spiritual faculty, a force from deep within your soul that pushes you to move beyond exhaustion and reason to accomplish the deed.  Neither are emotions.

No, the emotions come into play while immersed in the task.  I write a particularly clever phrase, and I am thrilled with it, imagining how impressed people will be once they read it.  I write a heart-wrenching scene, and I cry along with the characters.  I write about revenge, and pour all my petty vindictive thoughts into selecting just the right, cutting word for the touch.

Is it no wonder so many writers have mental health problems? We are so heavily invested in understanding imaginary lives that it is difficult to learn to pour out the words, close the (computer) door, and walk away into our ‘real’ lives.  I still haven’t learned to do it.  I will find myself seeing the visions, the interactions between the characters, experiencing their emotions as I try to understand their motivations, and completely forget what I was trying to do in real life.  I don’t take twenty-minute showers because I’m trying to relax; I simply forget how many times I’ve shampooed.   I can’t even trust myself to boil tea bags anymore, having cleaned burnt tea bags off the bottom of a completely-evaporated saucepan before.

So, why do I do it?  At this point, I almost feel as if I am ‘tapping’ into parallel dimensions, ‘connecting’ with real people having real problems, and ‘offering’ them my support by trying to help them figure out how to get out of their situations, like a best friend who cares so much she will give all her energy to help them out.  Scribing their lives, acknowledging that they have meaning and that their lessons are valuable to others, is the greatest gift I can give them.  ”Yes, you are important.  Yes, your struggles will not go unnoticed.  Yes, your life matters.”

I write compulsively because, as if I were their guardian angel, I must help them think things through.  I must guide them to a greater understanding of their world.  I must be their advocate.  I must love them, praise them, and value their spiritual growth.

If I could ask an omnipotent being any question, it would be, “Is imagination the only way to access those parallel worlds?”

I have decided to set up my book to be Print-On-Demand with CreateSpace!  DIGNITY should be available soon, and here is the preview to MAJESTY:  https://www.createspace.com/Preview/1111316

The toughest part is getting the entire book cover designed, such as back page and spine.  That’s one reason why I have always appreciated ebooks!

The pricing on both is going to be tough.  117,000 word novels cannot be priced like an average paperback from a traditional publisher with massive resources.  And, if you buy them from Amazon, the royalties are mere pennies, whereas if you buy them directly off the CreateSpace catalog, the author at least gets a dollar or so out of it!  It’s heartbreaking, yet that’s the price you pay for a physically printed book.  I hope I’ll be able to afford my own copies for family and friends!

Eva

I’m so happy to have finally uploaded MAJESTY!  Even after Tracy Seybold’s final edit, I found a few things to add.  Someone who reviewed DIGNITY ‘had a quibble’ with the state of technology on my planet, so I added a section explaining the prevalent technologies just for her!

Here are the newest links for you to explore:

MAJESTY on Smashwords:  https://www.smashwords.com/books/view/245347

Or on Amazon:  http://www.amazon.com/MAJESTY-To-Be-Sinclair-ebook/dp/B009QNKSD6

A guest post I did for Indies Unlimited, called “Is She Geeking Out AGAIN?”  http://www.indiesunlimited.com/2012/10/14/is-she-geeking-out-again/#more-27923

A fabulous review of DIGNITY by the exquisite Diane Nelson:  http://sandinmyshoesreviews.wordpress.com/science-fiction-romance/

As well as this unexpected five-star review!  http://hampton-networks.com/review-dignity-book-one-of-eva-cayes-to-become-sinclair-series/#comment-1514

What I loved about that last review is that she found the Easter egg!  So many people have not!

You can also now see how much time I’ve been wasting on Goodreads and Reddit.  A funny thing about Reddit — I wrote a short post called “True Love!” on my blog, and I’ve had well over twice as many views as all my other blog posts combined after posting the link on r/Bacon!  How funny is that!  Here is that link:

http://evacaye.blogspot.com/2012/10/true-love.html

I hope you all enjoy MAJESTY!  Please leave a review on Amazon for it!  Thank you so very much!

I’m so happy things are starting to pick up for me!  First, my interview at Author Quiz went live on September 29th.  It is at http://authorquiz.blogspot.com/2012/09/eva-caye-author-of-to-be-sinclair-series.html and I thank you, Charles, for such intriguing questions!

Second, several friends have told me that the photo from World Con was too blurry.  I agreed, so we did something about it!   Here are two new photos of me they took that I can send along with new posts and interviews:

Then, I opened up my email to find I have two new items coming out.  The magnificent Louise Wise at Wise Words – Book Blogger will be posting my guest post on October 4th.  Called “World-Building: Visualizing the Future”, it was written specifically for her October focus on science fiction.  Her website is:

http://www.louisewise.com/

Then I was notified that one of my regular blog posts would have a spot on October 2nd at Digital Book Today!  Thank you, Anthony Wessel!  Please see http://digitalbooktoday.com/  for my blog entry titled “Geeking Out on the Thesaurus”, which has had more hits than any of my other blogs!  I guess people like to hear about geeks getting OCD-freaky more than they like to hear about why I think science fiction romance is a superlative genre!

In addition, on Monday October 8, on Shah Fazli’s Spotlight Show on Facebook.  Shah interviews an author LIVE while using only one Facebook post.  Anyone can attend the ‘live’ interview and post questions during the interview!  It will be at 2 p.m. EST, and I believe all you have to do is ‘like’ the Interpreter Literary Group page in order to chat with the author during the interview.  That page can be found at: www.facebook.com/groups/shahsight/

I’m having a blast, but I sure hope all this promotion starts to translate into real book sales!  MAJESTY will be out next week, so perhaps that will get me more exposure.  MAJESTY is perhaps 90% science fiction to 10% romance, and it is THE pivotal book in the series.  That should help my Amazon rankings!

I would love to hear from more readers, so please feel free to leave comments or email me at evacaye <at> gmail.com — and thank you so very much!