I am sitting here trying to catch up with emails. Lots of them in the last few days are from readers in Asia.. I had no idea my story would end up in an article over there and be read by a 16-year old student in Singapore or a man in Pakistan...how bizarre is that! But over the last few days emails have been coming in, not just from people here but from people who have read the article or read my book all those thousands of miles away telling me how, although they might have very different lives, they have been able to relate to my story in some way.

I have spent the last hour dipping in and out of some of their blogs, reading about their lives and cultures, being reminded that people are essentially the same wherever they come from, the same fears the same dreams.

Sounds of weather like this will probably always remind me of certain nights in the car — driving rain and stormy, wintry winds battering around outside that sound like wet laundry flapping about on washing lines across the sky. One time in the car in particular has come to mind in the last few days. I’m not sure why but it’s always the same one: one evening walking back to the car in the dark to drive to the laneway for the night, cold and wet and absolutely dreading another night of being out in it.

Just for the record, let me say that I was wrong...writing books is not as easy as I thought. Obvioulsy I didn't think it would be a walk in the park, but after all that time in the car, living how I was living — on the outside of everything, depressed, isolated, without focus or purpose, no job or project to throw myself into — I thought everything would be easy after that, that nothing could phase me and nothing could beat me — which hopefully is true, now I have fought my way back - and I thought that since I love writing, that that would be a joy to do for the next six months.

And occassionally it was. The times when I forgot that I was writing about me and just sank into it, but writing your own story is hard. And writing books generally takes everything you've got. Not nice...Feel wrecked. But at least it's over now. Now I can start rebuilding...

There were boiling hot days like these when I first slept out in the car. Not quite as hot, and I was down on the coast then, in and around Brighton, so warm, salty breezes coming in off the sea cooled things down a bit. But sometimes, when it had been there collecting heat all day, the car's metal could burn bare skin and the interior was full of exhausting, nauseating, oven-hot heat, unbearable, the kind you have to physically force yourself to get in to: my hair would frizz, my body stick to the seats, grimy sweat from walking about all day would slide in greasy streams and collect in hot pools underneath me, and the inside of my head throbbed with constant headaches from breathing the hot, dry air full of car fumes.

December probably isn't the time for it, but I'm looking around for another job at the moment. This job was only ever meant to be a stepping stone - a way back into things — temporary cover that I knew would come to an end, but I feel quite anxious now that it is - anxious about what the next step will be. Not sure which way to turn again. Not sure I'm tough-headed or tough-hearted enough to go back to a career in law full-time, even if that was possible, but not sure what else I can do. It's hard knowing what you're cut out for.

I have been so busy lately that I haven't really sat and watched the weather so this mornings downpour took me by surprise. Since it was early I am sure there was some old man out there snoring as well. I slept like a rock last night. I have found that if I start sleeping sitting up that I sleep best. I end up on my side sometime in the middle of the night. The new bed is really nice. All it needs now is some nice cushy pillows to go with it.

Book News:
With my increased appetite for food my appetite for books is slowly returning as well. Yesterday I finished Bel Canto and am now half way through The Color Purple.

Bel Canto Short Review:

I woke up this morning with the cold howling around inside my bones. But looking out of the window everything was all white and beautiful and brilliant, the sun like pearl behind white sky, and everything glittered with frost. It looked quite magical. I love mornings like this. Give me this over rain any day. I went to a pantomine the night before last, and the fairy godmother in it was fantastic, really throwing herself into the part, tip-toeing around the cast waving her wand and whispering good into everyones ears. That's what it felt like this morning, waking up to all this whiteness, as if someone had tiptoed through the night - over rooftops and hills, through the trees, up and down streets and alleyways and parks, waving a magic wand, turning the land this clean, silvery-white. I felt happy just laying there thinking it. I turned up the on the music on the CD alarm — the Late String Quartets again!

Time is playing its tricks with my mind again. I have been away for a few weeks, to Ireland — and now that I am back everything seems either slowed right down, or speeded up: it seems impossible that summer is almost over, or that it is a whole year since I first rolled up my fleece as a pillow, loosened my boots, laid my head down on the passenger seat, just to rest for a while, and ended up sleeping in my car for the very first time. Time seemed all scrunched up then too. I couldn’t hold it back, and so didn’t want to know about it, blanked out as much as I could — couldn’t even say what day it was sometimes; and sometimes, now, too, it is difficult to decide whether it seems ages ago since I was in the car, or more like yesterday. Seems a bit of both. Despite two massages and a hard bed, my back still holds most of the pain of it, so healing is no indication of time lapsed.

I stopped off at a shop yesterday morning, on the drive back, and had a very surreal moment. My book was there on one of the shelves and just as I walked past, a woman came along, took it down from the shelf and after reading the back cover went off to buy it. I couldn't believe it. What are the chances of that happening? Not only of actually having a book up there in the first place, but actually standing there as someone takes it down and goes off to buy it. For a moment I was stunned. I immediately picked up another book and pretended to be reading, but when she turned out of sight I actually walked off after her. It was Monday morning and there was hardly anyone about and I found myself wanting to whisper 'thank you for buying my book,' or just to tell her that it was my book she had in her hands, wanting to say something, anything... Because what are the chances of seeing that again. Of course I didn't. But it was a very strange moment.

The book is entirely out of my hands now, but the pressure still hasn't lifted. Several times a night these last few nights I've woken in heavy sweats, desperatley wanting to change words I am no longer able to change. It is a terrifying thing to accept that the way I said things on particular days sometime at the end of last year are now set forever.

I woke up and lay in the dark at 3am last night trying to force myself to remember the words of the serenity prayer. I eventually remembered 'accept...', 'change...' and 'know the difference...' But I couldn't string the rest of it together or get any comfort from even the jist of it.

They are just words I keep telling myself, just, just words... But it hasn't been easy letting go of them.

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What with yesterday being Halloween, and all . . . do you read horror? Stories of things that go bump in the night and keep you from sleeping?

I thought about asking you about whether you were participating in NaNoWriMo, but I asked that last year. Although . . . if you want to answer that one, too, please feel free to go ahead and do both, or either, your choice!
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Sometimes pointing to where it hurts doesn't give the best clue as to what's wrong. It doesn't help that human anatomy can vary so much.

Below are two images of the large intestine. There are 3 sections visible ... the ascending colon on your right side (left in pictures), the transverse colon that goes across the top, and the descending colon on your left side (right in pictures).

I haven't written here for a while. I've been trying to let things settle and to think forwards, rather than backwards all the time. Obviously I had to do that while I was writing the book, think backwards — wade through all that past, all that heavy sludge of childhood emotion. I felt like a spring recoiling on itself. But once the book was finished it was time to try to go forward again. It's what we all have to do, but that's exactly what I hadn't been doing for so long. I'd gotten stuck. So these past few weeks I've tried to think forwards, and put all the past behind me. But the paperback is out tomorrow, so for a while I can see that will be difficult to do.

I came into London today to talk on a local radio show about my book. It was a very strange thing to do. Not only sitting in a dark booth at BBC studios infront of a console with such a bewildering array of buttons and dials that it looked like we were about to take off, but just the talking about the book at all. Writing it was bad enough. It is definitely not a comfortable thing to publicise. I have been psyching myself up for it for weeks, though I was very glad to get it over and done with today, particulary given the cold I have. But the presenter's reaction was so lovely, and in a way unexpected. I assumed like most people his interest would be in the homelessness bit and how I wrote the blog. He did talk about the shame and secrecy of homelessness, and how it had been for me living in the car for those nine months, but he focussed mostly on the earlier part of the book — on some of the childhood stuff.

This morning I woke up to NPR on my husbands alarm. The newscaster was informing everyone that Detroiters were loosing their homes at a rate of five times that of the national average and that Michigan had one of the highest unemployment rates. Lovely, just what I want to hear when I wake up in the morning. A friend from Michigan e-mailed me this week to tell me she had just been laid off. She is joining the half a dozen people I know from back home that are without a job. For me January 2009 can't come fast enough, we need change and we need it now!

On to more boring items, my day today is again booked. I had hoped to get the car today and do some shopping but the plumber called and said he could come out today. So he and the pest control guy will be crawling around the house this morning and part of the afternoon. I informed my husband that I desperately needed to get out of the house tonight.

Last night was our second to last hypnobirthing class. It went really well. I wish we had gotten the opportunity to get to know the other couples in the class better. Last night we realized that of us five, Dan and I would be parents first. We promised to e-mail the instructor our birth story for the class to know how everything had worked out.

I don't casually toss around the "album of the year" phrase, so when I say something is in the running for that title, even in May, there's a good chance it'll stand the test of time.

With that in mind, let me say that The Midnight Organ Fight, the sophomore effort from the Scottish Trio Frightened Rabbit, is my favorite record of the year so far.

Trying to write about this band is difficult because they're very hard to classify. No, strike that. The problem is really that they're all to easy to classify. You just point out the Scottish brogue, churning guitars, melancholic lyrics, and some dreamily orchestral folk. If you want to get specific you bring up The Twilight Sad, and maybe mention Snow Patrol if you're feeling impish.

I headed into my neighborhood watering hole yesterday after a hard day working in the woods, on a mission to get some food, and got talking with the bartender, who is a young woman recently graduated from college. I guess I'm more avuncular than I realized, because she started confiding in me, and of course with bartenders it's supposed to be the other way around. Anyway, she majored in international relations, and now she somewhat regrets it, because she knows too much about what's going on in the world and it's depressing. She'd rather be a happy idiot. I told her that happiness isn't everything.

As I was intending to get back to the mind/body thing, along comes a fortuitous hook: Pfizer, the same people who give you the whorish Dr. Jarvik hawking an expensive statin that is no better than its far cheaper generic competitors (even though he has no relevant expertise and has never practiced medicine), is now marketing a new drug for fibromyalgia.

To us medical sociologists, fibromyalgia is an endless source of fascination. Like the psychiatric "diseases," it is diagnosed based on a checklist of self-reported, qualitative and subjective symptoms. There is no known etiology and there are no physical findings whatsoever. So there is raging controversy over whether there is any such "disease" as fibromyalgia.

Today was surreal. I found myself in Waterstones looking for a book. Not mine…what I wanted was some comfort-reading to get me through the next few days so that I didn't have to think of mine for a while, — something like the one I've just finished, The Summer Book by Tove Jannson, something timeless and ageless, some other world I could just sink into for a while.

So the Celtics had their first "real test" of the season last night, taking on the Detroit Pistons at the TD Banknorth Garden.

Item: Could maybe the City of Boston pony up a few hundred grand and turn the "Insert-Corporate-Name-Here" Garden back into the Boston Garden? Ever since they succumbed to the whole cheerleader thing (they give them the euphemism "dancers"), I guess all of the "These-could-be-your-father's-Celtics" bets are off. Regardless, I, Evil Ted, shall simply call it "The Garden" until such time.

Basketbawful wanted to write about this, but is unable, so I'll give a go. Bawful felt Paul Pierce overshot, and played like someone trying to be the hero of the game. The result? 11 points on 5-for-16 shooting, and 0-for-4 from 3-point range.

Earlier I saw my book listed on Amazon! It isn't even nearly written yet, and yet there it was! A very, very strange experience seeing it there. I felt sad, rather than surprised or exhillerated though, seeing it there (was almost going to type just then it felt like coming across your own obituary in a newspaper — that same, I imagine, kind of shocking strangeness — but maybe that is the wrong analogy. Extremely weird though that first glance...left me winded. Seeing the title there for the first time: 'Abandoned', alongside Anya Peters, was a bit unsettling too. It even said how many pages it is: 320! and the date it will be published. Three hundred and twenty pages and none of them written yet! Except mostly in my head — where they have been written over and over most of my life in a way. But that is nowhere near the same as having them written down properly on paper, and then typed up — not in the form they will be in in a book that is sold on Amazon anyway.

Let me take a break from blowing vapor about the bio-psycho-social conception of health and make it real for a bit. We're collaborating with a researcher who I won't name just yet because I didn't ask permission on a project which is really terrific. It's a randomized controlled trial of a program to teach therapeutic massage to caregivers -- spouses, siblings, children, friends, whatever -- of people with cancer. There is an orientation, and a DVD, and a manual, which don't just teach techniques but put massage into the context of loving relationships and the emotional and spiritual (deity free) consequences of serious illness.

Massage has been shown to have powerful palliative effects for people with cancer, reducing pain, nausea and other symptoms as much or more than drugs. This project goes one better, by replacing the professional massage therapist with a loved one who also benefits from knowing that she or he can do something effective to help the cancer sufferer. That feeling of helplessness is one of the hardest things about facing a serious illness in a loved one, of course. And the relationship between the two also benefits. We hope to demonstrate these benefits using the gold standard methods of biomedical research. (I take no credit for developing the program, we're just helping our colleague with the trial.)

This letter was submitted anonymously by a working reality writer. He/She requires anonymity, because otherwise, he/she fears being fired for writing this.

Dear AMPTP,

Today, I read on your website, “thousands of people in reality and animation have chosen not to join the WGA.”
This statement is false.

As a writer (aka "Supervising Producer", the name I'm given to get around having to give me a WGA contract) who has worked in reality television for over three years and who knows many people on the reality circuit, I can tell you that reality writers desperately want to be part of the WGA.

damage good!

Weeks and weeks since I've written in here. I haven't known what to write. I kept waiting for something more interesting to happen, but since I've written the book nothing has really, not really, nothing particularly bloggable anyway. I've spent the time since slowly putting my life back into order, sorting things out, settling back into things, relishing the ordinariness of it all again. I feel stronger now than I have ever done, can't imagine what could phase me after how I lived this time last year, but the feelings I have about the book are still very complicated, conflicted feelings and I suppose that was another reason to avoid writing in here too soon — to avoid even thinking about any of it for a while once it was written. It is done now, will have to speak for itself.

Title: After the Fire
Author: Belva Plain
ISBN: 044023574X
Publisher: Dell Publishing/2000
Pages: 439

This is one of the books I picked up from the pavement book bazaar dirt-cheap because I liked the cover. I had heard of Belva Plain before this.

It was difficult to concentrate at work today. I found distraction in everything. I kept staring out of the window trying to watch the clouds changing shape, or found myself standing in the kitchen down on the first floor, staring out at the long lawns at the backs of the houses across the way. Towards the back of one of them there's a weathered bench beneath a beautiful maple tree with big, beautifully-shaped red and gold leaves the colour of flames. The rest of the lawn in front has been raked and is clear and green, but the area behind is still thickly carpeted with gold and russet leaves fallen from the taller trees at the back of the garden. I looked at the leaves and looked away a few times today before I saw what was in them. Curled up, just to the left of the bench, right there in the open, was a big fox, asleep in the leaves. Just curled there, happy as you like, in the middle of the day, at the back of a garden in a busy area of London.

It always seems to be raining when I write a blog.