Monday 27 June 2016

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

Life After Neurosurgery

Like your surgeon told you, it takes exactly four weeks until you can carry on with your life as normal.

But it's not like before.

You see improvements and also some negative side-effects.

It's now almost four months since you had your operation and you haven't suffered from a single headache. Not even a little throb at your temples.

You can swallow food and water easily and your limbs and fingers aren't so clumsy anymore. In fact, sometimes you show Spiderman-style reflexes!

You feel better about yourself, more positive about life. All the issues you had before the surgery are gone. You feel brand new, if that makes sense. You're glad you had the decompression surgery.

There's always a price to pay for good things though.

There's a lumpy, pale-pink scar running down your neck, which you hide by wearing your hair down. No more up-dos for a while...

You wake up in the morning with a sore and stiff neck. It gets stiff if you don't move your head for a minute or so, like when you're staring at your laptop, continuing with your books. Giving your full attention to the TV is out of the question. No movie or documentary is worth the stiffness that comes with looking in one direction for a prolonged period of time.

But you get used to twisting your head from side-to-side every few minutes when you're writing. It's good to take regular breaks from the computer screen, anyway. You avoid repetitive strain injury.

The reduction in the number of words you write in a day however, you don't easily get accustomed to. Once upon a time, you used to write an average of 3,000 words every evening after work. Now, typing 500 words over the course of the whole day is a struggle.

Also, and more worryingly, your vocabulary has diminished somewhat. You don't get it. Words you've written a million times before become out of reach somehow. They're not even on the tip of your tongue. How can they be - it's like you don't even know them? Although you read more books in the last 12 months than you have in the previous 12 years combined, you cringe at how limited your vocabulary seems to be now.

Words don't come easily.

With the back pain still a problem, you wonder if you're meant to be a writer after all. You want to be an author, it's your dream and passion, but maybe it's just not in the cards for you? So many things in the last few years have stood in the way of your writing. What if they weren't obstacles to test you, hurdles you had to overcome?

What if they're signs, a message from the fates, telling you to give up?

Part V

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 urban fantasy/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: Paranormal Romance / Vampire Romance / Paranormal Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / 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!

Monday 20 June 2016

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

More pain and even more painkillers...

A couple of weeks before the surgery, you finally tell your brothers and sisters about your diagnosis and pending operation. They're shocked. Scared. Worried. After lecturing you about how you should have told them a year ago, when you first learned of your condition, they promise to pray for you and be there for you.

Your surgery - foramen magnum decompression - is the first of the day. In the waiting room, you're practically quaking from fear and dread. There's another lady waiting to have a procedure so much more complex than yours. She and her sister have had a few brain surgeries in the last few years. One of them almost died on the operating table. The surgeon that saved her life, is your surgeon, so you put things into perspective and realise how lucky you are to not be suffering from what they are.

A porter and a wheelchair take you to the room where you'll be put to sleep. You don't expect to dream while you're unconscious, but you do. You dream about waking up and getting ready to arrive for your operation. You also dream of your deceased mum and sister-in-law; it's like they're there to keep you company until you awake.

And you awake with pain so sharp, so severe, that you feel breathless and begin to cry. You thought you knew pain, knew it well. You and pain have always had a love-hate relationship - you hate pain but pain loves you, never leaves your side.

But this is something else. This is like hell.

You beg for painkillers but you're already on morphine and they can't give you another dose for another four minutes. Once you're given morphine that you can administer yourself - at a very high dosage - the pain becomes bearable. It makes you drowsy though, your speech slurs and you doze off in the middle of talking to your visitors. You're sort of overdoing it with the morphine, but you can't help it. The biting pain is too much.

You're well tended to at the hospital and your family and friends really pull through for you. It overwhelms you. You've always been the one to look after the others, and now they're looking after you. It's nice.

Being in hospital however, is still the worst thing ever. It's lonely after visiting hours are over and you can't sleep, can't eat and you don't feel like doing anything to help pass the time. Your mother had spent a whole year in hospital and you cry over it in private. She must have felt so alone and helpless...

The physiotherapist comes to see you everyday - she's the same one your mum had - and it turns out that one side of your body is less sensitive to touch and temperature than the other following the operation. You don't care. You just want to go home.

Part IV

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 urban fantasy/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: Paranormal Romance / Vampire Romance / Paranormal Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / 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!

Monday 13 June 2016

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

I always knew there was something wrong with my brain...

"Tell me, what have you come to see us for?" asks the friendly neurosurgeon when he ushers you into his consulting room. You tell him it's because your MRI scan showed you had a bulge in your spine. "Okay, tell me about your headaches."

You say that you get really bad headaches at least once a month, they're accompanied by nausea and last all day, all night and you wake up with them the next morning. They start when you sit down at your desk in the office, and it gets worse as the day progresses. When you get home, you wish someone would take a hammer and smash your head in. Maybe that's the only thing that'll stop the pain.

Then a set of diagnostic questions:
Do you feel numbness in your fingers, weakness in your limbs.
"Yes, sometimes," you reply, wondering what any of this has to do with your back pain, which is the real, debilitating problem.
Any problems swallowing?
"Yes. I have to concentrate when swallowing food, drinking liquids, else it goes down the wrong way..."
Dizziness, depression, insomnia?
"Yes, yes and yes, but the low moods and lack of sleep are connected to my back pain and my personal life..."

Apparently, it's all related to what they saw in your MRI scan.

You look at the black-and-white images on the computer and your Psychology training helps you understand what they show.

There's a tube-shaped cavity in your spinal cord that shouldn't be there.

"It's called a syrinx," he explains. "It's common in patients suffering from type 1 Chiari malformation, which is what you have."

Your brain is too big for your skull - your skull is smaller than normal.

Pressure builds up in your skull and pushes the lowest part of your brain downwards, into the spinal cord, causing the hole - the syrinx - inside your spine.

The pressure at the base of your brain blocks cerebrospinal fluid (CSF) from circulating properly, which means the CSF can't bring nutrients to your brain or remove waste.

The syrinx can elongate and cause serious damage to your spine.

The only way to fix this problem is to operate. Make the opening at the base of your skull larger.

But you have so much going on in your life at the moment - your mother has just been diagnosed with kidney cancer and your family is going through a lot - so you put-off the surgery for six months and agree to see your neurosurgeon then.

Even in six months, you might still be terrified about having brain surgery.

But during those six months, your mother passes away and it's at the end of the month she dies that you have your appointment with your neurosurgeon. He explains the risks of not having the operation because he can see how scared you are. "The worst-case scenario, should you be so unlucky, is that you sneeze and that causes enough pressure in your skull and in the syrinx, that you rapture your spine and end up paralysed, or even dead."

That makes up your mind for you and you're booked in for surgery in a couple of months' time. February 2016. But you're still frightened out of your wits.

Mostly, you worry about the general anaesthetic and if you'll wake up from it...

Part III

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 urban fantasy/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: Paranormal Romance / Vampire Romance / Paranormal Fantasy / Urban Fantasy / 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!  

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!