Monday 6 June 2016

When Life Imitates Art ~ An author's tale (Part I)

Sitting Pains

Imagine writing when it kills you to sit down.

When your lower back aches and throbs, feels sore. Burns.

When it feels like your bones are falling apart, hanging loose inside your skin.

Imagine having to sit in an office for eight or nine hours every weekday and then hope to go home and do a bit of writing. Then groaning because that includes more sitting. More pain and discomfort.

But you persist. You have to. You need to. You want to. Writing is what you love to do most. Plus, you're just starting your indie-author journey and want to see how it goes. Mostly, you want to spend time with your characters and see where they take you. Mukti, Jamie (Soulmates Saga), Ellie and Christian (Poison Blood Series), they're beckoning you all the time. Come with us, they whisper. Finish our stories. Without you, we don't exist...

And the thought of your beloved creations no longer existing, the adventures you'd planned for them never materialising... No, that can't be.

So you write and write and publish and Tweet and all the rest. Life finally starts making sense. Writing, maybe that's your calling after all. When you write, you don't feel thirst, hunger; you don't notice the passing of time. After nine hours at the office, you can write an average of 3,000 words every evening and it's great.

Then something happens in your personal life (see my previous posts for details) and your back pain is the least of your worries. Writer's block sets in and you can't write a sentence for months on end.

The back pain however, only gets worse. Your employer arranges for a special £2,000 chair to make you more comfortable, but it does little to ease any of your pains. Your physiotherapist thinks that your core muscles are weak, need strengthening.

Six months of physio and you still feel no better. If anything, your back hurts even more.

After three years of your GP insisting that MRI scans are rarely conducted to investigate back pain, your rheumatologist decides it's the first thing she wants to do.

The scan is for your lower back and spine, and should take only an hour, but you're in the scanner for almost three. There's an abnormality higher up, near your neck.

So they scan your brain too.

"It's an incidental finding," says your rheumatologist when you meet her to discuss the results.

A few of the discs in your spine are fractured and the majority are flat like pancakes instead of round and spongy. But you push all that to the back of your mind when you hear that you're being referred to a neurosurgeon

You have a degree in Psychology and you know the NHS - they wouldn't refer you to a neurosurgeon if you didn't need neurosurgery....

Part II

Thank you for reading this post. If you're interested in my debut novel, click the image below to learn more about it:
 


Like all my other books, it's also available on:
iBooks   |   B&N Nook   |   Kobo |   Smashwords 


Book Details

Length: 110,000 words
Genre: Contemporary Romance / Clean Romance / Diverse Romance / Interracial Romance / Romantic Drama / Women’s Fiction

Mood: Inspirational / Feel Good / Coming of Age / Dark
Content: Sexy but No explicit sex scenes / No erotica
Audience: New Adult & College / Adult / Female Readers

Recommended for: Readers that enjoy romance novels with serious issues and characters with depth. This is a story about life, love, friendship, family, music, art, destiny and soul mates.


And the first two books in my teen urban fantasy/YA paranormal romance series, the Poison Blood series, can be downloaded for free via:

Amazon USAmazon UK|   iBooks US & UK   |   B&N Nook Store   |   Smashwords



PB1 Book Details

Length: 29,000 words
Genre: YA Paranormal Romance / Teen Vampire Romance / Young Adult Paranormal Fantasy / Teen & YA Urban Fantasy / Young Adult Science Fiction & Fantasy

Mood: Dark / Humorous / Coming of age
Content: No violence / No explicit sex scenes / No erotica
Audience: Teen / Young Adult / New Adult / Adult
Recommended for: Readers that love all things vampires, slayers and witches!