hi--i'm new

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my name is april. i'm 36 and was just diagnosised with asperger's this month. i have always felt like a freak all my life, so getting the diagnosis was a relief for me.

i'm married and have three children 16, almost 15, and almost 9. i homeschool the kids.

i don't work. i'm on ssi. i do have two book published though (don't make much of anything on them--lucky to break). marketing just isn't my bag!! ! anyway, my first book (secrets of a city bench) is about what it's like to survive abuse/rape as i am a survivor. my second book (gift of the morning) is actually about what it feels like to be me with asperger's. my therapist at the time asked me to tell her what it was like inside of my head and i couldn't verbalize it. before i knew it, this book just popped into my head. after i wrote it, it actually helped point us to the diagnosis of asperger's.

right now i've been hired to write a nonfiction book about a local teen who passed from luekemia. it's really hard for me to do--just so very different from fiction.

writing is my big interest, but i also enjoy getting freebies on line and using coupons. i hate to shop, but when i can use a bunch of coupons, it makes me feel better because i can focus on the money aspect of it (i love numbers) instead of how out of place i feel. plus it also helps as we are below the poverty line.

well, that's a little about me.
april

Welcome to WP!!

Welcome to the Wrong Planet

So how do You get in to writing books I have always wanted to write a book Myself.

Hey welcome to WrongPlanet!

I think its really cool that you got some books published! I myself have story ideas sometimes but can never seem to find the discipline to take them to any sort of finished product (I'm an engineering major), so you should be proud that you actually got something they're selling on Amazon!

Hi and welcome. Nice to see someone who's published - i hope to do that one day too. I too worry about promoting though. It's not my strong point. I'm actually a good public speaker and can probably doa book tour with Q&A and that stuff. It's dealing with publishers that I find intimidating.

Welcome to Wrong Planet.

I've felt like a freak for a good part of my life, as well.

thanks for all the welcomes!!

as to the writing, i hate speaking. i would much rather write any day as to speak. i have a lot of difficulties conveying things through speech (at least it seems that way to me). then also, i have a tendency to repeat things over and over again in my head. when i was really little, i would sit with the same book and go from picture to picture in the book and have adventures for each picture, and no matter how many times i did it, the adventures were the same. i would do the same thing with blocks--i would line them up and move one and that would be a step in the adventure, then move another, etc. and again, the steps would always be the same. so i think that my writing is an extension of that. i get these story lines in my head and then replay them over and over and over again until i get a chance to write them down.

as to publishing, i could not handle the traditional publishing route. i get bogged down in all the formalities of it--sending in querry letters and proposals and all that bull. it didn't take long before i realized that i couldn't go that route, so i went with print on demand self-publishing. it works for me because i can go ahead and publish and bypass all the formal stuff. there's a little bit of stigma in the writing world about being self-published--like if you don't go the traditional way you're nothing other than a wannabe--but screw it!! ! at least my books are out in print, and even though i really don't make any money with it, i still feel a sense of accomplishment.

as to the public speaking, i too can do that with relative ease. i used to be in theater. i loved it because everything is scripted, and public speaking is basically the same thing. i haven't done so well at getting things set up though because again, it takes marketing yourself to get the speaking engagements. plus i can't do too much of it anyway because it drains me so much. if i could just get up there and do my thing and leave, i could handle it a little better, but it's all the stuff before and after. there's so much interaction that it totally drains me.

well, i hope i've answered some of your questions. thanks again for the welcome.
april

Hi, April! I live public speaking, provided either no one who knows my past reputation is in the crowd, or they don't recognize me.

Hi!

Welcome to Wrongplanet! I hope you enjoy posting here!