Refuse To Be Weak

All his life, Atriya followed one rule.

Refuse to be weak.

Push harder.
Ignore pain.
Punish hesitation.

What didn’t make you stronger was a waste of time.

People asked why he drove himself like that.

He never answered.

Why wouldn’t you?

But something had started to interrupt him.

A thought he couldn’t crush.

And the timing couldn’t be worse.

Strength built him. Now it’s starting to question him.

Continue Atriya’s Story

Atriya’s journey through war, hierarchy, and the hidden forces shaping his path begins in the Echo Saga.

New readers can enter the story here:

or start the full book:

Curious about the rest of Kent Wayne’s worlds?


Comments

18 responses to “Refuse To Be Weak”

  1. My honest compliments! This is seriously upgraded self-advertising, it creates a stronger desire to read that book…take good care of yourself

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I’ll have to pass 99% of the kudos to my marketing person, Jes. She’s coming in with the vision, she’s read all my books, and she’s fiddling with the image generation to make sure that things look and feel right. She did say she really appreciated your compliment, and to thank you! 🙂

      Liked by 1 person

      1. I highly suspected third party assistance… Chef’s kiss to the approach😽 But it still takes making a good decision to find the person best suited to maximize the potential for what you are trying to achieve. Nobody needs to reply, take good care of yourself 🙂

        Get Outlook for Androidhttps://aka.ms/AAb9ysg

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      2. Hey Ariana, I hope you’ve been doing well. Just wanted you to know that I’ve been doing a deep dive into glycine and it seems to have a ton of promising effects. It’s not an essential amino, but our body stops synthesizing as much of it as we get older. We need it for a ton of functions, including production of collagen, immune system modulation, and sleep. In addition, if we eat a lot of meat, one of the meat-aminos, methionine, starts sucking up glycine, which can lead to a shortage. This is relevant because our food is more processed nowadays so that tends to be a bigger concern than in older eras. In older eras, folks were much better about eating nose to tail (glycine comes from collagen, comprising a little over 1/3 of it), and meat was more nutritious (glycine-rich), and/or we didn’t eat as much of it, which means less methionine to suck up glycine.

        I started taking it a couple days ago, noticed an immediate improvement in sleep and joint pain. It kind of tracks with my symptoms–my joint pain was never relegated to a single part, so I suspected there was something systemically lacking. Also, my sleep has gotten lighter over the years. Never thought the two were related, but I feel like that’s the case. These seem to be common results from anecdotes of people taking glycine.

        One of the things I like about glycine is it’s literally food, just broken down into an easier to absorb component. Also, it’s cheap. Another interesting fact about glycine is that the body can “cannibalize” its own collagen to produce glycine for other functions. The analogy that formed in my mind is that creatine is like an awesome unpaid intern–you can fire the intern, but you’re not really going to see a boost in cash to use on other stuff. Glycine is like straight-up cash. It can be boosted by selling stuff you have on hand, or it can boost and upscale existing structures.

        Obviously, take everything I’m saying with a grain of salt–I’m no doctor. That said, glycine deficiency is estimated to be between 10-40g on average. There have been studies where folks have taken over 50g for months and seen no ill effects (I think that amount supposedly had a positive benefit on schizophrenics). It’s slightly sweet, so I put it in my coffee (glycine has a pretty high heat tolerance, so it doesn’t get denatured by fresh coffee or tea. I’m noticing big differences on 18g a day, but that’s anecdotal, and, of course, it could be placebo.

        Anyways, just thought you might find this info helpful. Cheers!

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      3. Hello 🙂 I likewise hope you are doing well! This crossed my inbox while I was feverishly trying to vacuum up the glitter fall out from our Christmas tree after it was taken down. Yep. I totally know the date. I can’t even shake my own head at it, I had other priorities. Tony wasn’t on board with the removal though, told me it was “bad” and he “didn’t want” it to go down. But it has left me in the unenviable position of offering a piece of advice that is less useful and that you no doubt already have down: no matter how much you love glitter, don’t buy an artificial tree encrusted in it unless you want to add a fair bit of extra vacuuming to your cardio.

        I did a brief look at a study on the glycine, and I can see what you mean about the potential indications. I have been focused on living la vida Ornish because the bout of COVID I had a year ago left me with prediabetes, reduced eGFR, and elevated lipids. Me and COVID cannot be friends, like not ever it appears. So I had to look at this through the lens of what the manufacturing source would be. Two months of Ornish has all of my lab results normal, my A1C is finally trending down, but once you need Ornish’s reversal diet for elevated lipids, you can’t ever get off that train or your body resumes it’s march towards heart disease.

        I think the glycine does look promising based on my brief perusal, provided I can find a source that is chemically derived only or plant based, so I thank you for the recommendation! As a perimenopausal woman, acquiring muscle mass is as I understand it about the only thing I can do to successfully hope to offset what the loss of estrogen can do to my sleep, etc. So next to phytoestrogens, it’s worth taking a look at!

        I did buy your latest book, but as a heads up, probably won’t read it until the summer. Unless I can listen to an audio book while I am working out or cleaning, it’s not as much happening right now. We are already entering into negotiations for what happens in high school for Tony, and I have been busy trying to continue to heal my nervous system and reverse that pandora’s box of nasties that COVID left me with. That means sit down reading time is minimal, but look forward to getting to it. I apologize for the word bomb as always, and thanks for thinking of me with that one, it’s a helpful thing to look into. Wishing you the very best, 🙂 Ariana

        Liked by 1 person

      4. I empathize with Tony–I think of Christmas as starting after Thanksgiving and ending at New Year’s, but I definitely wish it was longer! I’ve heard in the Philippines they celebrate it for six months or so.

        No worries on the word bomb, and thanks for buying my book! It was a little bittersweet saying goodbye to Erany and Jon, but I have plans for them to make a cameo in Lucky’s astral detective noir (I think I’ve drafted around 15k words of it as of now), and I was very, very happy with how the series ended. No spoilers, but even though it’s a rough ride for Erany and Jon, I believe they are happy with how it ended as well.

        If glycine helps, let me know! I hope everything continues to get better for you! Maybe this will help, but I don’t know–I brought a tub of nutricost glycine for a little under $20, and it says it’s vegan. I estimated the amount of money I would have to spend to get the same amount of glycine from Kettle And Fire Beef Bone broth, and it was over $300, and I would be drinking like 2+ quarts of bone broth a day, so nutricost is definitely easier for me, lol!

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      5. Typically I agree on the start and end of Christmas, however I used to leave the tree up until mid to end of January (pre Tony, pre POTS, pre spinal cord injury me anyways). Now I just enjoy the lights and prioritize not letting a fixed removal date weigh on my brain. Thanks again for the recommendation, I actually have some glycine arriving today… Look forward to seeing how their story ends, and wishing you wonderful days ahead 🙂

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  2. Sadly Amazon flopped again. The link takes one to the US site and does not redirect automatically to the same product in the region of the buyer. I wonder if there’s a better link you can add – as a vendor.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. could you try this link and let me know if it works better

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      1. Couldn’t see a new link.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. My marketing person wants to do away with Amazon altogether, so hopefully we can get that in place. Thanks for the input–I’ll pass it along!

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Apparently one needs to use a service like that from booklinker.com.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Gotcha! I’ll pass it on!

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  3. I like your new site! By the way, I don’t know if it’s just me but the links on the front page, such as “Step beyond the page” didn’t work for me.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Thanks for mentioning it! I passed that on to my website/marketer Jes!

      Liked by 2 people

  4. curious about where this goes

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The story gets pretty psychedelic and existential, especially in book 4

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  5. […] ← Previous Scene […]

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