I’m so excited to announce that my interview with David Byrd for American Café, Voice of America, is now up and live!
After he interviewed me about my experience and my book Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me, he spoke to Dr. Lynda Thompson of the ADD Centre about me, the treatments, and the hope that my experience gives to people with brain injury — that there are real treatments out there that make it possible to recover! I’d forgotten how difficult it was for me to write until I heard her tell Byrd where my writing skill was at when I first arrived at her clinic. Although I want to forget how bad things were, sometimes it’s good to be reminded so as to realize how tremendously far I’ve come. Take a listen, it’s only 7.5 minutes!
. . . I have been shortlisted for the 2018 Word Awards. I was a finalist with my novel She for the 2012 awards, so this is pretty cool to be a finalist for two different books!
I hope you will check them out, bookmark my page, and return to read my latest posts. And if you like my writing and brain injury advocacy, please consider supporting me through Patreon, the place for patrons like you!
Books don’t sell themselves. Unfortunately. You must market, publicize, convince people to write reviews for you — not rave about the book only to you. An up-to-date website also helps to sell yourself and your books. It ups your SEO on Google, a good thing as that’s how people find you. But an old-looking website plants doubt in potential readers’ minds.
So I’ve set myself a triple updating job: keep the blog pages that are an extension of Concussion Is Brain Injury updated with new info and ideas; blog regularly; and update the appearance and function of the entire site.
That last task I used to do yearly. Every year, I had to relearn what I’d done the previous year in the back end of my site: how to tweak the theme I used and how to read the HTML/CSS codes I’d copied and pasted to customize my site. Now the free — always and only use free is my motto — theme is obsolete, and I have to find a new one to customize. The problem is I feel like I can’t understand the back end anymore, it’s been years and years since I last updated (for reasons I touch on in Concussion Is Brain Injury). From my experience with SoloLearn, I know my programming knowledge is in my brain somewhere. I can relearn. But I haven’t retained what SoloLearn taught me well. Believe it or not, that is a step up. At one time I couldn’t have remembered my pre-injury programming knowledge at all, and whatever I had learnt would’ve vamoosed in minutes. So at least I can remember for a bit. It was hard to believe that though this past week as I found a new theme, tried to learn it, and all I felt was a massive wall between me and understanding.
I’m beginning this updating mountain climb with an easier site I manage. At first, the new theme was completely — I mean completely, absolutely, totally — incomprehensible to me. I’m used to clicking here, mousing there, to figure things out, kind of like how I play with my photos, trying out different looks until I find what I like. But all the options were, like, huh?‽!!! Thankfully the theme designers had made a helpful video; it just took awhile to find it.
I clicked here, played with settings there, tried and tried experimenting with almost every option to see what they would do to the site. But still the whole thing was murky. And I was seriously, painfully fatigued.
All of a sudden, I understood how their theme worked, what all the options did, how to “read” the back end. Phew.
But now I have to keep working on it, for I’ve only just begun with the basics of the site and after two days off, already began to forget how some of the options worked. I still have to relearn how to use the Events feature I installed years ago, figure out how to make some of the fonts look the way I want, and set up a gallery. And, oh yeah, why does the site title keep changing its look FFS??!!
Once I master the easier site, I’ll be set to work on my site.
If I take too many days to rest, which exhaustion probably will force me to, because with brain injury, rest is neverending, I’ll forget it all over again. Stab a fork in my eye if I have to take too much downtime and relearn it all. But right now, I’m pleased with how it’s looking and functioning . . . Except for that site title that seems to have acquired a gremlin.
Smashwords is having their first Boxing Week sale,* and I’ve taken 50 to 75 percent off my ebooks! Until January 1st, fill your new eReader or old tablet with all my ebooks at amazing prices. Just hit the links below!
As I entered the creative halls of NaNoWriMo, Kirkus Reviews shot me an email saying the review on Concussion Is Brain Injury is done. Nervously, I clicked the link and read:
“A brush with a life-threatening accident spurs a writer to investigate the “hidden epidemic” of debilitating brain trauma.”
Nice first line! I like that they identify me as a writer. When I wrote my first book Lifeliner, people enthusiastically received it — as a one off. The idea that I would write more books seemed . . . well, foreign. But I now have several under my belt, and a mainstay of the publishing industry recognizes me as a writer. Cool!
“In this revised version of her original 2012 publication, Canadian novelist and biographer Jeejeebhoy (Aban’s Accension, 2013, etc.) enhances the text with expanded personal detail, creating an immersive, multifaceted memoir.”
I noticed they chose the second novel I wrote as the one to name. I wondered why, then remembered that was the last one I published in paperback. Makes sense. The etc. is weird but OK. I mean, the number of words is limited; better to have the words go into the review then listing all my books!
I read on and came to —
“The author painfully describes the toll that her injuries took on her relationship with her husband, Mistral; her panic at losing the ability to read; and other cognitive impairments.”
I was temporarily confused over the name. Memory kicked in. Oh yeah, I gave everyone pseudonyms and, as usual, had fun with names when I did.
“Desperate to return to her normal life, she became intensely motivated to find a reason and resolution for her injury through determined research and treatment alternatives.”
Yup, they got that right. I was desperate. Very desperate.
“She’s uniformly candid when writing about a year of devastating setbacks, which she says felt like “a massive plough that trenches through your established networks.””
It’s been seventeen years, almost eighteen (gulp), since I was the person who would never have been this candid. Even this year, as I wrote these scenes, I wondered about it. It’s one thing to write it; another to put it out there. But it’s done, and I just hope that it makes a good difference in other people’s lives.
“Toward the end of the book, she delves even deeper into the scientific neuropathological data of her treatment plan and further developments of her “labyrinthine recovery.””
Another memory hiccup and then, oh yeah, based on everything I learnt, I put forth a theoretical treatment program for brain injury, since rest and strategies aren’t treatment, and a reading rehab program that would do more than make people settle for the new-normal of crappy, effort-full reading; it would hopefully restore a significant amount of reading skill.
I got to the final summing up and read it, holding my breath.
“Perhaps overly expository for casual readers, but the intricate details of the author’s experience are riveting and enlightening.”
OK, OK, first part maybe a little bit of a downer, but the main point — wow! Reading that was an upper. My mother was very very pleased!!
Read the entire review of Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me on the Kirkus Reviews website here. Or just go straight to Amazon and purchase it!
And if you would like to support my writing, please consider becoming a patron. I’m on Patreon, the website that lets ordinary people do the extraordinary action of supporting the artists that they love.
“Jeejeebhoy’s tale is highly emotional…uplifting, while giving a realistic view of recovery.” Self-Publishing Review
Kind of unbelievable that it’s finally done! Today, good stuff happened. I got my first review of the revised edition from Self-Publishing Review in my inbox — and such a nice review too! They also created a book page for it on their website. Bonus! Then receiving the paperback and hard cover in the mail today ended this week on a real high of this is real!! It’s done. It’s over. And the cover looks way nicer in print than I expected. Kudos to Daniella Postavsky who designed it from a couple of my images (she also helped me with my PubLaunch campaign) and Kathryn Willms of Iguana Books who went above and beyond for me in getting the book published through IngramSpark. Woot! Now the hard part begins: waiting for people to read it and see what they say. I have already heard that the font is a readable size. Awesome!
Readability was very important to me, especially for readers with brain injury and North America’s aging demographic who need reading glasses. I structured it so that readers could read just the story or the Learnings sections or both, whichever suited them. The chapters are fairly short, and the book is divided into sections that mimic my brain injury journey and allow for short attention spans. I asked for a larger font and every section to start on a right-facing page so that visually it would be easy to find the start of a new section.
The revised version is better looking, well edited, has all new material — and I hope is great reading!
This is my story about brain injury. Scroll down or see the sidebar to pre-order!
A long time ago, I suffered a brain injury, a “closed head injury” as the diagnosing doctor called it. All that had happened was that my brain had smacked around inside my skull like Jell-O inside a corrugated, shark-tooth infested bowl. Upon my diagnosis, the first thing the doctor said to me was: “You must write a book on this! It’s a hidden epidemic, and you need to get the word out!” (quoted from the original Concussion Is Brain Injury)
Well, okay, then.
In the year 2000, I was in a car crash. I emerged walking and talking, but the person I’d been was forever gone. Although no one knew it at the time, I’d sustained a concussion. The repercussions of that injury have shaped my life ever since.
Many believe a concussion is a mild injury, when in truth it is a traumatic brain injury in which the brain bangs about inside the skull. If not identified or treated within the first 48 hours, the injury can lead to secondary symptoms (euphemistically named post-concussive syndrome) that require years of rehabilitation.
Traditional rehabilitation, involving cognitive therapy and rest, were ineffective. In addition to lost neurons, I was quickly losing my social connections and relationships. The concussion was threatening to cut me off from the world.
I wanted this hidden injury healed; I wanted the plethora of problems from it, especially the cognitive ones, treated. I wanted to return to society. And so began my long quest to find better treatment. In Concussion Is Brain Injury: Treating the Neurons and Me, I share my journey and discoveries to give hope to those who have suffered from concussions and the people who care for them.
Concussion Is Brain Injury spent many years in incubation, was supported generously through a PubLaunch campaign, and is happy to be re-birthed with a brand-new reader-friendly structure. The Treating the Neurons and Me edition tells my story in all its rawness and in separate sections outlines the lessons I learned, the treatments I underwent that dramatically healed — and keep healing — my damaged brain .If, like me, you have trouble reading, I’d recommend the ebook. Ebooks are much easier to read.
My main credential to write this book is as a person with a brain injury. But I also drew on my education and experience. I am trained in the scientific method and have experience in designing, conducting, analyzing, and writing up research papers. I began working in the research field when a teenager. I worked six summers at the University of Toronto in a nutrition lab, assisting in science, animal, and human subject experiments and learnt much about laboratory research methods. As part of my Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology at the University of Toronto, I studied physiology and neurophysiology, I did an original-research thesis on reducing inattention in a child with attention deficit disorder, and conducted a year-long study on food perception in various eating populations and wrote the Abstract. I was hired as a research officer for a government of Ontario task force on the strength and quality of my research work; I created and analyzed surveys as well as did investigative research. For Lifeliner, I conducted over sixty interviews, read the literature, and waded through a massive amount of medical data. I grew up in a medical household and spent many hours learning from my mother about good nursing care and the social value of volunteering and from my father about what makes for a good clinician-researcher. Doctors don’t intimidate me.
I laid it all out, every particle of energy, every neuron corralled in the effort to finish my manuscript by the June 9th deadline. I could’ve gotten an extension, but mentally, the thought of working beyond my capacity for one more day slayed me. I’ve been working beyond my capacity for over a month, and as long as I kept going, I could keep going. But now I’ve stopped, my body has risen up and puffed my eyes, stuttered my voice, pounded my heart, weakened my muscles, and wrung me out. Used to be kind of scary shit, but for the first time, I felt pleased at completing a nonfiction book. Satisfied. I’m not disappointed at a goal unmet again. Nor did I feel like it wasn’t what I envisioned. I also had people work with me every day or every few days. It’s less lonely working on such a difficult book — my hardest one yet — all on one’s own. Having people to riff ideas off of, to pep me up, to schedule me, and keep me going through the tedious parts of writing, made a huge diff. Having an editor provide solid work gave me confidence and a feeling of standing on stable ground.
In the end, it’s good for one’s esteem to have met deadline. So it was worth it.
The day before deadline, a week after two days of the worst nausea I’d had in a long time, my brain made the last connection in new pathways, and I experienced a major uptick in organizing thoughts — I was able to see how chaotic a “Learnings” chapter was and to bring order to it — and a few hours later, an uptick in understanding — concepts that I either had sort of understood or had no clue about suddenly came into razor sharp focus. Needless to say, the new ability to think and understand meant I had to go over chapters I thought I had finished. Not satisfied with the workload, my brain decided to up it.
So Concussion Is Brain Injury II: Treating the Neurons and Me is one step closer to being published. If you want to be part of the process, get a peek at deleted scenes, or an early copy, please check out my Patreon page: http://patreon.com/ShireenJeejeebhoy
In my never-ending quest to find a way to earn an income with a brain injury that keeps interrupting the flow, I’ve joined Patreon. It’s a nifty way for readers who like my books and my blog to support me, like the patrons of old, except for as little as $1US per month. Many artists, even musicians who get much airplay, have joined Patreon because in today’s fragmented publishing world, it’s difficult to make ends meet. Throw in a brain injury that saps your energy so that all you have left is just enough to write but not enough to market, and it becomes impossible. And from the recent controversy over cultural appropriation, you may now know that the Canadian publishing scene is not exactly friendly to minorities either. A seminal moment for me on that score was the withering stare, like I shouldn’t exist, from a major publisher. Fun times.
Anywho, if you like my blog, enjoy my tweeting, get engrossed in my books, want to see Concussion Is Brain Injury succeed aka sell well, or wonder why new novels from me are no longer appearing on virtual bookstore shelves, please check out my Patreon Creator Page and consider supporting me. You’ll be rewarded, for sure!!!
I attended a unique all-day conference featuring Dr. Norman Doidge and Dr. Lynda Thompson on #HealingtheBrain that brought together survivors, medical professionals, lawyers, and insurance representatives to learn about and discuss a totally new way of treating brain injury. I live tweeted most of the day – my way of taking notes plus share with the world. And I talked to several about the exciting things we were learning. It was exhausting, but I gained a whole new purpose driving my writing of Concussion Is Brain Injury. I have 2.5 weeks left, and suddenly what’s driving me is not the deadline to get it to the editor but what I want to say!
So much has happened in the last little while!
Books don’t sell themselves. Unfortunately. You must market, publicize, convince people to write reviews for you — not rave about the book only to you. An up-to-date website also helps to sell yourself and your books. It ups your SEO on Google, a good thing as that’s how people find you. But an old-looking website plants doubt in potential readers’ minds.
