Pride: The Journey to Publication
After I serialized Pride on my website, I submitted it to a few publishers without any luck. That I had no idea what I was doing didn’t help. Come 2009, I applied for the Olvar Wood Fellowship – a program run by Queensland writers Inga Simpson and Nike Bourke that involved mentoring and workshops. At the time, I was struggling with the beginning of chronic neck issues – the result of hunching over a laptop while editing all day. I went to bed after one lengthy editing session with a tightness in my right shoulder blade. The next day I woke with spasms to the right side of my neck.…
Chronic Pain and Perspective
I live with pain every day. The worst of it is in my right leg and foot – a result of being struck by a car in 2011. My leg was broken, the ankle dislocated, the nerve damaged, and the injury developed Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS). After about eighteen months of rehab, hydrotherapy, and pain seminars, the surgeon confessed he never expected me to recover as much as I did. He told me he expected the foot to be all shriveled and shiny from the nerve damage. In my last appointment with him several months later, he laughed when I asked if it’d ever recover fully. He said the…