Well, you see, what had happened was…
Okay, it’s a long story for real. TheSecondRealm.net actually died, as in, the hosting vanished, the website went offline. For months. For maybe a year or so. Life hit hard, in that I had hit a financial level where I was donating plasma for extra money. Where my partner struggled to find a job and keep a job for a while. Where I got hired by a law firm and work completely took over my life.
Whoa, okay let’s slow down for a moment.
Hi, I’m Melissa. I’m a 35 year old indie author living in central Texas. In my previous incarnations of this website, I’ve talked candidly and openly about my mental health struggles, life changes, things that affected my career as a writer. TheSecondRealm.net held dozens of entries spanning from 2013 about my mental health struggles, my comebacks as a writer, my writing progress and process.
And now it’s all gone.
Kind of.
The Wayback Machine holds a lot of information I’m using to rebuild this website from ground zero. It’s strange to copy/paste my own writing and transform it into something new — but then again, that’s a process of my writing lately, as I edit older works and polish them up. The Second Realm Trilogy has been getting that treatment as well.
It’s kind of nice starting over.
In 2021, I ripped my life apart when I filed for divorce. I started over. I was in a transition period where I was just barely getting into fitness, where I had torn my soul apart, where life was changing so rapidly that I couldn’t hold onto anything and events slipped through my fingers like trying to hold onto water.
2022 became the Year of Fitness, as I fell in love with weightlifting and powerlifting, specifically. But while I was improving my body, my life was still in transition. I hit so many milestones I didn’t think were possible. I retired my psychiatric service dog, Shadow and learned how to not be dependent on him.
In 2023, I was hired by a law firm once I realized I had no choice but to return to the workforce to sustain myself and my household. The law firm changed my life just like weightlifting did. It ignited my love of law, and my love of working with people whose lives were also in transition and chaos.
And in 2024, 14 years after I dropped out, I went back to school.
So yeah, life has been crazy, chaotic, and busy.
Where did that leave my writing? I failed NaNoWriMo for a couple of years, and I failed to meet 50,000 words in November 2024 again. There was too much going on between working a full time job, being a full time student, and my personal life to sustain myself in an intense writing challenge like NaNoWriMo.
Out of that failure came the desire to put TheSecondRealm.net back online. It was like being thrown from the edge of a waterfall. I even had a dream about working on the website, where I had to put it online again.
So, here I am, once again.
The phoenix is a big part of my inner mental symbolism, to the point where I have tattoos planned around it. My life cycles in highs and lows — and out of those lows come new growth. New opportunities and new ways to come back. The phoenix always rises. Sometimes it just takes a little more time.
The Second Realm Trilogy never got to be finished because I was rewriting Liliana when the website went down. I dedicated myself to other projects because my divorce was too painful and the ex-husband lives in the character Atrimalous. In my healing from the divorce, I had to put the trilogy down. I got involved in other projects, as well as my fitness work, and my actual job and just… life got in the way.
The phoenix had to combust to come back. I’m not done yet. I still have a story to tell. The Shadow Assassins deserve for their story to be told.
So, like a phoenix, here I am. And here is this brand new website with some mixed old content and links to the Wayback Machine while I put everything back online.
Ready to get back on the ride? I’m ready.