Blog Articles by Month: July 2013

Chronic Resilience: An Interview with Danea Horn

I’ve had the opportunity to interview a terrific woman for who’s written a book on stress and chronic illness. Lots of great tips and it’s taught me a lot. I’m brewing another post. as a result, but that’s for next week. “Chronic illness adds a unique kind of stress to your life that can be…

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Judging a Book by Its Cover

This is the second post in a series about publishing my book independently.  Once I decided to publish Your Life with Rheumatoid Arthritis independently, the next task was to figure out exactly how to do it. That meant breaking down the process into separate tasks and to figure out what those were, I did a…

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Book Review: Joyland

It’s been forever since I posted a book review and I’m not quite sure why. It’s not that I haven’t read good books — I have and plenty of them — but every time I finished a book worthy of a review, several days would pass in a flurry of work stuff and the moment…

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Writing to Heal: CreakyJoints Memoir Course

Combining two places that I’m proud to write for, I did a post about the new CreakyJoints memoir course for HealthCentral: “Have you ever wanted to tell the story of your life with RA or other types of arthritis? Now you can! CreakyJoints, the arthritis community started by the nonprofit Global Healthy Living Foundation (GHLF)…

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Why Go Indie?

When I started writing Your Life with RA, I fully intended to publish the traditional way. Because of the vagaries of my own RA, I didn’t think I could deliver a large manuscript on a deadline, so the idea was to write a book first, then shop it around to an agent or publisher. Decent…

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Learning from Chronic Illness

This is my CreakyJoint post for this week…   Living with a chronic illness — any chronic illness — is an excellent teacher. It may not be a learning environment most of us would choose, but once there, living through the experience can teach you some important new skills. Balancing everything that goes into living…

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A Matter of Millimeters

I am extremely thenthitive. Perhaps not so much emotionally, but physically? Fuggedaboutit. Decades of RA, especially the wreckage after my 2004 flare, combined with fibromyalgia has made me as sensitive as the girl in Hans Christian Andersen’s The Princess and the Pea. My body works all right within my current parameters, but if you mess…

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Faces of Canada Day

Last Monday, I went to the St. Lawrence Neighbourhood Association’s Canada Day party. The cloudy weather actually made it more enjoyable because it wasn’t too hot. A great time was had by all. , including me, and not have a lot to do with The festivities started off with a rousing rendition of Oh, Canada…

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Writing to Cope: A Chronic Pain Study

I recently had the opportunity to interview a very interesting woman for HealthCentral. She did a study of using writing as a coping tool for dealing with chronic pain. “Chronic pain affects not just how you feel physically, but your emotional health, as well. Effective pain management addresses the physical symptoms, but must also help…

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Unbound – FREE DOWNLOAD

Unbound is the story of my childhood with juvenile arthritis. It is a story of loss of ability, the isolation that comes with illness in childhood, but above all, it is a story of how I found freedom and independence. Unbound is free and is available as a PDF for download here.        

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Happy Canada Day!

And the best ever version of our national anthem. Perhaps not the most emotionally stirring, but so wonderfully Canadian

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