I’ve been busy with a number of things this week. I had the art show Saturday, an appointment with Nikki Sunday, I think I cooked and cleaned Monday, the nurse came Tuesday and I had a friend stop by that night, I had a call with Nikki Wednesday, and yesterday I had a zoom with the nutritionist. Tomorrow I have Jen coming by for what I think is my last appointment with her, and then I was supposed to go up to see my parents this weekend, but it looks like that’s not gonna happen due to the weather, but they might be coming to see me, and then I’ll see Nikki again Sunday, yadda yadda. Time just keeps flying by. I made these stickers a couple nights ago and offered 6 for $10 and a new friend ordered a pack. I made a few more that I didn’t take pictures of and am sending them out later today.
Today is my boyfriend’s birthday, and we talked more of our plans when he comes to visit in July. I’m looking forward to that. I had fun with my friend the other night too. He is an artist I know who I relate to a lot and had a great time hanging out with him. There is also someone in my neighborhood I’ve been meaning to see again too. There are a number of new people in my life I’d like to maybe see now that we can hang out with people but I also don’t wanna do it so early on with the restrictions.
He brought these cool beers and we just hung out talking, which I need. It helped lift my mood a lot to have the social time with him and the event Saturday.
I’ve been busy with all sorts of projects, including the fact that despite the fact that I keep saying I finished my new cover, I keep changing things.
That’s a photo of it on my computer screen. It won’t be blurry like that, and I have to center it better and possibly change the font, but I think that’s what it’s more or less gonna look like.
I finished my 8th edit of that same book and it’s shaping out nicely. I’m getting ready to start writing a one page description of the book to send out as a press release with stickers and business cards. They won’t be as big of packets as I did for The Godchild… no 8 pages of reviews and quotes, probably no prints, and then I’ll do one original sticker and I’ll possibly buy cool random fun stickers in bulk, or if I can get professional stickers of my logo made in bulk for fairly cheap, I may do that instead.
I’ve realized I probably won’t get around to my next book for a couple years. I wanna redo and re-release the first Godchild book first, and I’ve actually been going through that and taking notes on what to keep, what to purge, and what important things I need to keep in the story from the stuff I purge. I plan to completely redo the beginning. There’s so much unnecessary shit and so much important shit I somehow managed to leave out completely, so I’ll give the first 1/3 of the book a complete makeover.
Here’s me and Moo. Aren’t we cute?
Don’t mind my ADD. I’m listening to jazz right now but I did a couple new hip hop videos for tiktok. The link is through Instagram though since that’s where I have more followers. I’m trying to get ready for the upcoming open mic.
My last post was about haters on the internet and whether it even makes sense to ask strangers their opinions on art or writing. It was stemmed from some hate I got about my book cover the other day. A bunch of people said they wouldn’t even pick up my book because the cover was “too busy”, “unprofessional”, and one person said they wouldn’t know what the book is about by looking at it (as if any book cover can really do that)… but it was eating at me because so many people emphasize that the cover is the first thing people see. If I get a professional publisher, I may not even be able to use it, but it’s looking more and more like self publishing is the most likely thing to happen, and I can live with that, but I don’t wanna scare people away with an unprofessional cover, yet I also felt my cover was nearly perfect for my book… maybe not perfect graphic design, but it felt right to me. It was what I envisioned… So… with the help of the basic Paint program, I added a few lines here and there and I think it’s better. Here is what I plan to go with…
Here is what it looked like before.
So, I just made a few adjustments, but I think it’s better.
I’m heading to bed because I already took my night meds, so I can’t do a full post about my show at The Armory yesterday, but I will when I wake up.
Here’s my new business cards though….
And here’s a song I wanted to share that I fell in love with…
I’ve been getting a lot of shade from strangers on the internet as I put myself out there more, and especially when my stuff gets seen by many, which was the case with a comment I got today on my Tik Tok video. It got 18 likes and a number of compliments, which isn’t a ton, but often times I only get a few likes and views. This time tons of people saw it and I got some compliments, but I also got unsolicited advice from a stranger with 4 followers and no videos of their own. He said “You need to throw in better punch lines and think of better rhymes. The words shouldn’t all end in ‘ad'”
At first the negativity hit me hard and I felt like shit, but then realized I was being gas-lit and told the opposite of the truth by someone who was trying to invalidate my work. I’ve been editing my autobiography and there’s something in there about how when I was growing up, kids and teachers used to tell me I was stupid, ugly, fat, boring, and other stuff like that when the opposite was true. I am fat now, but for the first ten years that I was called fat, I was actually quite skinny. I was also very attractive, fairly smart, and extremely unique, even if I didn’t know how yet, but I believed I was fat, ugly, stupid, and boring because those comments were felt much stronger than any compliments I may have received. This dude on Tik Tok saying “all your words shouldn’t end in -ad” took something kind of unique I do on purpose and spun it like it sucked because he had no understanding of it. Yes, I often throw a bunch of similar sounding rhymes into a verse, but unlike the typical lyrics where each line ends in a rhyme, I throw them in throughout the line for a different kind of effect. It was also only a 1 minute clip of a three minute song, so it may seem excessive in that one part, but there were plenty of other rhymes that didn’t end in -ad.
“I gave all that I had/ and was made to feel bad/ for trying a fad/ and not being rad/ and of course there’s my dad/ but I’m not gonna get into that./ Some stuff’s not even in the past.”
That was the one line with all the words ending in -ad. It goes on from there…
“I’m trying to find my independence/I wear an anchor as a pendent/ I’m sending letters to the president/ It’s evident/ that America is doomed/ We can all sit in one room/ but with whom can you bloom?”
So yeah, this dude with 4 followers and no videos whose advice I did not ask, whether it was meant to be constructive or not, was BS by someone who’s likely just jealous.
Keep in mind, when I say someone is jealous of me, I don’t mean because I’m such a handsome, rich, successful, talented artist. I’m not sure I am any of those things… definitely not rich, and success is a matter of how you view it. In many ways I am successful, but the average person isn’t gonna see me that way. My art may be great, I can’t say for sure, but there are lots of people who still think Picasso and Basquiat’s art is trash, and they’re obviously big influences of mine. Hell, there are people who don’t like DaVinci, even with all his skill, I mean, I’m not even such a huge fan, although I do appreciate him, but The Mona Lisa is a bit underwhelming, in my opinion. Still, who the fuck am I to say it isn’t good? (and that’s not even what I’m saying, but many of these haters are.) And I may be okay looking, but I’m not exactly a hottie or whatever. Anyway, my point is that they may not be jealous of my art or my looks or talent, or any of that, but what they are jealous of is my bravery to put my own art out into the world… hell, the bravery to do art at all in the first place. To be able to say “I’m an artist. This is what I created”, and then not only that, but my art clearly exposes my heart and soul in a vulnerably honest way which one can’t help but feel. On top of that, I often say political things that piss off half the population. To bravely put out my opinions and my creations and bare my soul the way I do, I make it easy for haters to shit on me, and it’s hard, but I am brave. A few friends have reminded me of that lately, that bravery isn’t about not having fear or not being hurt by the comments meant to invalidate us, it’s about continuing to speak up and continuing to share our art, continuing to live each day the best we can when the world is trying its hardest to break us. I am one of the bravest people on the planet by that definition. You aren’t being brave if there’s nothing to be afraid of, which brings me to another story…
After talking about not letting the haters get me down, and not listening to advice by strangers who may know nothing about what they’re giving feedback on, and in fact, usually don’t, I saw a discussion in a writer’s group about Beta Readers, which are people who read your book for free or a small fee, and give you honest feedback. Many swear by them, but others say it’s a waste of money and time. I said I’ve thought about doing it, but usually people find these Beta Readers in writing groups and they’re complete strangers. What if my reader is prejudice to my topic? What if they don’t know anything about the topic? What if they don’t read that genre or they’re lacking empathy for people with mental illness or addictions? Why would I solicit the advice of one or two total strangers and take their word on my work when it could be great and just not meant for them? I got a reply right away from what appeared to be a straight, white, Boomer, cis man saying “You worry too much.” I ended up deleting my comment, and his in the process, which I now feel was weak of me, but I didn’t wanna get ganged up on with other replies. I reminded myself the same thing as before; that I’m being gas-lit by people trying to invalidate me. What the fuck does an older straight, cis, white man have to worry about when giving their book to someone to read? Unless he went through a horrible sexual trauma, survived a suicide attempt, spent years in the psych ward, is talking about true crimes or war crimes, or has problems with his dick, there is almost no topic a straight, cis, white man can really be considered brave for writing about. There may be a few other topics, I’m sure, and I’m not saying they can’t be brave for other reasons, but to “bravely” write about a topic, I think there are limits for straight, cis, white men. Most of what they write will be read by people who’ve grown up in a society where the straight, cis, white male perspective is the norm and not to be questioned the way people would question me for what I dared to share in my books. Being told I worry too much is invalidating of the many reasons I have to worry and he more than likely does not. For me to hand my life story to a complete stranger on the internet in 2021, and say “be totally honest and tell me everything you think needs work” would be setting myself up for possible disaster, inviting the wrong kind of person to unleash their hate on me after learning everything about me.
I was just trying to offer a perspective as to why I agreed with many who said it was a waste of time and money. I mean, unless I got someone who I know is not transphobic, is politically left, doesn’t hate people based on past mistakes, etc. My book isn’t for everyone, and I don’t even want the opinions of the average reader. It is hard for me to take criticism of any sort though, and sometimes it pisses me off at first and then pushes me to come back harder. That’s the only way to properly use criticism, but I find that if it comes from a stranger whose opinion was not asked for, and it invalidates what I already created in any way, I’m not gonna listen, regardless. I know I have more to learn, but it doesn’t mean that what I created so far is wrong or bad just because some random dude doesn’t like it.
Speaking of all this, part of me was glad to hear the woman next door singing today. She didn’t sing yesterday and I was worried I made her feel like she couldn’t sing, ever, but she sang today for a shorter time and with her windows closed. I could still hear, but she only did it for a few minutes. I would be okay with this. I’m not someone who has no empathy. I’m a musician myself and sometimes it can be a little loud. I’ve also completely blasted my music late at night and had the cops called on me many years ago, but I’m mindful now of the volume and when I practice, it’s just for about 15 minutes a day every few days…. of course I know I need more practice than that, but 1. I have a million other projects, and 2. I sacrifice it sometimes for the sake of my neighbors, and this woman has spent the last 3 years, including the entire pandemic, making high pitched opera sounds that are like nails on a chalkboard for five hours a day sometimes, every fucking day while standing on her porch with windows open, just a few feet from all our windows on this side of the building. It’s been terrible and needed to be stopped at almost any cost, but I was a little relieved to hear her sing again, as well as the fact that she was more mindful about it this time…but I was glad I didn’t break her spirit completely. She is brave and continuing on.
Here is a picture of a graffiti sticker I bravely stuck over some racist graffiti I found last month. I was happily surprised to find it still there…
Today was a struggle and I don’t remember much of what I did yesterday except that I probably did a million things. I’ve been pretty busy and that’s basically been good for me but the lady next door who sings opera noises every day was going on for five hours, and it was piercing my ears and driving me mad because it woke me up and I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed and immediately checked my email and social media to find a lot of junk mail, no news from any agents, and a reply to a post I made about my book and book cover in an author’s group in which I didn’t ask for opinions, but someone said “You’ll get more clicks with a professional cover.” I felt shot down, and started to doubt my cover, which does have a few flaws. When I shared it on my page last week, some of my friends said they loved it, including some who I know would buy the book regardless of the cover, and they are my friends, so were they to be trusted to be honest? Some part of me thought they were, because I decided to post my cover in a memoir group and a group for trans men over 40 and asked them if they’d be interested in a book with this cover, and right away, two people in each group said no. One said it was unprofessional, two said it was too busy, and one person said no, because he wouldn’t know what the book was about from the cover; as if any book cover really explains a story! I felt shot down and immediately took down my post in both groups because the opera woman was still shrieking and I wasn’t in the mood for any more negative comments. My cat came up on the couch next to me and started crying non-stop. I shoved her off the couch and my rage was growing as the opera woman had been practicing since noon and it was after five. The noises kept getting worse and worse, and I could see her in the house right next to us in the room with all the windows open. I finally snapped and ran to the window. Part of me didn’t wanna destroy her spirit, but most of me just wanted the noise to stop. I have PTSD and it’s literally caused me to punch walls and break things. Just as I was about to scream “Would you shut the fuck up? You suck!” the guy downstairs from me literally yelled out seconds before me “Is that you who’s doing all that singing? You’re terrible!” and I chimed in “you should really get some sound proofing or something because I have PTSD and the noises are driving me into a rage every day!” She apologized and said she’d shut the windows, but I can hear her all winter when both our windows are shut. I dunno if it’ll make a difference but she’s been driving me mad for years now. Every Spring, I used to look forward to opening all the windows, but now I have to keep them closed to drown out as much as it allows. I don’t wanna crush her spirit, but I’ve honestly had violent thoughts, not that I’d act on them. I’m not a violent person, but the fact that I even fantasize about it makes me feel awful about myself and is toxic for me to have that kind of rage, so it’s about time she had a rude awakening as to how bad it is for the rest of us. There are all kinds of musicians in my building who do all make noise, but hers goes on for hours and it’s so high pitched it feels like nails on a chalkboard.
Anyway, I’ve been busy editing the book some more and I think I’m gonna keep the cover I made. I may take one more stab at designing the same basic thing, but if it doesn’t look better, I’ll keep the one I have now, which was my second attempt after the first didn’t feel professional to me at all. The second one didn’t feel like it was that bad though. I liked it and was bummed others didn’t, but I mean, I don’t know what their interests are or what kind of books they like or anything about them, and my art is an acquired taste. Like a lot of great art, sometimes people have to see it over and over before it starts to resonate with them. I thought the idea was cool, to show the flawed and rigged system through the claw machine, and pictures of me pre and post transition showing my gender journey over the years. I wrote a post on my own Facebook after being shut down, and my friends encouraged me to keep the cover unless I wanna change it, because it was my vision and it goes well with the book. One person also mentioned that I’m likely to mostly just get my fans to read it if I self publish, and so they’ll be the ones who will want it and love it, and while it may not exactly attract the masses, the people who most relate and most need the book will probably be drawn to my cover. So, it really just depends on if I get it published through an agent and publisher who may have other thoughts on it, but one of the things I like about self publishing is having the control to make my own covers and choose my release dates and stuff like that, which are part of the whole presentation for me, even if others don’t even recognize it. I really wanna release this new book on my birthday this year, which is the 20 year anniversary of 9/11. It’s to the degree that while I obviously wanna be professionally published, part of me hopes I get to do it all myself again since it was fun for me the first time around…but I’ll definitely take an agent and professional publishing if I can get it. It’s just not looking likely right now.
I have a Pride Sale going on at my Threadless Store for 15% off until the 23rd
That’s a couple of the items. You can get them here…
I got an idea for a new book that would be mostly fiction, although based on a true story about my cross country trip to see the Pope at World Youth Day in 1993. It would be called “Good Catholic Kids”, and would be sort of like a classic 90’s teen story about a queer kid with mental illness, coming of age type thing. Ideally, I envision this one as a film, but I think I wanna write it as a book, in hopes of it becoming a film, since a book is easier to get out into the world than a screenplay. Plus, I have a lot of details I wanna put into the story that would be hard to include in film, especially if it were low budget, so I’m gonna make it a book, but it was this photo I recently hung in my kitchen which gave me the idea to write the story. this was at World Youth Day in a desert in Colorado. We had to walk seven miles to get there and there was a sea of people, as far as the eye could see in every direction.
Last but not least, I got this awesome record this month to reward myself for all my hard work and stress and everything. It is an incredibly rare record and a miracle I found an unopened copy for a price I could afford (although was pretty much the only thing I could buy this month) but the CD version changed my life in the early 2000’s when it introduced me to the Boston underground hip hop scene which is the best out there.
I will leave you with a few favorite songs from the album… I highly recommend you try them, even if you don’t like hip hop, but especially if you like really great quality underground hip hop with “conscious” lyrics
It’s been a busy few days. There’s been some stress over the possibility of Out Of the Blue Gallery losing our space at The Armory, and so I’ve been posting about it and yesterday I wrote letters to the mayor and the art council in Somerville to urge them to take a look at the new gallery and the time and effort put into it. I also mentioned how OOTB has helped me as a disabled person who otherwise had no access to the art world, and how far I’ve come in the last few years because of the gallery.
Today was my parents’ 45th wedding anniversary. They also have the same birthday…
I’ve been trying to set things up for when I put out my next book, including making a new LinkedIn and Twitter account. You can find all of my links here…
I also made new business cards with my web site on them
I was gonna use this image, but it would have been too small…
I didn’t get out for a walk to take photos as I hoped, but here is a photo of my cute cat…
and a photo of the chair with the canvas that I’ve been staring at for weeks, trying to figure out what to do with it…
Of course, as usual, I forgot to take a picture of the old painting before I painted over it. It was basically just the background. I added the hand and arm today, as well as a few minor editions to the background.
I’m calling it “Holding Onto My World”
I also recently decided to try the free app Duolingo to learn Spanish in memory of my good friend Randy who I recently lost to suicide, and he was big into taking online classes for all kinds of stuff, including many languages.
I’ve been practicing the keyboard, eating healthy, put some of my records that I wanna show Koda into chronological order, I met with my mental health worker yesterday and played the Igor album by Tyler the Creator for her on the record player because it’s one of her favorite albums and it’s one of the many albums that sounds a lot better on vinyl. She wanted to know what the difference was between vinyl and just listening to an mp3, so I wanted to show her, and now she wants a record player of course, haha.
Last but not least, I got some much needed sleep today and wasn’t even too grumpy.
I’m grateful for my day… Here’s a random video from the early days of Youtube that is still the first video to pop up on my YouTube page because I need to edit it, but it’s cool…
Today could’ve been incredibly stressful. I won’t get into all the details, but often times, days like these wreck me, yet I chose to laugh about it and shrug it off today. Maybe my weekend away helped, maybe it was the “LA Confidential” weed strain which is good for Bipolar, PTSD, anxiety, and pain. Maybe it was seeing my family or being showered with hugs now that my parents and I had our vaccines. Maybe it was a little sun and fresh air or the somewhat inspiring movie Nomadland that we watched. It was likely a combination of it all. I also found out I lost weight, I got to eat some good food, be social, got some help with my blog, and all kinds of good stuff. Today I got a book in the mail that I thought would be kind of like a how-to book about how to self publish a children’s book on Amazon, but it wasn’t quite as helpful as I was looking for it to be. I skimmed the whole thing, looking for the specific info I wanted, and it wasn’t in there, but he did have a few helpful suggestions. Honestly, I was a little turned off by the fact that even though he kept giving his wife credit for ideas, he kept saying “women are always right” which just rubbed me the wrong way because it reminded me of something my father would say to imply “I don’t actually think women are even close to always right, but my wife makes me feel like I have to say they are or we’ll argue about that too.” I didn’t enjoy that part, but I got a little bit of helpful advice, and one of those things was to make a YouTube channel to use for the books, and so I made a video of myself reading my favorite chapter from my first book, “The Godchild” and uploaded it to my YouTube… Here is that…
I trimmed my beard after I made the video. It was getting a little wild…
better
And here is an interview a blog called TZSBlog did with me awhile back about my Godchild trilogy…
1. Tell us about yourself:
My name is Jymi Cliche. I’m a 42 year old intersex trans man from Boston, Massachusetts in the US. I’m a newly self published author, an artist, photographer, poet, rapper, and human rights activist. I’m Bipolar with Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and more than ten other psychiatric diagnoses. I spent twenty years of my life in and out of psych wards. I studied Psychology and Art in college and am still interested in both, as well as popular culture, especially music, but also books, movies, and TV, even though I’ve hardly had time to watch anything lately, or read for fun. I collect vinyl records and listen to music in some form all night while I work on my creative projects. I sleep during the day. I have a cat named Moo who’s been living with me for over fifteen years and I come from a large, close, chaotic family, many of whom live in the Boston area. My art is hanging at Out Of the Blue Gallery where I regularly do art shows and perform poetry and hip hop. I enjoy cooking new and old recipes and doing local Open Mics which have moved to Zoom during quarantine. I spend most of my time alone, which is what I usually prefer, although I do enjoy seeing friends and family and I text people or chat on Facebook, so it’s not like I don’t like people. I’m just somewhat agoraphobic and have severe social anxiety, so not having to go anywhere the last nine months has helped me be more productive. I love swimming at sunset, looking at the stars, enjoying live music, and dancing to shake the bad energy off my soul. I don’t do those things enough though.
2. How did you get into writing and publishing? Was this something you always wanted to do?
Yes, I’ve pretty much always wanted to be a writer. It’s been my goal since I was nine years old, and while I’ve written almost every day of my life, it took a long time before I was ready to write my books. Technically I wrote my first book when I was nine, but it wasn’t very good. I wrote another when I was eleven, and that was terrible too. Both were hand written and were pure childish fantasies, but I enjoyed the hell out of writing them, and I think that’s what was most important. I loved creating something. I had many ideas for books and screen-plays I wanted to write over the years, but they were fictional and I’d come up with a bunch of ideas but not know how to get started and make it work. When I began writing “The Godchild”, it was different. I went through some life changing and eye opening experiences in 2008 and 2010 and I knew since 2010 that I had an epic story to tell… my own. I knew that if I could just tell my story with all the details I could remember, that I’d have mind-blowing book. I started writing it in 2013 and finished a year or so later, but I wasn’t ready to publish. I was scared of the world reading something so personal, and honestly, I still am.
“The Godchild” gets off to a slow start because I didn’t even know where to begin, and I decided to start with where I was, at and go back and forth. It takes about the first third of the first book before the story fully gets going. The majority of the publishers I sent query letters to only wanted the first five to twenty pages, and I knew that even though I was sure the book got better and was worth reading, that they wouldn’t know that. I’m basically a nobody, at the bottom of society, so I expected to be rejected by most, and I was, even though many of the rejections were complimentary. I debated on whether to keep trying, but I wanted the whole trilogy to be released by July 2020, so I decided to self publish and I don’t regret it. It’s still selling and getting great reviews. I just wrote another book this past year which I’m hoping will get the attention of a publisher.
3. How was the writing, editing, and publishing process like for the first book?
It took seven years to write the trilogy, and part of that was because it was written as a journal. In the first book, I went back and forth from current day and into the past to tell the story of my life, so it only took about a year, but the following two books were both about the current day as I wrote them, so I had to actually live my life to find out what was going to happen, and I had to wait until enough happened to make it worth writing down. It was kind of a trip though, because everything that happened was perfect for the story. The books just wrote themselves. Of course, as I was writing my third book, I had extreme anxiety. I had faith that the universe would give me the perfect, epic ending for my trilogy, but I had no idea what that would be. I drove myself crazy with fear about the end of my trilogy coming. Was it the end of my life? The end of the world? I started to fall apart again like I had before I wrote the first two books, but it ended up bringing the trilogy full circle, providing the perfect ending as I had faith it would.
4. How has writing and being an author helped you as a person?
As a person who lived most of my life as a professional lab rat with different psychiatric treatments and medications tested on me since 1993, in and out of psych wards for 20 years, and the last decade slowly recovering after being broken, it’s nice to feel like I did something big and important, and that I count. I’m grateful that my story is being told and heard, and that people get it. It’s given me the ability to say that I’ve got a job and show people that I’m not lazy or stupid or whatever they think when they hear I have mental illness. I didn’t waste my life. It may have been far from conventional, but that’s what makes it such a great story. I have far less shame about existing and sometimes needing help than I once did now that I’ve put out my books. I hope the books will help heal the world, but I’m grateful that they started to heal me first.
5. What advice would you like to give to aspiring authors?
Just write… and live. Don’t compare, just create.
6. How long does it usually take to write a book?
It depends on what kind of book. The book I wrote this past year only took about six months for about three hundred pages.
7. Out of the five books that you have published so far, which is that one book that holds a very special place in your heart?
If I had to pick just one of the five, it would be the first book of “The Godchild” trilogy. It works alone as just one book, where you can’t really pick up part 2 or part 3 and just read those without having read the first one. It was originally going to stand alone, but I realized I had more I needed to say and life provided me all kinds of new material, but the first book of the series is probably the one that means the most to me.
8. What is your favorite place to read and write?
As much as I’d love to sit out on a deck overlooking the ocean or something perfect like that with fresh air and the sound of crashing waves, I do my writing wherever I may be. My books were all mostly written on a laptop computer, facing a corner wall on an extremely messy desk with music playing and my cat staring at me. Similarly, I will read wherever, but last year I found a green leather chair and ottoman tossed out in the trash, so I took it and put it in my bedroom, which is where I like to read before bed when I get a chance.
9. What kind of books do you like to read?
I like a variety of stuff, but memoir is probably my favorite genre.
10. What are you currently reading?
“On Writing” by Stephen King
11. If you could recommend only one book to anyone which book would that be?
The DSM-5. That’s the Diagnostic Statistical Manual for mental disorders currently being used to diagnose mental illness in the US and other parts of the world. I think people would be surprised how many descriptions they relate to and maybe question what “crazy” even means anyway.
12. Are there any upcoming launches that you can share with us?
I’m getting ready to publish my next book, hopefully in September of this year, and then my first children’s book around the winter holidays. I’m also doing a photography and art show about my mental illness from May-June at The Armory in Somerville MA.
13. Do you have any message that you want to convey through this interview?
The world is struggling right now and these are some uncertain times. Almost everyone is questioning their sanity from time to time, and I hope that my story will bring comfort to those who are. It’s an inspiring story of survival and it’s my honest guts and tears. I put myself out there to help others feel less alone.
