Normally, when I’m feeling well (which doesn’t happen very often), I don’t think of telling anyone and everyone who stops at my Facebook’s author page or here on Goodreads that I suffer from – or live with every day – an incurable genetic illness. I have Hypokalemic Periodic Paralysis, which happens in approximately 1 out of every 100,000 people. I have had it for a very long time, much of which I spent fighting with doctors, trying to convince them that I was NOT crazy, that something very real was happening inside me.
This is a hard disease to diagnose. For starters, you need a doctor willing to believe you. You need an emergency room with enough time on their hands to run every test they can think of to figure out why this person can’t speak, can’t move, and is struggling to stay awake. You do not have 3 to 4 hours to wait in the waiting room. You need the potassium tested NOW. My episodes, the normal ones, are over in that amount of time. My potassium is then high enough for a medical professional to brush me aside as a hysterical female. It is never high enough for me to be properly functional, just high enough for no one to believe something is wrong, seriously wrong.
Most authors probably want to get out there, promote their books, browse the internet for marketing ideas, throw their energies into doing everything and anything to drum up attention and sales. I would love to have that energy. I just don’t. Haven’t for over 25 years. I am so grateful for Amazon, and for promotional tools like World Literary Cafe and their wonderful Facebook links. Without them, I would have attracted little notice. With them, I have a way within my abilities to lure people to my Facebook page and maybe garner a few more sales.
My goals are of necessity modest. I want to finish editing the books I have written over the past 25+ years. I want to get them listed on Amazon. I want to know that after all these years of my books sitting on my hard drive, at least people are finally reading them. And much to my delight, liking them.
Behind every author out there, there is a story. There may be children pulling at the leg or whining, or elderly parents needing as much care as those children at the leg. There may be loss, death of someone beloved that pulls at the spirit. There may be teenagers that require more attention than the little ones, teenagers sullen and frightening, while parents try to decipher what is wrong.
So we all do what we can with what we have. And we hope that someone will find our books when they are sent out into the big wide world filled with other books, bigger books, fancier books, that someone will buy them, and that same someone will love them.
And of course, that those same someones will give us a review!
(original blog date 12/2013)
