TAHernandez

Hello! How is everyone? I know it seems like I've been absent for a long time, but I do still lurk around here pretty regularly so I can see all the pretty artwork. I just wanted to give an update on life the last 2 years, but I'll try to stick to the highlights.

2018

• Started writing Survivors of PEACE, the last book in my dysopian/thriller Secrets of PEACE trilogy
• Got accepted to the 1-year advanced standing MSW program (master of social work) at Utah State University. There was much rejoicing.
• Graduated from Utah State University in May with my Bachelor's degree in social work.
• Three days after graduation, started grad school.
• Endured an academically grueling 6 weeks as I completed some of the required summer courses for my graduate program. Was fairly certain I was going to die, but survived somehow.
• Had a fun summer, lots of family time and camping. Was placed at a local middle school for my MSW practicum and assigned to the best, most supportive supervisor ever.
• Started school again in the fall with 15 credit hours AND putting in about 18-20 hours/week at my practicum AND trying to be a good mom AND trying to keep up with art and writing stuff for my own mental and emotional well-being.
  Guys.
  Grad school is no joke. Seriously.
  That entire program, but especially that fall semester, is the hardest thing I have ever done by choice in my life. We had one class that combined learning about DSM-5 diagnoses with learning different therapeutic theories and approaches and it was so. freaking. hard. Many tears were shed. Every single day, I wondered what the hell I had gotten myself into. I loved my practicum at the middle school, but I was so new to being a therapist and felt so completely inadequate. How was I supposed to help these kids when I was barely hanging on in my own life and there was so much I didn't know? This semester pushed me so hard, and I came out of it a completely different person.
• Finished and published Survivors of PEACE. I'm still really happy with how the book turned out. It feels like a super fitting conclusion for the series and allowed me to explore the aftermath of the previous books in a way I feel other dystopian books/novels often don't. And a lot of Zira's professional and personal journey in that book reflects what I was going through at the time with my own professional journey (which of course became personal, because how could it not?) It felt good to give the characters a proper sendoff and move on from that chapter of my life to work on new projects.
• Finished all my final projects and papers and took a much needed winter break.

2019

• Started a new semester with much anticipation and dread. Was pleasantly surprised to find that the workload was much lighter and more manageable in all of my classes. We still had 15 credits and practicum, and one of those classes was pretty intense, but the other classes were more discussion-based and not so crazy. And I think all the growth I did the previous semester really helped, even just in boosting my confidence and letting me know I could do this.
• Started to feel more competent in my practicum, made a lot of good progress with clients and felt like even though I didn't have all the answers, I was getting a better sense of my own therapeutic approach and knew how to implement that with the kids I saw.
• Started rewriting an old fantasy short story I've had sitting around, titled Calico Thunder Rides Again. It turned into a novelette and then turned into a novella. And now it's a novel, so, you know...that's awesome. I've only rewritten the stupid thing a dozen times. In all seriousness though, I really do love where the story is going and I think I've almost got it nailed down now. It's fantasy and it's set on a magical traveling circus in an alternate version of 1920s America. The main character is a cowboy who inherited the circus from his father, and he has to pay back some of his father's old debts to a dangerous mobster before time runs out.
• Started studying for the social work clinical licensure exam, which is the test you have to take and pass in order to get your license and be able to practice. In other words, if you want a job, you have to pass this test. Just a couple of things about that test though:
  1) It costs like $450 by the time you pay for pre-approval, the test itself, the actual license, etc. And that's not counting whatever study materials you do or don't purchase on your own.
  2) The test is 170 questions pulled randomly from a bank of like 500 or 1000 or something ridiculous like that. Only 150 of those questions actually count; the extra 20 are just questions they're testing. You could get a bunch of great questions, or you could get a bunch of hard ones you don't know. It's a gamble. Basically you just have to know all the things.
  3) If you don't pass the test, you have to wait 90 days before you can take it again. And you have to pay for it again.
  So, you know. No pressure.
• Two days before I'm supposed to take the licensure exam, on the day of my 10th wedding anniversary, my Grammie suffers a major heart attack and passes away. This is the woman who pulled me through the lowest point of my life, who literally saved my life and who has been one of my biggest supporters, even when I felt like everyone else had turned their back on me. Who rooted for and supported my husband and I and our marriage when everyone else was saying we'd made a mistake. Who has gone to bat for me more times than I can count and has very bluntly called me out on my bullshit when I needed it. So I was devastated. I still am, honestly. It sucks and I hate it, and every time I start to think I'm okay and learning to accept what happened, I'll just get really sad and angry all over again. It was just so sudden and it feels really freaking unfair.
• I went to take my licensure exam. It was scheduled early in the morning, so I stayed with my brother in Salt Lake. Instead of getting a good night's rest and studying some last things, I stayed up super late with him talking and watching movies and binging on pizza and cookies. I just didn't care anymore. So what if I wasted all that money taking this test? So what if I had to take it again? So what if I threw away all of my own hard work and all the support I'd gotten from other people to get me here? I just didn't care. It was super selfish, but I honestly just was not in a great place.
• I don't know if I just got easy questions on the test or if my complete apathy towards passing actually helped me do better, but I got through the exam super fast and passed it with an 85% (you have to get at least 70%). Honestly, I think it was both. I don't like to get into religion much online, but I genuinely wonder if God cut me some slack and gave me a break on some of those questions, even though I was super pissed at Him for taking my Grammie away from me. Drove home. Had to pull over at one point to scream and cry and curse at the world, but I made it.
• Started taking all my finals for school two days later. Still did not give two craps about anything and totally didn't participate in our group final, so I got docked major points for that. But I had a good enough grade in the class overall that it was fine and I still passed and graduated.
• Moved to southern Utah (St George area) for better work opportunities. The area has been growing a lot over the last few years, and there are a lot of jobs in social services working with kids, which is all I've ever wanted to do. My husband had a job before we even moved here and is making more money than he could have at his old employer, but it has taken me a lot more time to get hired than I anticipated. Two weeks ago, though, I did accept an offer from a local agency that works with kids who are involved in DCFS for whatever reason, whether because of abuse or neglect or foster care placement or adoption out of foster care or whatever. So it combines the child welfare stuff I've always been really interested in doing with the one-on-one therapy stuff I think I'm better at (as opposed to doing groups or more community-based social work). Basically it's perfect and I'm super excited about it. I haven't actually started working yet because I'm still waiting for my background check to clear, and then it will be a gradual start with part time hours at first while DCFS catches up and starts referring more kids to our agency now that they know we have 2 additional therapists (me and this other lady they hired). But it's going to be a good fit, I think, and I'm really excited about it.
• 1 month after we moved into our new house down here, we found out the owner is selling the place. They have to let us stay until our lease is up at the end of May 2020, but that doesn't give us quite as much time as we were hoping for to save for and buy a house. Once I get my job and the house is actually sold, we'll be able to better determine what we're going to do, but right now we are aiming for potentially moving up our timetable a little bit and trying to find a house to buy next year. This is super exciting to me (I hate renting and I just want a place of my own that's stable and where I can keep pets and do what I want without landlords and other people bothering me) but also a little scary. So we'll see how that goes.
• Calico Thunder Rides Again is nearing completion? I think? I just sent it out to my CP and more beta readers for a second review, so we'll see what kind of feedback I get back and how long it takes me to make those revisions, but I am still shooting for a late 2019 release date.

Hey everyone. The holidays are coming up, and for the past few years, I've always tried to participate in at least one Secret Santa art exchange type of thing either here on deviantArt or elsewhere because A) it's super duper fun and B) I love drawing other people's characters. This year, I want to do something a little different to give other creators a chance to win some cool art of their characters and (hopefully) help me grow my audience a little more as an indie author. So I'll be holding an art giveaway!  You can enter from now until November 5th, and I'll be choosing winners 2 different ways. (We'll get to that in a second.) Art will be completed and delivered to the winners on December 25th. I'm not entirely sure yet what kind of art I'll be doing for these prizes (fullbody, portrait, with or without backgrounds, etc.)--a lot of that will probably just depend on the characters. I do want them to be nice, fully-rendered pieces, though. And lately I've been kind of partial to drawing portraits, so that's a strong possibility. Moving on--here's how to enter.

Option One: Submit Your Character

As an artist, I love having choices and want to be able to draw subjects that interest me most. So the first way to enter is to submit your character to me for consideration, and I'll choose the one I want to draw most. You can submit up to three. Include all relevant details about the character's appearance in your submission. Reference images are fine, but recognize that characters will be drawn in my own style. I also like to have some information about their personality, but please don't write me an entire novel. You can submit your characters to me by sending me a note here, a DM on Twitter, or using the contact form on my website. To help you increase your chances of winning, here's a non-exhaustive list of things I like and don't like drawing. Looking through my gallery will also probably give you a sense of what I enjoy drawing and what I'm best at.

Likes: Sci-fi/fantasy characters, wings, colorful things, characters with interesting personalities (obviously very subjective...sorry)

Dislikes/can't draw well: Really dull colors, lots of black clothing, older characters, mecha, furries

Option Two: Raffle

Because the first option is so subjective and I want to give everyone a chance to win, I'm also doing a raffle through Rafflecopter. Here is the blog post on my website you need to comment on if you want to get credit for that entry. Each item you complete gets you an entry, so the more things you do, the better chance you have at winning. You can submit a character AND enter the raffle (and you're encouraged to do so), but you can only win one or the other. If I choose to draw your character because I like them and you end up winning the raffle, you will be disqualified from the raffle and a new winner will be chosen.

And that's all there is to it! I hope you guys have fun with this, because I'm super excited about it. Best of luck to everyone who enters. If you have any questions, just let me know.

Hey everyone. It's been a while, so here's a random update on what I've been doing for the past few months.

Honestly...it's been a little rough, and I've been feeling kind of down lately. Some of you may remember a few months ago I got my practicum placement at a local domestic violence agency and I was really excited to go there. I only ended up getting even more excited after I met with them and learned more about what I would be doing there. Then in late April, I found out that I might not be able to go there after all. Because of their grant funding, they can't take on interns or hire anyone who has a misdemeanor on their record, no matter what it is. I know I've talked a little bit on here about some of the problems my husband and I went through right after we were married--or at least I did right after I joined deviantArt, when those issues were still pretty recent and had a greater effect on my life. I won't go into all the details now because it's a really long story, but basically my parents weren't super excited about me getting married so young, and in hindsight, sure, I'll give them that. But more importantly, my dad didn't want me marrying a Mexican man, which is obviously completely out of line. After we got married, I was kind of stuck in the middle and there was a lot of arguing on both sides. My husband and I had an argument late one night and the neighbors called the police, which resulted in them placing a no-contact order between us. We decided to move into his parents house--together--because I just couldn't go back to my parents house. Also we were young and stupid--I know that. Anyways, my parents found out we were together, called the police, they came and arrested both of us, and I ended up pleading guilty to charge of Resisting or Obstructing a Police Officer, even though I didn't actually resist or obstruct anything. I was 19 years old, I'd never been in any kind of trouble before, and I had lost my entire support system, so when they told me to plead guilty I just went with it. My husband did 3 month in jail before being turned over to Immigration and Customs Enforcement to be deported. We were able to bail him out of immigration detention and spent the next few years fighting his deportation, which sucked. During the time he was in jail, I cut ties with most of my old friends and everyone in my family except for my Grammie and Grampie, who were nothing but supporting and loving throughout the whole ordeal. Even with their help, I just became extremely depressed and basically only ever left my room to go to work. Most days I thought about killing myself.

Over the years, I've managed to heal and repair relationships with my family. My dad and I will probably never be as close as we once were, and I'm always going to wonder if he loves my children less than he loves my brothers' because they are the half-Mexican grandchildren he told me he didn't want. But I've mostly moved on and put it behind me. I'm okay. Most days, I'm even appreciative of what I went through then because it made me the person I am today, and I'm proud of that person. Those experiences are part of what made me decide to become a social worker, so I think I went through all of that for a reason. But then things happen sometimes, like the practicum assignment falling though, and it feels like my past is coming back to haunt me. It brings up all those old feelings of anger and hopelessness and abandonment from what was the lowest, darkest point of my life. It shouldn't bother me this much after all this time, but when it's still having an impact on my life, preventing me from doing something I was so looking forward to--it just really sucks.

My professors have been really kind and supportive through the whole process, even though this whole thing has made extra work for them and means that I've basically just wasted their time placing me somewhere I can't even go. The people at the domestic violence agency were really understanding and kind as well. I sat in the supervisor's office crying for like fifteen minutes when I had to go talk to her about the background check issues and she just sat there and listened and was really nice about the whole thing. So that made things a little easier. I ended up interviewing with a different agency that works with people with disabilities and will probably end up going there. I'm sure it will be great, I'll love my clients, I'll get the experience I need, etc. But working in that field honestly was not something I ever really had a strong desire to do--not like I did for working with families and children, which I would have been doing at the domestic violence agency. I'm trying to be positive about it and hopefully by the time the semester starts, I'll be more excited, but right now I'm still just trying not to be disappointed.

In other news, a different professor in the social work department hired me as a research assistant for the summer, along with 3 other students from my cohort and 3 of the students who just graduated and are now starting the Master's program. We all got assigned to an individual project to work on, most of which involve writing up actual research papers (the kind you see in academic journals) based on the research students in the social work program have done as part of the Transforming Communities Initiative. Mine is on religious help-seeking as it relates to domestic violence. I'm not a huge fan of research stuff but it's actually been pretty interesting so far and it's definitely going to be a good thing to have to add to my application for grad school.

My husband and I are planning to take a vacation to California next month, which I'm super excited about. We're going to stay in Vegas for a couple days, maybe visit some Fallout: New Vegas locations (because we are nerds like that), then go through La Quinta, CA where I lived as a kid/young teenager. Then we'll probably go to San Diego, LA, drive up the coast to San Fransisco, spend a couple days in each place. It should be fun. The ocean is my favorite and my husband has never seen it, so I'm excited to go with him. I'm also prepping for the release of Renegades of PEACE...or at least I was. I kind of gave up on it the last couple of weeks because I've just been frustrated with life in general, but I need to get over myself and just get back to work. The cover and blurb are almost done and then I just have some copy-editing and formatting to do and it should be ready.

Confession: I haven't done much of anything since March 21st besides play Mass Effect Andromeda. Fortunately, I haven't had much homework in my classes lately, so that's been nice. Now that I'm done with the game, I just wanted to take a minute to write down some of my thoughts about the game for anyone who is interested.

Play time: 67 hours
Completion: 91%
Overall rating: 9/10 (I can definitely see myself playing this again)

And now for some specifics, first the bad and then the good.

Things I didn't like:

• Character creator: My biggest complaint is about the character creator. It was so limiting for such a huge, in-depth RPG. When you compare it to something like Dragon Age: Inquisition or Fallout 4 or even previous Mass Effect games, it wasn't quite up to the standards I expected. At all. It was underwhelming and I hated not having options to change out specific facial features or adjust them individually very much. And this is a minor thing, but if you're going to let us pick unnatural hair colors, give us ALL the unnatural hair colors. They have a ton of different shades of brown and very limited shades of blue and red and some others. I went into it kind of hoping for a dark blue-black hair color for my Ryder, but they don't have that. That all being said, I still managed to create a Ryder who looked pretty darn good. Her name is Marko and I ended up getting really attached to her by the end, so maybe you'll see a portrait of her soon.
• Facial animations Since release, the internet has been complaining about some of the facial animations, and yeah, they could have been better in some places. I didn't think it was a game-breaking issue, but I did wish they had put a little more time into that. I was more annoyed by the lip-syncing issues. It didn't happen often, but it was enough that I kind of wanted to shake my fist at the screen a few times. Hopefully the game will get updates later so that some of those issues are resolved.
• Asari faces: While we're on the subject of faces, can we talk about the fact that almost all of the Asari NPCs looked exactly the same? Aside from Peebee, they all had the same face as Lexi, the tempest doctor (with different colors and maybe a few other variations, but still obviously the same face). At first I thought/hoped I was just being paranoid, but at one point there was a cutscene where about a dozen Asari walked past right in the foreground and they all literally had the same face! I saw somewhere that the same was true in the original series, but I honestly don't remember that, and maybe it was just more noticeable because they all looked a lot like Lexi. And I'm fairly certain they do the same thing with the other races, but you don't notice them as much. The Asari have very human faces so it's easier to pick up on. I don't know, but still...not cool, Bioware. Not cool.
• Tedious side-quests: This is a minor thing, but some of the side-quests get tedious and feel repetitive. I always feel like I have to do everything in open world RPGs, so I'm definitely used to missions that are like, "collect x amount of this item" and "gather useless information about this thing." But I do wish there had been a few more side-quests that felt relevant to the story and had an impact on events, the world, etc. More like the mission "Dissension in the Ranks," which kind of starts out feeling like more tedious nonsense, but actually ends up being significant in the end. Not majorly significant, but enough that I didn't feel like I had wasted my time. (Oh! The quest "The Little Things That Matter" is another must-do, even though it doesn't have any major story significance.)

Spring break is over and that means I only have about 7 more weeks of school this year. Next year will be my last (at least as far as getting my bachelor's degree is concerned), so I'm finally starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. One of the most exciting part of this whole journey for me is about to begin, and today, I got to find out where I will be going to complete that journey.

Anyone who wants to get their BSW in the United States has to complete 480 internship hours at a social-work related agency in their senior year. Aside from that, I just have one other required class to take, and I'll probably end up taking one more elective in the fall so I can at least have full time hours for fall semester. This semester, the 50+ of us in my cohort have been going through the process of figuring out where to go. It's kind of a big deal and I've been simultaneously excited and wanting to puke my guts out about it for the past week or so. Today in class, our professor announced where each of us would be going. I ended up getting place at one of my top choices, CAPSA. They're a local domestic violence group that has a prominent presence in the community and does a lot of great work, and I'm super excited to be able to work there next year.

Some of you may remember me saying on multiple occasions that I really wanted to work with kids or teenagers, and that's definitely still true. Most of my practicum choices were more centered around working with that population directly (schools, DCFS, juvenile probation, etc.) I honestly wasn't even considering CAPSA at all, but when I went to their table to talk to some representatives from the agency at the practicum dinner last month, I just got a really good vibe from them and ended up listing them on my application. So it was kind of a wild card, but I think it will be a great learning experience and allow me to work with a population I hadn't really considered working with before.

In other news, the highlight of my month so far has been the general anticipation building up around Mass Effect Andromeda. I seriously can't WAIT until my copy gets here on Tuesday. I wasn't super stoked about it at first, but as more and more information has been released over the last few weeks, I've just gotten more and more excited. It looks like it's going to be excellent. I've been brainstorming names and appearances for my Ryder all week and I think I've finally narrowed it down to something I can work with. I've been trying to finish Knights of the Old Republic as well, but my laptop is dying a little more each day, so it's frustrating to even get it to turn on sometimes, and I decided I needed to prioritize my writing a little more before Andromeda comes or I'll never get anything done.

Speaking of which, I've been busy working on revisions for Renegades of PEACE. I think I finally managed to add in all the extra scenes I needed in the last draft (because I have a tendency to seriously underwrite everything the first time around), so now I've actually been able to start from the beginning and work through the story chronologically. That's been kind of interesting. I've never written a story out of order before, but Renegades was all over the place. Chapter One was literally the last thing I wrote in the first draft, and I had a lot of weird pacing and timeline issues to sort out at first. I think most of that has been taken care of and it's nice to finally be seeing the story all laid out the way I intended it to be. Someone please remind me never to write a story like that again; it's been a bit of a nightmare. Anyway, I'm hoping to finish this round of revisions this month, send it out to beta readers in April and start working on the cover, then go from there. We'll see how it goes. So far, I think I'm still on track for a July 27th release date.

That's about it from me. School, writing, art, video games, riding my motorcycle now that the weather is nice enough. Nothing too exciting, but I'm okay with that.