I guess I'd better start talking about why my first blog is titled 'My Story Idea.' The true meaning behind the title 'My Story Idea' is a very special one: it starts with an experience I'd like to call... High School... Let me just take you back six years --
HIGH SCHOOL & GETTING IN TOUCH WITH MY IDENTITY
I was fourteen years old, nearly fifteen. It was 2006. Indeed, that may not seem like a very long time ago to all you people who believe life goes by incredibly quickly, but to me... it feels like a whole lifetime has passed. So much has happened. I have gone through a tremendous transformation (and I mean spiritually, as well as physically and mentally) in the space of JUST SIX YEARS. As a matter of fact, I was only fourteen when I started asking questions about the Universe and what it was about...
I was starting my fourth year in High School (YR 10, basically, for all those who are British like me); it was a time when my personality was just beginning to reveal itself, I had no idea what I was to become, or whether I actually had a cool individual, quirky side. I was not very rebellious, to tell you the truth, so this was a hint of a big change that was yet to come up. I had just discovered my new favourite singer in the world - Jay Kay - from a band called Jamiroquai! 🎵🎶 I have to say, he was my calling. If I hadn't heard his new song back in the day ('Seven Days In Sunny June'), while I was out sailing on holiday with my dad on his boat, on the good old radio, I might not have found my style... or that little aspect of individuality and rebelliousness that I needed to become a happier, more free-spirited person. I was saved!! It led me to getting myself a couple of winter ear-flap hats; I just wanted to be like Jamiroquai. Now I realise, though... I've been missing the techni-colour poncho - perhaps I should get one of those next? It can be part of my new signature! Te-he!
Anyway...
FAMILY & AFTER-EASTER PROJECT
Around the same time, I'd begun to ask more questions about the Universe. In particular, I was focusing on the philosophical aspects - because I was taking Religious Studies at G.C.S.E. level - and it just so happened that, while I was answering my own questions by coming up with my own thoughtful theories, one of my older sisters (I have two, plus one older brother; I am the youngest by thirteen years 😊) also was doing the same. I call my oldest sister the most spiritually advanced one of the family - she has her own splendid, unique view of the world and it has helped me to see myself in a more grander light, it has opened up so many doors for me, allowed me to see how magic occurs in my day-to-day life.
My eldest sister and I do get along very well. She has acted as my guide from the time I started asking my philosophical questions. I would listen to my eldest sister's theories, and I would get an instinctual gut feeling that what she was saying had more truth to it than anyone I knew. I have to admit that it was difficult; I did have my moments of doubt, though I was arguably trying to listen to my own head as well as other people's, so whatever judgement I made in the end, it was NOT because I was being swayed, it was because my heart genuinely knew what I was being told was right! Luckily, I have a finely tuned, in-built sense of what's right and what isn't, I just needed a certain particular hand to guide me, that's all - and it came in the form of my awesome, psychic sister.
Right, so, let's move on. There was something to be said of my ability to spin a story; I was neither a compulsive liar nor an exaggerator, I just liked to make the simplest things sound amazing, expressing exactly how I felt when it happened - I believe this is what makes real stories, it's not necessarily about making it sound realistic, but about the feeling you put into it and the tone it has. Stories are an extension of life, we can make them sound however we want them to sound, as long as it grasps the reader or listener and makes them go "wow". I suppose, instead of being known as a writer, first and foremost, I ought to be known as a storyteller. Writing ✏ is just one of the many mediums I will use to communicate my stories - the rest will have to be revealed as time goes on.
In April, coming up to the Easter 🐇 break, in Year 10 of High School, my classmates and I were in the middle of an assignment for our English G.C.S.E. course... and one day, I thought to myself - I was remembering what had happened to me in Year 9 during our English course, when we are asked to do a creative writing piece and we were given 6 weeks to come up with an idea and write a short story. I think we had a choice between doing a ghost, sci-fi or fantasy story; I chose the fantasy route, because it was all I knew from watching/reading all those Harry Potter books 📚... I didn't do very well... for one thing, it took me at least FIVE WEEKS to come up with a simple story, and then I only had 1 week to write it! So I was struggling, basically. I ended up having a mental/nervous breakdown the weekend before it was due to be handed in, because I needed to stay at home to get my story finished but ended up procrastinating and staying round a friend's house instead - so I was left with a day to sort it all out!
I managed to get it in, anyway. But I'm afraid I did not get as good a response from my teacher as I would have liked. I have no idea what the whole grading system at that time meant, but I got given a 6, together with some rather negative but constructive comments, which I assumed meant it was not brilliant - nevertheless, it was my first proper go at writing a story, so a 6 was not bad for a first attempt. I guess it might have served as an equivalent to a pass... 🏆
So... a year on, I was ruminating over the fact that I didn't give myself much time to write the story for my creative writing project in Year 9, and in that moment, I devised a cunning plan: I would come up with a few story ideas at home, so that the next time we happened to be given a creative writing project - IF we got given one - I would be prepared. I would be able to concentrate more on the writing part than taking too much time coming up with the actual storyline. It was an excellent idea! So - I went and did that.
After school, one day, I went home and three ideas popped into my head - so easily, in fact, that they might have been put there previously by a mystical higher being 😉, waiting to be discovered... One of these storylines started out as just a drawing of two characters, and these were to become the central characters of the story I ended up writing. I will not give any more of this particular story's plot away... for it must be kept a secret until you read it! Nevertheless, the story of how I came up with it I am presenting to you right this very minute, because one day you will see me (I have no doubt about it in my mind) in the public eye, and you will most likely wonder how on earth I came to achieve something so great. And so, if you do happen to see me, or in fact be one of those lucky individuals who get to read my books, then you have this blog to fall back on, in case there are any questions you have about me and how the idea for my story was born.
This will be, I suppose, my auto-biography for the future!
MY GOAL
To continue the tale of how I created my story idea, I was coming up with three storylines, just in case I needed one for a creative writing project in the near future... Now this is the spooky part... Two weeks or so after I did this, I heard, one day in the classroom from my English teacher, that we were going to be asked to do some CREATIVE WRITING for our next project!!! You can imagine my excitement and enthusiasm when I heard this piece of news. I was like: "What an interesting coincidence - I have some story ideas already for that creative writing piece!" I was telling my teacher how I was glad she was setting this project, and I was privately thinking, "Hey, I'm gonna do an excellent job on this, and I will be praised." Little did I know that I was going to end up taking this story a lot more seriously after finishing that project.
By the time our project began, I focused on the story of the two characters which I had simply drawn out in a notebook, and started developing the plot along with the rest of the characters from there. I chose to just write the first chapter, partly because I knew it was going to be impossible for me to know what would happen to these characters throughout the whole story before I got to writing it - our teacher told us we either had to write the first chapter, the last chapter, the middle chapter or a short story... a short story was NEVER going to do me, so I had no other choice but to go with the first chapter, partly because I already had a scene playing out like a mini film in my mind, and that happened to take place at the beginning.
Next thing, I was halfway through my six weeks of writing the story... I was in my room, sitting on my bed, thinking: "I wonder what it would be like to continue writing this story. Maybe if I did it properly, if I really made the writing excellent and perfect... this could be a really great story, like Harry Potter!" Well (snigger 🙊), you can see how naive I was at that time, and wasn't it a brilliant time? Gosh, I've been through a lot since then: the insecurity, the perfectionism, the writer's block - mostly, though, this was all to do with the issue that I had no idea how to write properly let alone write a proper book that excelled to even J.K. Rowling's standard.
In fact - and I am going off on another tangent here - I didn't start getting into reading other books, beside Harry Potter, until I decided I was going to write this story. I wanted to see if there were any other books out there which were well written and easy to read, like J.K. Rowling's - but to my surprise, there was nothing out there which, to my eye, was well written enough for me to really understand or get into reading it over and over again. Nothing like the Harry Potter books anyway...
So, by this point, my goal and my intention for writing this book shifted: I now felt compelled (like it was my destiny to do this) to write a story - properly and with the correct spelling and grammar - that other children, and teenagers (like myself), would want to read. It wasn't a question of me doing it for myself, I felt at that point that it was my duty to provide people with something other than Harry Potter to get stuck into; I knew that some day fans of Harry Potter would start to grow bored of the series and want to move on to something else that's just as entertaining and well written plus even more unique and empowering.
My goal was now to get my writing up to scratch. And my ambition was to write a book based on what I would love to read, for others who have trouble getting into the majority of the other books in the world. I realised that it wasn't their fault they didn't want to read these books, it was mainly because they were written so complicatedly, and in such a strange fashion some of the time, that we, who are not on the same wavelength as the author, could not follow or get into what had been written, because our brains are not programmed to read in this way. J.K. Rowling did very well because she wrote Harry Potter in a way that every person could basically understand it; it may have been conceived as 'dumbing down literature', but in my opinion, readers should not be excluded, therefore, we have a duty to write in a way that can be understood by E-V-E-R-Y-O-N-E in the world, not just by the intellectuals.
I HATED READING & HARRY POTTER (Disclaimer: I become in love with both in the end)
This brings me to another aspect of myself: I was not a heavy, or should I say avid, reader while I was growing up; I was more into films and television, I was a visual person and I didn't even trust the fantasy genre enough to want to read Harry Potter as a child, even though all my friends were getting into it. I just thought that the books were corny and typically about magic - I was eight or nine years old, and I couldn't understand fantasy, even though I had watched Terminator many times (as well as those Disney films I had on video in my bedroom) since I was five years old! How ridiculous... and I'd even tried to read the second Harry Potter book once (because there was nothing else I could think of reading at the time), to the teacher's helper in primary school, while I was in Year 5 or 6. It was the chapter where Ron was burping up slugs - and I remember the lady going: "Eeeuuuuuggghhh, burping slugs!" 🐌 And I was just in a daze, because I was mainly concentrating on reading - I had no idea that what I was reading actually meant anything - and when she was reacting to what I was saying I was thinking, confusedly, "Blimey, is that really what's happening?"
Another time I remember Harry Potter being introduced to me was when a friend got me 'Chamber of Secrets' - the book, not the film - for my eighth or ninth birthday. I was thinking sarcastically, "Greeeeeeeaaaat," and what I actually said to her was, "Wow, thank you!" And THEN, after this, I got given 'Philosopher's Stone' by my Aunt. Oh yes, that was annoying - she thought I was going to want to read it because everyone else my age was into that book (😒) I was not amused. And stubbornly, I decided not to read either of those two books... UNTIL - I feel foolish for even recounting this story - the first FILM 🎫🎦 came out at the cinemas. I had witnessed the trailer, and thought, "Oh My Goddd, I am not seeing that!" (I was ten years old and the biggest Harry Potter Grinch ever, ha-ha!) Nevertheless, my eldest sister (the psychic one) was planning to go see it, so, thinking that I might as well go with her - because I loved to go to the cinema with my sister, just for the sake of it really - I now didn't even care that we were going to see 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'. Though, I was sort of dreading it, I remember, for some reason...
The film began, and just as the first scene rolled on, I became hooked. Already this was proving to be my kind of film. Afterwards, I was like: 'I want the game!' and my sister got me a special goody bag which I thought included the whole game of Harry Potter for PC, but turned out in fact to be just a demo 😢 I was gutted afterwards when I found this out. But anyhoo, I must tell you why the film took my fancy... for this simple reason: I had no idea that fantasies were, like, stories where unusual things happened, my brain just sort of thought that fantasies were full of unrealistic fairy-tale stuff; basically I was a little slow on the uptake, kind of like Neville Longbottom (😁). I was only into films if they had an unusual, unique sort of twist to them, like Terminator 2 - where you get this random man appearing out of nowhere, naked, and he can make himself wobbly, and this other man, who is really a robot underneath the skin - that was like 'wow' for me.
So... when I started watching the first scene of 'Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone', I was thinking, "This better be interesting," and low and behold, it had a really mysterious and unusual storyline, which I was not expecting! It was not so much about the huge giant that fell out of the sky on a motorbike, it was more the fact that there was this baby who was about to be left on a doorstep for some strange, mysterious reason, and I was like: Click❕ goes my brain, stamp my foot on the brake, ruuuuuuuuuuuuuuu... "I'm watching! Now, tell me what the answer to this mystical quest is."
ERAGON SIMILARITIES (eek!)
Now, what should I talk about next I wonder...?
Well, basically, what you've read previously is pretty much how I came about the idea of writing my story. It is a fantasy, like the Harry Potter series, but you'd be pleased to know that it is not a copy, like plenty of other wannabe fantasy novels out there. No, this is so unique, from the storyline to the characters, and I can tell because so far I haven't seen a single film or book that has come out which includes any of the quirks and abnormalities that my story does include.
Oh! But that does remind me... When I first started coming up with the story, I remember, there was one series of fantasy novels I ran into at that time, and I noticed that a lot of the ideas I had come up with originally were similar to what had already been put in this one book; I thought it was like a funny instance of synchronicity. It was the Eragon series, but fortunately, I did make a lot of changes since then, because of that - so it no longer resembles those books, rest assured! Nevertheless, the synchronised scenario certainly did encourage me to make my storytelling more unique and complex, rather than typical and trashy... hey, I was fourteen/fifteen years old, and I was just starting out as a story creator! My series has evolved, along with myself; as over the years I have been getting more in touch with my spirituality. I've learnt a hell of a lot about life. Due to these extra fantastical experiences, I had some more special things to incorporate into the series, and I am thankful for those, otherwise my story would just be like any other story in the world! I like to think I've put a large percentage of myself into this story, which would naturally make it unique.
STARTING COLLEGE & WRITER'S BLOCK (ugh!)
I had been working on the PLANNING-of-my-books for many years after I initially came up with the idea; I started college in 2007, and let me tell you that was no picnic for me. The problem was actually, in fact... I was so interested in my story and the research for it by that point that all I really wanted to do while I was studying at college was focus on that - rather than on my coursework or on my revision. I guess that means a slap on the wrist for moi... But, in my defence, college was a pretty tough experience for me, tougher than anything I've ever experienced before that era. By the end of my second year, I think I started writing some of the chapters of my first book, but I was still a novice --
Oh, oh, oh, perhaps I should have mentioned this earlier, but you're probably wondering how a teenager who wasn't thinking of studying English at college or university managed to learn her punctuation and grammar? The truth was, I taught myself. My Dad bought me some books online, which helped me a lot. And I also read Harry Potter a load of times, just to get to grips with how punctuation was used by a pro writer. That's it, basically. So I haven't got an English degree 🎓; nobody in my school had bothered to teach us punctuation and grammar, which frustrated me at the time because I would have wanted to learn, but all they were concerned about was the coursework. It is an abomination. Concerning, actually, that teachers these days can't find the time to teach students such skills which are obviously necessary. But never fear, anyway, I did manage to teach myself how to write properly. And I think I'm doing a pretty good job of it right now... te-he-he!
Where was I? Oh yes! End of second college year: I was seventeen, coming on eighteen. I started writing my book properly; I was pretty nervous and lacking in self-confidence. I remember thinking, "What if I get this wrong?" or "What if I'm not ready to write this yet?" and, every time I would decide to write a bit more, I would feel really wary and apprehensive about it. But I knew then that I would have to get some practice if I wanted to get better and better, so, basically... it took a while, but I did manage to get more confidence in writing. However... in came writer's block a couple of years later. And this was what I call 'IMMENSE writer's block' ❎❌, because I spent the best part of three years or so working on the same paragraph in the same chapter that I had started to write in 2007. Unbelievable, huh? I was beginning to doubt that I would ever get into the groove of writing this story. I was really perfectionist about it at the time, and I guess, looking back on it now, I realise that is where I might have gone wrong. But I was so scared of getting my punctuation and grammar wrong that I ended up focusing on that aspect rather than actually getting my ideas down on to paper. I was blocking myself, basically, but unfortunately it wasn't as simple as telling myself to not block myself and be an UN-perfectionist.
You see, I had been stubbornly living by the philosophy for years, since my high school days, of getting everything down once and writing it perfectly: that was how I wanted to write these books. Really, this philosophy came about because in our exams we were told to write what we knew down first and then in the last five minutes go back and correct it - does this advice sound a little familiar to you too? - and I always thought: "That's complete rubbish - I can't check everything I write in just five minutes, and I never even get to finish writing it before time is up anyway!" so I've always stuck to what made sense to me and tried to get it right the first time in exams, only I never succeeded very well, particularly when it came to History - I was completely rubbish at that subject. Sorry, teacher.
ACTING
Time to plow on through this next bit... so, lets catch up. For 5 years out of the 6 it took me to get my book to the stage of completion, I had been researching, getting the story up to scratch and getting stuck on the actual writing part; this was the writer's block. I was very unhappy from 2008-2011, due to the fact that I just could not seem to move on from the first chapter of Book I. Therefore, in 2011 I decided to take a break from writing; I was not getting ANYwhere, and every time I tried to knuckle down and rack my brains over the one single sentence that was proving difficult to get perfect (you see, I like to write my chapters consecutively and in order, because unlike other authors my brain just cannot skip ahead to other parts of the story, and half the time I don't know what I'm going to end up writing, so it was a lot better for me to go through every step of the way with my characters, and that way, the story would end up flowing more naturally), I was having no luck at all.
From that point on, I turned my focus onto something else, which I thought was going to help me to support myself financially...
Acting.
Yes, I know, that is so typical. For someone to change their career so suddenly to something that EVERYONE is trying to do. I was being unrealistic. But, I have to say, I needed a little confidence boost, and ACTING was definitely the way to go to get what I needed. So I went and took some classes at a local theatre, and that was quite fun; it gave me some experience and confidence in my acting abilities. After that, well, what should happen but my mum gets a mysterious email from a random person asking if she knew of any actors/actresses (because she is part of a troupe herself) who could help her out and volunteer to act out a scene for her college film project. I, feeling that this was the right thing to do, got in touch with this girl and immediately we clicked and I was asked to meet up with her and the other people she had got to help her. She, I think, was about two years younger than me at the time; she reminded me of an old high school friend I used to be best friends with, in fact. And through her, I met this guy who ended up offering me a chance to help out with a show he was directing at a theatre he volunteered at. His name was Steve. And the filming of this girl's scene ended up being cancelled, so I ended up working with him instead. What a funny coincidence! And my experience on his project ended up being the best one I ever had in my life.
After I completed that, I was at a loss for what to do. I still didn't know what to do with my writing; I kept getting all these brilliant ideas for things to happen in the story, but I just couldn't translate it into words.
I had to pick another career route, in case I didn't manage to get my writing sorted out in time, so I decided, on the spot one day - things were pretty stressful at home and, you know, family tension got the better of me - I was going to enroll back at college and start a 2 year course in Acting. That was probably the best thing I could have done for myself at that time, because that following year, I met a lot of great, fun people on my course, on top of which I ended up learning a lot about myself and improving my spirituality. But, on the downside of that, I was getting less and less amused with my course. As I was yearning to be at home more, I started getting more stressed at college. I was not getting enough sleep... and so... I quit my two year course after completing the first year. A bit unfortunate, BUT, this was because I was saved in 2012. A miraculous event took place, and it happened because I had gained confidence from being at college and doing all that acting, as well as because I had reached a higher stage of my spirituality so I was not using my brain as much as I used to.
Basically, what happened was that during the summer - I was happy to say the least that I had finished my first year of college - I was just in a state of abandonment and total relaxation. For my 21st birthday, I happened to receive some very appropriate gifts from my older brother, who was working abroad, one of which included a special writer's pen. Indeed, I had even been thinking a week before my birthday that I ought to get myself one of these, as it might be nicer to write with and thus would give me the ability to write better.
That was just my wishful thinking, but you'd be surprised actually that it came true for me in that very month.
So I get given this special writing pen, along with a clicky pencil-thing, in a very nice black box, and after my birthday I went into Gunwharf Quays and, just for the sake of it, because they looked nice in the shop, bought myself, with my birthday money, a nice new hardback notebook. I thought maybe of using it to write my story in, but I was not getting my hopes up at all that I would get any further than where I had been stuck for all those years, previously...
It was late July - or middle of July, can't remember exact date...
Oh, wait, I should probably say first how all throughout my year at college, I had - ironically - started creating a PowerPoint based on the chapters in my first book; weird how I start college and all I want to do is focus on my writing! 😕 So all my creative juices had been flowing, and on top of that my bizarre spiritual experiences throughout the first six months of 2012 had completely drained my body of all negativity, so I was, in a way, unblocked. RESULT! 😃
Maybe it was to do with the fact that I was feeling so relaxed, or that I was getting some spiritual guidance from somewhere... or maybe it just happened to be the right time and the right situation, I don't know... but one day after my birthday, I just decided to randomly give into this recurring idea I had been having for ages since I had come back home from college, and use my new special writing pen and fresh hardback notebook to write my first chapter again up until the point where I usually get stuck and then... when I did just that... I took a deep breath and said to myself, "Okay, relax, just... write whatever comes to your head, Sophie.' I did this - and what would you know, half an hour later, I had got to the next page - I had never been able to get to the next page before! I was like: "OHHHHHHH MYYYYY GOOOOOOOD! 😆 I've got my groove, finally! I'm writing it, I'm really writing it!' And two days later, I finished my first chapter. 🙌
You can probably imagine how chuffed I was at that point. I felt amazed and yet totally baffled 😵 by what I had just managed to get done, in just a fifth of the time I spent trying to get it done previously! Completely insane. But now, I was so scared that I was gonna fall back to the old routine... so I kept on going, writing the next chapters of my book, until... about a month and a half later... I was at Chapter 9!!! That was when I took a break. But there were still so many chapters to do, and I was even more scared by this point that I was going to lose my mojo.
END OF THE WORLD, 2012?
When I kick-started my writing again, half a month later, I was getting so much more apprehensive and nervous as I was writing the following chapters... that I ended up getting my FIRST ANXIETY ATTACK 😨 at the start of November, in 2012. This was very strange and scary for me. I had never had an anxiety attack or any kind of thing like it before in my life; I am a very healthy person normally, I rarely suffer from depression or anything else that lots of people suffer from, so I was pretty shaken by this sudden, and completely random, anxiety attack that I got. I'm not completely sure if it could have been an "anxiety attack" but that's the only name I can think of calling it.
Basically, I was not getting much sleep one day - but I rarely did anyway, my sleep schedule has always been wrong since I got into my late teens - I stayed up the whole of the previous night to write chapters in my book, I was pretty frazzled and exhausted and I just couldn't get to sleep again, I was feeling so unsettled. Not only that, but I hadn't much food in my system, that didn't really help matters. I went shopping later that day with my dad, and when I came home, I tried to get some sleep... but I started having alarming palpitations 💓 in my chest; it felt like every time I was beginning to drift off, my heart was going to jump out of my body; and that was when the anxiety attack started.
Later that afternoon, I couldn't breathe, 😭 and I went to complain to the rest of my family, and one of my sisters told me that I was having a panic attack. (Later, my eldest sister, the more really psychic one, told me it wasn't a panic attack, so we stuck with calling it an anxiety attack instead.) I was thinking, "Oh no! A panic attack? Please, no, why me?" and after that I decided to have a very big lasagne for supper. It certainly helped, but I was having to spoon it slowly and carefully into my mouth because I was shaking so much.
Next, I went into my eldest sister's bedroom, because she has, by far, the most positive energy, and I thought if I could just surround myself with that I might feel more relaxed; I did, and so I slept there on the floor that night, I couldn't get to sleep in my room at all, my heart was doing palpitations again and I felt like I was dying, honestly. One hour later, in my sister's room, my heart became still, and my whole chest felt warm, like it was filling up with heat from the inside. I fell asleep, but I didn't realise it until I woke up, half an hour later, and I was remembering how I had been dreaming before, so I said to my sister, who was in her own bed: "I fell asleep," and she replied: "Oh good." I was so relieved. I didn't think I would ever be able to get to sleep; I thought that if I did manage to, I would be dead because of how my heart kept going into spasms whenever I began to relax.
I decided the next day, then, to take a break from my writing, for I thought it was probably due to that that I got the anxiety attack. Meanwhile, I was being given a breakdown by my eldest sister of what was happening to me: she suggested that I drink loads of hot chocolate because the milk would deal with my chest area, or something like that - can't remember really, but I do remember it helped magnificently. I became dependent on it, like it was my personal elixir of life or something (ha-ha). I stopped drinking tea for a while, because I thought the caffeine in it wasn't going to help me relax, and just stuck to water and tea. I got over my first anxiety attack pretty well, and I returned to my writing the following week.
A week later, though, on the same exact day as I got my first anxiety attack (pretty strange coincidence, that, I reckon), I surprisingly got another one. This one wasn't as bad as the first but it still hit me like a ton of bricks. Therefore, I decided to take another week - actually, two weeks I think it was - from writing; I thought it had to be the source of my problem, as it was that which made me get so restless before I went to sleep.
At the same time, I was seeking advice from the Spirit World - basically, how I do this is I just imagine someone is listening to me out there in the cosmos, and I just ask specific questions and I just go with whatever thought comes my way first, and it usually is the right answer (you don't have to believe me, but it has done wonders for me in my life so far). The messages I got were basically that everyone in the world was having anxiety or panic attacks at the same time, but they were taking different forms depending on the person. In other words, the mood and general atmosphere of the world at that time was causing me, causing everyone, to feel like they were being suffocated, and I got proof of this, because when I got my first anxiety attack, other members in my family were feeling all panicky and anxious, and my cat had a serious stomach pain the week before I got my anxiety attack and we thought he was going to die, so it was like the feeling that the End of the World was near was being spread throughout my whole family. And it was November/December 2012.
So, I managed to heal after my second anxiety attack; it took a lot longer than before. On top of that, I was very, very, very, very shaken and worried because I thought, "What if they don't stop?" and that made me even more anxious.
I got my third anxiety attack a short while after that, and this caused me to take immediate action. I didn't want to get them anymore, I knew anxiety attacks just weren't what I should be getting 😣, so I thought, "What can I do to improve my state of mind, so I don't get them anymore?" And I kept getting the message from somewhere deep inside myself that the recent anxiety attack wasn't to do with me, it was to do with how the rest of the world was feeling, so with that in mind, I asked my next question to someone very specific who has been my kind of spirit guide or friend for a while - and she said to me, in response to my question, "Will my anxiety attacks stop after 2012?" that I will "indefinitely" stop getting anxiety attacks.
And low and behold, since then, I haven't had a single one, and I don't think I am ever going to get one again, because the atmosphere and mood of the world has changed dramatically since those two months - November and December - in 2012.
Anyway - what does this have to do with my writing? Well, I found out that my writing had nothing to do with my anxiety attacks, so... with the help of my trusty iPod music 🎧 (without listening to my music I would NOT have been relaxed enough to continue writing properly), I got back to it and finished the final chapters of my first book! A week before the end of January, in 2013, was when I managed to complete it, at long last. I am SO happy with what I have achieved in the space of SIX MONTHS alone, with massive breaks in between, what with all the anxiety and stress.
WHAT NOW?
In time, I completed the rest of the series (the draft versions) and that took me until 2014.
Since that year, Books 1 and 2 have been published on Amazon and I am now in the process of building up my massive following, while developing my side-along talents in illustration/graphic design. I hope that one day it will become as popular as Harry Potter and be turned into a film series. 😄 Fingers crossed.
