As I write this email, I’m sitting in my “office” (the recliner), and the air around me is redolent with the mouth watering scents of: 1) A big batch of oatmeal chocolate chip cookies, 2) two crusty loaves of bread sitting on the counter to cool, 3) a batch of rhubarb-strawberry jam made from scratch, that my daughter is canning at the moment. All of that is topped off by 4) a batch of gingerbread granola that Mark is making for me to eat for breakfast this week, which is sending all the spiciness into the air — ground cloves, cinnamon, all-spice, roasting cranberries…
And it’s hours yet before dinner!
So let me tell you, instead, about my latest project. This one, I just had to squeeze into my writing schedule before I rolled up my sleeves and got seriously stuck back into writing fiction at my old rate (or close to it).
Cancer Curated
My Public Face-Off with Multiple Myeloma
Cancer is also a mental game…
Because I am an author, when I was diagnosed with Multiple Myeloma in 2022, I unintentionally lived through my treatment, the ups and (some of) the downs, in a very public way. Then something strange happened.
I begun to get messages and emails from strangers. Lots of strangers. My posts and public updates, they said, were helping them deal with their own brush with cancer—as survivors, patients, carers, friends and family and, sometimes, as victims.
The public updates were necessarily short and severely edited. This book is an unedited chronology of everything I dealt with to arrive where I am today. Woven through the public posts are the raw facts and events I didn’t include in the updates. I’ve also included my hugely subjective opinions on some of the extremes cancer patients and their carers go through and how it changes you.
Looking for a different way to think about cancer? Try mine.
A Cancer Memoir
As you can see, it felt very natural to write this and it was also cathartic in a number of ways. It was definitely the book to write, right now. I was having trouble settling back into the fiction writing at my old speed of production, and Mark made the suggestion that I spend a bit of time writing this, instead — that you guys would understand. He figured; get it all out, then get back to fiction.
And he was right. I’m steadily writing fiction once more, after struggling for months.
Cancer Curated is available for pre-order everywhere (links below).
We’re releasing the book on October 26th on Stories Rule Press, my store, in both print and ebook.
And, there will also be a hardcover edition, only available at Stories Rule Press.
For now, only the ebook is available for pre-order, but the print editions will go up for sale a week before the release date of October 26th.
On all the other retail stores, the ebook is also available for pre-order, but won’t be released until January 25th. Similarly, the paperback edition will be available shortly before the release date of January 25th.
Buy Cancer Curated from Me @ SRP!
Buy Cancer Curated from your favourite retailer!
