How
to Deal with Anxiety
looks like a great self-help book. Do you plan any follow-ups or
similar genre books?
Yes
What
do you think makes a great self-help book?
A
book that helps you to become ‘unstuck’. Often you might be in
an emotional and mental place that is debilitating and hard to get
out of and you need a helping hand. Sometimes it can improve by
talking to family and friends. However, we sometimes can improve
more with professional help and guidance.
What
inspired you when writing How
to Deal with Anxiety?
The
years of working with clients and my own life’s experience dealing
with anxiety inspired me. I find as time goes by I am working with
more and more complex cases and important stories.
What
are your ambitions for your writing career? Full time? Part time?
Writing
has sort of taken over and may do for a while but the professionals
have said to keep the momentum up to be successful, so ‘I am on
it’, as some say.
When
did you decide to become a writer?
It
might sound strange, but I have a lot of knowledge and practice on
psychotherapy and coaching but writing about it can sometimes be a
struggle. My psychotherapy theory facilitator said I would stop
wasting my own time if I were to give up writing, in her frustration.
Maybe I was wasting her time! That made me think; do I just follow
her instructions and just give up? A little voice in my head said,
‘there are many books inside me’.
After
the devastating news from my class facilitator, in a couple of days I
thought ‘ I know what I will do, I will write a book’. I had no
idea how to start but I had been following a coach by emails from the
States and had a trail blazing finding of a network of people who had
literacy problems but they were earning 6 figure incomes in the
publishing business! I was up day and night watching webinars since
November 2016 for 3 months! The kids thought I had lost my mind. I
began to find key people giving the entire business model away on
writing, but they had all already made it so they didn’t care and
they were not worried who said they couldn’t spell or write. The
manuscript journey from start to finish took me about 3 months, with
all the proof reads, edits, and graphics project. I wrote about
what I know about and what I do best as a psychotherapist, coach and
energy psychologist.
I
soon read about Keith Houghton a shy publisher, he once said, and
there was no turning back for me about what anyone thinks anymore.
When
writing How
to Deal with Anxiety
did anything stand out as particularly challenging?
I
am short sighted so I need my glasses on and even with my glasses on
I often edit in colours to picture my proof reading, editing and
specific ideas. It’s great though that the boom in Indie writers
means that there are hands out there to help with grammar, another
‘thing’ that I think infuriated my facilitator about my essay.
How
did you come up with the concepts and ideas in How
to Deal with Anxiety?
It
just comes natural working dynamically, on the phone, Skype, email
and face to face. I have a passion to deal with anxiety in a way to
dissolve it even with high levels of trauma cases. I wanted to write
something practical, especially for patients on long waiting lists,
and came up with the idea of an ‘Interim Guide on how to ….’
help yourself in a time-frame where people may or may not be self
harming or thinking about planning a drastic decision before
treatments or psychological intervention.
What
do you like to do when not writing?
I
like to have quiet moments in my garden. I want to listen to the
birds again. That all went out the window a few years ago when the
economy crisis started escalating and has positioned me on the phone
a lot talking to clients. I do like cooking exotic food and would
like to take up traveling and actually meet some of those online
publishing mentors face to face.
I
am working on writing a series of books on different diseases and
mental health topics, and maybe some suspense fiction genres, but
can’t say much more. The vision is, it’s all about our
individual self care inside the global complex conditions we find
ourselves in, trying to survive.
Jennifer
Hooper
Indie
Author – Self Publisher