{"id":343,"date":"2017-11-06T09:26:33","date_gmt":"2017-11-06T09:26:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/?p=343"},"modified":"2017-11-06T09:26:33","modified_gmt":"2017-11-06T09:26:33","slug":"five-books-and-a-cancer-diagnosis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/?p=343","title":{"rendered":"Five Books and a Cancer Diagnosis"},"content":{"rendered":"

Well,\u00a0 nobody wants to be diagnosed with cancer. At the very least, it does\u00a0 rather upset your plans. There are various ways you can react; my attitude has\u00a0 been, Sod you, cancer, I’m not going gracefully.\u00a0 You’re there, and I can’t avoid you, but you’re not who I am. The cancer I have has been described as Incurable, but Manageable, and the fact that I’m still here, admittedly running at half-speed, \u00a0four years later, seems to bear this out. And it can have some good results. Without the cancer, my last five books probably wouldn’t exist. And thanks to two excellent self-publishing companies, they’re now here and readable.<\/p>\n

Two of them I’d already written; these were the first of a projected trilogy on the girls who played a part in the Trojan war, and the first one went through the dispiriting process of being rejected by conventional publishers, despite me being a published author, who’s won prizes. These kind of books don’t sell, said some. Your heroine isn’t feisty enough, said others (I think feisty now means she’d have to dress up as a boy and go around shooting people.) She spends too much time spinning and weaving, said others, as though women in ancient Greece didn’t have to do this. My heroines do their share of this but manage to get out of it wherever possible. If that’s not feisty , then I think feisty isn’t for me.<\/p>\n

So\u00a0I thought I had no choice but to forget about these two books, never mind the third of the trilogy which I had just started to write.\u00a0These days unpublished books aren’t even manuscripts, they’re simply holes in cyberspace somewhere which only the writer knows how to find. They don’t exist in any real way.\u00a0 Without you there to press the few buttons that lead to them, they’re nowhere.<\/p>\n

That was where the cancer diagnosis came in. My first thoughts were the usual ones, worry for my family, for myself, anxiety about how the treatment was going to be, etc. But pretty soon down the line came the thought of those two books. \u00a0And again, my reaction was aggressive and angry rather than ladylike and accepting. Sod you, publishers, I thought. I shall publish them myself.\u00a0 The excellent Silver Wood Books enabled me to do this, and the impetus of wanting to finish the series gave me an incentive to write the third, despite then being rather knocked out by chemotherapy treatment.\u00a0 (I hope not being well at the time doesn’t show in the text – I don’t think it does.)The first book, Helen’s Daughter, and\u00a0the second, The Burning Towers\u00a0both came out in 2014, and the last, The Silver-Handled Knife in\u00a0\u00a02015.\u00a0 They have lovely covers, and I like the look of them as much as anything I’ve had conventionally published. Self-publishing certainly isn’t to be sneered at.<\/p>\n

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And there was even a bonus – SIlver Wood invited me to do an ebook for a new series they were running, and this, The Beautiful One, the story of Helen of Troy as a girl, turned my trilogy into a quartet. The\u00a0 chemotherapy had become less aggressive by now\u00a0but I was pleased to find I was still able to write.<\/p>\n

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The fifth of my post-cancer books was something quite different. In\u00a0 2011,I’d published a book called A Bracelet of Bright Hair, which was a sort of a journal of my poetry reading over the year and how it had enhanced my life.\u00a0 It wasn’t the sort of book which fitted into any convenient category, and my agent wouldn’t look at it. Self publishing was the only answer, and Arima books did a lovely job with it. Although it hasn’t sold in huge quantities, it has acquired a loyal following, and people like to buy it as a present, often for those who are ill or bereaved, who can find comfort in poetry.<\/p>\n

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Well, the peculiar circumstances of my cancer years impelled me to start another such, which I wrote during 2016. This wasn’t a nice year, both politically and personally, yet my overall\u00a0 mood I hope, was optimistic. It gave a sense of purpose to the year, to write about my daily routines, and the things going on around me, and find poems to suit the day.\u00a0 The cancer stuff gets mentioned – it has to – but I wanted to show that there can be a lot more in a cancer patient’s life than just having cancer.\u00a0 And while the world\u00a0 was in a bad way, I managed to be fairly cheerful throughout – illness can concentrate your mind like this. I call this book Dancing in the Chequered Shade, because that suggested\u00a0 the contrast of light and darkness which was that year to me.<\/p>\n

Again my agent wouldn’t touch it,\u00a0and self publishing was the only option, and I turned again to Arima. Now the book is in the final stages of preparation – they’ve promised me it will be out by Christmas, and I’ve already had the lovely jacket design.\u00a0 So while I can’t exactly say thank you, cancer, for making this all possible,\u00a0 there’s some good to be found in all situations.<\/p>\n

\"ChequeredShade_cov02\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Well,\u00a0 nobody wants to be diagnosed with cancer. At the very least, it does\u00a0 rather upset your plans. There are various ways you can react; my attitude has\u00a0 been, Sod you, cancer, I’m not going gracefully.\u00a0 You’re there, and I can’t avoid you, but you’re not who I am. The cancer I have has been […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-343","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=343"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":358,"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/343\/revisions\/358"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=343"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=343"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/francesthomas.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=343"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}