Gum on My Shoe

Fran and I are excited to announce a new creative venture that we've been planning for some time. Kingston Park Publishing will publish a new revised edition of our first book High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder . It will be available in print and for Kindle. Watch this space for further details. We encourage you to follow KPP on their website , Facebook , Linkedin , and Twitter . The first edition of High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder is still available for a limited period from Amazon and other booksellers.  

Fran and I are delighted to introduce the new book by a dear friend of ours, Aimee Wilson. Aimee’s mental health blog I’m NOT Disordered has had huge success across the world, with numerous media appearances and collaborations. Recently published for Kindle, When All Is Said & Typed is a complete collection of articles from I’m NOT Disordered published between January 2013 and January 2019. The articles are arranged by chronological order in five topics: The Power of Writing, The Impact of the Media, The Devastation, The Progress, and The People. The book can be read as a self-help guide or as a source of inspiration as it leads the reader through Aimee’s journey from psychiatric hospitalization to recovery. When All Is Said & Typed is available for Kindle at Amazon.co.uk , Amazon.com , and in other regions. Foreword I’ve always loved writing so putting my everything into a book seemed like the natural next step. I remember when I was young, and I used to write...

Fran and I are delighted and proud to announce that we have signed to Eliezer Tristan Publishing for an exciting new project. Watch this space for further details! Co-founded by Stigma Fighters CEO Sarah Fader and Vice President Sarah Comerford, Eliezer Tristan Publishing publishes nonfiction and fiction largely focusing on survival in its many iterations. We encourage you to follow the ETP team on their website , Facebook , Twitter , and Instagram . Our first book High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder is published by Nordland Publishing.  

There are far more people than we can ever list by name, but those we are able to include represent a wide spectrum of experience, knowledge and expertise—and they have all believed in us. That is awesome—and humbling. As any author will tell you, compiling the acknowledgements is not the least part of writing a book! Whether you choose to recognise one person or one hundred (or none at all) it is a decision not to be taken lightly. We learned so much that we wrote a blog about it , in the hope authors might benefit from our experience and our friends and readers might understand how we went about it (and, perhaps, why they were—or were not—included). It is one year since our book, High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder was published. It seems an appropriate time to share our acknowledgements here on our blog. Acknowledgements We are grateful to writer, journalist, and mental health campaigner Rachel Kelly for her encouragement and support, and...

Whether you have recently started writing your book or are close to publishing it, there is no wrong time to start thinking about your acknowledgement page. We have brought together a few ideas and lessons based on our own experience writing High Tide, Low Tide: The Caring Friend’s Guide to Bipolar Disorder . Make a (Contact) List and Check It (At Least) Twice! You will meet many people in the course of writing your book. Not all will warrant a mention in the acknowledgements, but you don’t want to forget someone who contributed early in the process simply because they weren’t actively engaged at the end. Don’t rely on memory. Make—and maintain—a list. If it’s good enough for Santa... It doesn’t matter how you keep track—on paper, on index cards, or in a Word document—but start recording everyone you encounter. You never know when you might need to contact that guy you met at the library, or the lady at the coffee shop who said she’d introduce you to her nephew at the radio sta...

Fran and I are proud to announce that our book, “HIGH TIDE. LOW TIDE: THE CARING FRIEND'S GUIDE TO BIPOLAR DISORDER” will be published by Nordland Publishing . Watch this space for further announcements! We’d like to take this opportunity to thank each and every one of you for your interest, love, and support. It is nothing short of the truth to say we would not — could not — do this without each and every one of you. Follow us here on our our blog and on our other social media channels as we take this next stage in our journey together. “No one is too far away to be cared for, or to care.”  

Always Unstable: Bipolar and Hospitalisation: A Memoir is a book that was a long time in the making, 26 years in fact. I started to write it after my second hospitalization within a year. I felt like I had a lot to share, a lot to own up to, and a story to tell that maybe others might find interesting or helpful. I was already running a blog but I wanted to do something more. I had a bigger story to tell, one that couldn’t be contained within a blog post and one that I didn’t want to draw out over a series. The main focus of my book is my five hospitalisations over the last ten or eleven years. Psychiatric hospitalisations. Although I probably don’t need to clarify that. The first one was when I was 15, I had tried to kill myself, unsuccessfully much to my dismay. The second one didn’t come until ten years later, it was soon after I was told that I had Bipolar Disorder. I was hospitalised for a Bipolar mixed episode. Next was the mania and the eating disorder, then the electroconv...

Hey everyone! It’s been a while since my last blog post . A lot has happened in the meantime, not all of it good, but this time I definitely have some good, and hopefully inspiring, news to report! I’ve been working on a fantasy novel for nearly three years now ( check out my author page ). I had been making steady but slow progress, mainly because living with CFS, depression and IBS takes up a lot of my energy. My fortunes changed this past June, when I was contacted by a representative of Nordland Publishing , a great little publishing company based in Norway. After a lot of Skype calls I was invited to join a group of writers who pool ideas and help each other. I can’t overemphasise how good it has been for me; since meeting them I’ve finished the first draft of Book 1, transformed my plans into a trilogy and made it a lot more streamlined. The group I’m with are all great people and it’s been a huge boon for me. I have saved the best...

What an amazing week this has been. A week of awareness. A week of passionate and compassionate people making a difference. I had an opinion piece in the Maine Sunday Telegram and attended two local events; an It Takes A Community public forum for Maine Behavioral Healthcare , and a fundraiser evening for mental health non-profit Family Hope featuring humorist Tim Sample of the Maine Humor Company. It was hard for me. I don’t do events well. I get social anxiety. I get exhausted. My pain flares. My thoughts race. I can’t hear well. I can’t see well. It costs me. But the reward was gold. Attending these Mental Health Awareness Week events gave me the best gift ever. The reminder that there are people who care. One soul there had undergone ECT every 2 weeks for 17 years. Forced. We all were riveted. Speechless. Breathless. I met someone who helps those in extreme situations and shared how this affected me. How amazing it is that there are many reaching o...

Fran and I are delighted to appear in the Summer 2015 Carers edition of mental health charity Mind ’s Membership News magazine. “ My situation is unusual in that I live 3,000 miles from the person I care for. Fran and I met on Facebook; we like to say that the internet means no one is too far away to be cared for, or to care. Fran has moved through episodes of mania, depression and debilitating fatigue, and while she has local friends and a great team of professionals, I’m the person she is in most direct and constant contact with: the one she relies on to be there day or night.” Martin