A friend suggested that I use this page for the time being to share what it is like to write a book by telling my story.
Two and a half years ago, my mother was ill, and I started thinking about her childhood and how the people whose duty it was to protect her did so much damage to her instead. They abandoned her.
I subsequently started to see abandonment as an invisible force everywhere. I witnessed how people abandon their freedom of thought and choice in numerous ways. I realize we abandon our Self through conscious and unconscious methods. I observed how our society has abandoned the family and middle-class. More powerful, I saw how our Congress has abandoned their duty to responsibly govern the country and now our democracy is at stake. Sadly, our planet has been abandoned too.
Once my awareness of how abandonment has permeated nearly everyone and everything, the only way I could cope with the heartache for the lost possibilities was to start writing. At first, I storyboarded the issues with thousands of Post-it notes and then organize them by affinity groups. Then, using the affinity groupings, I mind-mapped the structure of the book. With these activities, I started to feel emotionally better with the knowledge that I was doing something constructive with a very destructive force.
Once I had the chapters laid out, I started to write them linearly … chapter 1, chapter 2, chapter 3 and so on. I had several chapters written when I registered in a course designed by Jack Canfield and Stephen Harrison called Bestsellers Blueprint. Through their mentorship, they explained that I should write a series of books because each chapter most likely would appeal to a different audience and that is how the America Abandoned series was conceived.
The first book in the series, “We, the Abandoned People” ~ The Secret Velvet Coup That Cost Us Our Democracy (current working title) was originally Chapter 7. I selected it for the first book to be published fall, 2016 because of its relevance to the 2016 presidential election.
Writing this series has been the most significant goal I have ever set out to achieve. The actual process of writing is slow and generates self-doubt. I read and reread what I’ve written not only for editing purposes but to see if what I’ve written would be of any interest t the reader. The gauge I have used is that if I am passionate, angry or agitated about the subject, my hope is that the reader will be too and will get active to recapture something that is important to them.
Writing a book has also been difficult because it has taken time away from my husband and the pleasure I experience with my two doggies, Sassy and Scooter. On one hand I know I need a break and so will do activities with them (as I should!) but then I feel pressure about getting behind on my writing schedule. There is always a dynamic tension there. I also go to places to get away to focus on my writing such as the library, coffee shops, and mini-retreats. I try to do this often because it can be very successful to have concentrated time to think, research and write.
After two and a half years on this project, I have become an investigative researcher on abandonment and its invisible impacts on our lives and in my upcoming book I have written, at the end of each chapter, Stand Up activities for the reader to be aware of to fight its impacts in the areas of their choosing.
In the Bestsellers Blueprint course, they asked why we were writing a book. My answer was to two-fold, that I felt compelled to share my unique observations and start a mass movement. It is my belief that when people realize what they have lost to abandonment, they will take responsibility and fight to get what they have lost, to this powerful and invisible force, back.