Author Interview
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.
How can readers discover more about you and your work?
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
