After writing this blog today, I have the exciting news that A Girl Behind Dark Glasses is available on Amazon! In it’s genre, it is Number 46 on the Bestselling top 100 and number 1 in the Hot New Releases! Please keep supporting it you wonderful lot and thank you for everything you’ve done to get us there! Enjoy the blog!
The Intricacies of Writing a Book Without Being able to Physically Write
The most asked question of my book was how could I write it through the brain fog and illness? So I have decided that I need to explain myself, once and for all!
What was really interesting about the book is most of it was written in the four year time period in which it covers. I used a diary called Bug. At first, it was a couple of words a day done via code because I couldn’t speak. After some time, I started to spend the whole day picking the words from the place that words swirl around my head, not making sense. I would focus on getting one sentence through code to describe my day.
When I got to my second hospital, they had stopped me from making Bug so the words would just come into my filing cabinet inside my head to be processed at a later date.
Once I had learnt how to speak again, I required a proper diary. It was called….can you guess…. yes that’s right: Bug! Without the exclamation mark, of course. Bug was a dictaphone that required the smallest of touches to record and it had a little clip that put a microphone as close to my mouth as possible. This meant my voice didn’t have to be loud at all.
I carried this on for the period of time that I was in hospital. Bug helped me to learn some Polish and gave me someone to talk to, (I very much thought of him as a friend).
So the process really was to decipher Bug and over three maybe four months I revisited that very lonely world, piecing together what happened. I wrote the book on an iPod Touch, which was very easy to slightly touch a letter and was small enough so I could type then rest, type then rest etc.
It was incredibly therapeutic to put down what actually happened and to put down the parts that people did not realise I had even seen because I was ‘A Girl Behind Dark Glasses’. In their eyes I saw nothing, did nothing and was just in a semi if not full on coma.
Once I had finished the book, it took an age to get it published. Firstly, no one wanted to take it on because it was a book about M.E, which was not a popular subject, they told me. Then I became very unwell and couldn’t do anything about it.
Finally here we are, after a successful Kickstarter Campaign, there was a false start again. It was considered that it had parts where I needed to reassess if I wanted to keep it in the book. I decided that it was important to tell a true honest account. The Kickstarter helped with getting the publishing deal and here we are!
One book finished. Sequel to come.