Autistic author hopes book will raise awareness about autism

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https://fox2now.com/2019/05/01/autistic-author-hopes-book-will-raise-awareness-about-autism/

I'm thinking of getting myself a copy.

Awareness already exists. People are already aware of it.

Autism awareness in Africa...

Where is your awareness of DESTROYED CHILD AUTHORS ? After my 16 years of raising awareness of that in the scene. Including my chapter 21 of British multi-writer compilation book Bittersweet on the Autism Spectrum, 2017, and including in the Scottish parlt.

autisticgroupsfairnesswatch.wordpress.com/tag/child-authors/

I have done it all to have folks remember and acknowledge the existence of wronged child authors, as serious abuse victims, and our entitlement to the same recognition as the ones who were allowed to make it, every time those get talked about. I have not done it to have folks give us a moment's recognition then forget about us, so that other folks have still never heard of us when they start threads like this. So that the abuse itself is followed by spending the rest of our lives explaining it from scratch.

Is this a rant against your efforts being forgotten?

I'm aware of some guy named Thomas Chatterton who might fit that description.

He was able to write, well, in archaic English when he was a teenager. He was self-taught.

Arthur Rimbaud was a little older when he stopped writing and became sort of a profligate type. Maybe because he was stymied by a society "not ready" for him?

No need to personalise it. Against the whole topic getting forgotten instead of passed on whenever child authors are spoken of. So that there can still be folks who don't know the issue exists, and in all innocence of causing pain write about the kids who did get their chances.

Arctic Terns are the birds who migrate the most distance.

The topic of autism, the topic of child authors, or the topic of child authors writing about autism?

Of child authors: but as an autism-related topic because we seem to have a high rate of being them, as serious-minded kids, resulting in reactions to books like this happening every couple of years.

Ahh... now I get it. Thanks!

On the blog linked above, I don't see much information about the actual topic of wronged child authors. Instead the emphasis is on bashing various organizations that have refused to take up the issue. Do you have another blog that focuses on documenting the issue itself?

How would I document it in a standalone blog, then?

The case only takes a couple of lines to make, as I have done there and in the Bittersweet book. That the seeming gap in any non-famous kids emerging as authors between 1978 and 2001 correlates with the generation when conservative backlash hardline attitudes to school authority and homework pressure were in favour., before autism awareness started to break some holes in that. The personal case is findable in a collection of anti-psychiatry stories, under "eighties teenage psychiatry for school pressure: one writer squashed another."

No, it would take a LOT more than a couple of lines.


You should not assume that most people are fully aware that there was such a gap, in the first place. Can you point to any statistics, from any reputable scholarly source, on the number of non-famous kids emerging as authors between 1978 and 2001 vs. the number of non-famous kids emerging as authors in decades prior to 1978 or after 2001?

Among those people who are already aware that there was such a gap, you should not assume that they would agree with you as to the main reason for it. Correlation does not equal causation.

I vaguely recall hearing, from various sources back in the period from 1978 to 2001, that the field of publishing had gotten more and more competitive, and that it had gotten harder and harder for new writers (of any age) to launch a career. This was generally attributed to greater and greater consolidation of the publishing industry itself, plus more and more people wanting to be writers. I also recall reading that many publishing companies were becoming more and more risk-averse, hence less willing to take a chance on publishing anyone who was not already famous.


Hmm. I was never under the impression that there was ever a shortage of good writers, whether due to educational practices or anything else. I do remember hearing about a shortage of publishing opportunities, even for excellent but not-already-famous authors.

The most relevant thing that changed around 2001 was the rapidly-growing popularity of the Internet, which enabled many new writers to become famous without going through already-established channels.


I would suggest that you create a blog describing your own personal case, plus other posts linking to and commenting on as many other personal stories as you can find, of other people who were children back then, along with other kinds of evidence, e.g. links to relevant news stories and academic journal articles, with your comments on these. If you want people to take your cause seriously, you need to make the evidence readily available, not just tell us where it is "findable."

Why no back-up for that? This is about stating the case, as opposed to potential evidencings of it ..

If I'm pointing it out to them, I'm hardly assuming it.

We will never change any injustice if we have to have research statistics already existing on a thing before we start telling anyone it exists. That's catch 22. They are the dates between Lindsay Brown and Catherine Webb/Luke Jackson/Kenneth Hall, searched for content.

Sure, and there are some popularly believed causations in politcal history that I think are so obviously wrong as to scream. But we have to scrutinise correlations to find evidence of causations, or else we would never find anything. The 2001 causation refers to kids picked up by publishers, not self-created through websites.

That findable is readily available, instantly googlable. I made it so by contributing it to the site where it is!