I've been an unofficial dementia carer for about three-and-a-half years. There's no easy way to say this - there was no easy way to write a book on being a dementia carer while being a dementia carer.
What sort of book was I compiling? Notes on this, that, and the other all went into computer files and stewed there. At the same time, I blogged here about some of the things I dealt with on the surface.
All the deep stuff floated around the blog, behind the blog, to the side of the blog...
I spent a long time trying to work out how to begin the story of being a dementia carer. And I didn't want to write that story. It's a story of gradually noticing someone had greater difficulty concentrating.
And eventually, that becomes the story of making the appointment to see a doctor and talking about memory problems.
I had no great desire to write that stuff down. Instead, I wrote about travel. Going away on a bus and coming back on a bus.
Coming back on the bus, I knew I'd walk into a house that I'd soon convert into a safer place.
I was coming back to town on a bus that didn't carry me - it carried the future dementia carer. And that future started the moment I walked through the door and checked on the woman with memory problems.
She'd survived her last unsupervised stint alone in a house at night, for a few nights.
The bus trip became a big symbolic event for me, packed with trivial details. Everything flowed from that point, and not from the realisation that something was wrong.
So here we are. After three-and-a-half years, I stopped holding back and I assembled the book out of that bus trip, selected blog posts, and additional observations about those blog posts.
That's the format. It was all I had. The detailed book about being a carer had to wait until I wrote this trip by bus out of my system.
I am still a dementia carer - growing more official in that capacity as the weeks turn dusty. And if I never publish this story about the bus, I'll never ever publish.
The book is coming out soon on Amazon Kindle. It lets me move ahead with the next part of the story. You write the book you write, and you put it out there.
I had choices to make. Keep the book Kindle Select, use the blog posts in the book, and take the blog down. OR. Keep the book out of Kindle Select, use the blog posts in the book, and leave the blog up for all to see.
The blog stays up, and the book is out of the Select system.
What do readers gain from buying the book? Additional commentaries on the blog posts, background info, and a dose of clarity that comes from binge-reading the whole blog.
I have a few formatting procedures to crawl through. Then the book goes out. I'll blog again when that happens. Is it a book about dementia care? It's a book about a dementia carer, starting on the journey home to a place that transforms into a care home.
Who is it for? Me. And for people who think they are about to get off a bus, out of a car, cross a street, walk through a doorway, and become carers themselves.
More news soon.
No comments:
Post a Comment