STOP PRESS! 'SURFACING, A MEMOIR' PUBLISHED AT LAST!

When I think about my blog these days, I have a sense of dissatisfaction with it.  I seem to have spent a lot of the last year or so dithering - starting to write fiction but never really finishing any of it to my satisfaction, promising a recovery book that then doesn't materialise, having panic attacks...  Also, I haven't written on here nearly as much as I used to, so I feel that there has ceased to be much sense of continuity or coherence to the blog.

But from now on I am going to be more focused.  And, as the lovely David just commented on my last post, I am going to remember to befriend myself. Because for all my shortcomings, I write this blog with a good and genuine intent, of helping others who have suffered emotional distress to find a way to wellness.  Even if they increasingly have to sift back through the years to find some useful information. 

And I have finally published my recovery book!  I didn't end up publishing the eight thousand word version that I said I was going to in my last post though.  It would have been such a waste of the lovely cover that Briony from Goldust Design created for me, right back at the end of last summer.  This version is forty thousand words (about two thirds the length of 'Surviving Schizophenia').  It's from one of my previous drafts, but with the most boring bits edited out.  It really is hard writing a memoir when nothing much has happened to me in the last few years.  But hopefully it explains some of the things that have enabled me to move on with my life and it may prove to be useful to other people.  I hope so.

It's called, 'Surfacing, a Memoir' and it mostly is memoir, but there is a section at the end (about ten thousand words long) which is a more straightforward recovery manual.  Just in case anybody can't be bothered to read through the memoir bit and draw their own conclusions as to what helped. 

So, finally I have done what I set out to do, years ago, just after I finished Surviving.  I always had a sense that I should have written more about the nuts and bolts of recovery, and now I have.  I have put down pretty much everything I can think of that might help and I have tried to make it as readable as possible.  I am almost certain that I couldn't have done more - not at this point in time anyhow.

I'll link to the book on here as soon as it is approved by Amazon, which should happen in the next day or so.  And I'll do the whole Twitter and Facebook thing too (I have shied away from self-publicity recently, but the sad fact is that nobody else is going to blow my trumpet for me so I might as well get on and do it myself).

A new book out - how exciting!