It shows how global our marketplace has become when the first person to buy the print version of my new novel, Ten Days in Summer, lives overseas in Great Britain. Two summers ago, Barb visited us with my sister-in-law. They toured the Rockies and fulfilled Barb’s long-time wish of attending the Calgary Stampede. When they left, I gave Barb a copy of my first novel, Deadly Fall. Since she enjoyed it, my sister-in-law bought Barb a copy of the sequel as soon as it was available on Amazon UK. 

The print version still isn’t released in Canada, although the order is in to the Canadian printer and distributor. My publisher has a deal with Amazon to print the copies sold in other countries.  I assume Amazon does this with print-on-demand, since they got the paperback up on their website the same time as the Kindle version and delivered the print book to Barb within days.

The Ten Days paperback is available in other countries served by Amazon. Here it is on Amazon Japan. I have no clue if the price listed there is reasonable or not.

Postscript: Chapters/Indigo now has the Ten Days in Summer paperback on its website, with 3-5 weeks delivery. You can also order it from their stores as well as independent book stores. You can get the book in two days on Amazon, but the retail price is higher.      

When Panic Attacks: the new, drug-free anxiety therapy that can change your life by David D. Burns, M.D., continues my blog series about books on modern psychiatry.

I picked up this book because some 25 years ago I read Dr. Burns’ earlier bestseller, Feeling Good: the new mood therapy, for a psychology course and found its cognitive therapy approach enlightening. Everyone, I thought, could use a dose of cognitive therapy. In fact, the so-called normal might benefit more than the mentally ill, who might require medicine and stiffer techniques.

When Panic Attacks is a self-help book for people with disabling anxiety. Dr. Burns includes charts as well as space for writing answers to his questions posed along  the way. He insists you can’t simply read what he says to get results; you need to be active in your therapy process, with pen in hand. I confess I didn’t write down anything. Mainly, I tried to relate the material to my most anxious, irrational moments, such as my panic when the mouse who lives in my patio wall runs out and scurries past my chair.

Dr. Burns takes a strong stand against the two pillars of modern psychiatry, medication and psychoanlysis. He calls them, generally, useless for anxiety and depression. I get the sense he never prescribes pills. Instead, he makes his patients work on their fears through daily mood logs and applying his 40 ways to defeat your anxiety until one of those ways works.

His case studies make the process sound easy, but it probably is a lot of work — and scary. His 40 methods include Exposure Therapy, which involves flooding yourself with the object of fear. For me, this would involve bombarding myself with images of mice and rats or real ones. I’d rather take a pill. In addition, my rodent phobia doesn’t affect me enough to truly want to change. I’m currently writing this outside on my patio.

Dr. Burns says that a problem with most methods of therapy is that they assume people want to change. In reality, we like the familiar and don’t want to confront our demons and darkest fears.

Anxieties, bad habits and addictions are also rewarding. He often asks his patients, “If you could push a magic button and make all your anxiety, depression or anger disappear right now, would you push that button?” A surprising number of people hesitate.

It seems bizarre, until you realize there are benefits to neurotic fears. He cites an example of a convenience store owner who developed post-traumatic stress disorder after being robbed and beaten at gunpoint. While working on one of Dr. Burns’ charts, the patient came to see he didn’t want let go of his anger at the perpetrator. The man deserved it. Anger allowed the patient to feel morally superior. He found satisfaction in being a victim. He believed hanging onto the anger might make him more vigilant against future attacks. All of these thoughts contributed to his continuing PTSD, which he decided, in the end, wasn’t worth these benefits.  Facing the truths behind your anxiety and fears involves harsh self-examination.

It’s something of a compliment when Dr. Burns says that people with severe anxiety are  invariably overly-nice. They don’t want to admit to problems in their lives and relationships and supress them, which causes the problems to burst out as anxiety and panic. What they need to do is chase their fears, rather than avoid them by running away.

I’d recommend When Panic Attacks to anyone suffering from anxiety that he or she wants treated. Meanwhile, I hope my resident mouse and I will keep our distance.

Evening Grandstand Show

In the midst of ducking rainstorms while showing my Stampede guests around Calgary and area, I’m catching up on my Stampede reading at Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers.

This week’s Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers makes me hungry.

Once in awhile I’m intrigued by a book simply because of its perfect title. One of those books is Once They Were Hats, about the history of the Canadian beaver. This week’s Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers features this book by Frances Backhouse, with an emphasis on the Calgary cowboy hat.  

For the first 18 years that I lived in Calgary, every June was rainy. I considered this the one consistent aspect of Calgary weather. So I was surprised when last year’s June turned out to be mostly sunny, warm and dry. Friends who visited from Australia, Britain and Ontario lucked out with their trips through the Rockies.

Despite rain forecast for this weekend, this June is shaping up to be on the dryer side. But who knows when we will once again experience the big one, as portrayed in this week’s Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers?

I’m back from my recent holiday in France and have finally found the time to catch up on Calgary Through the Eyes of Writers. While I was away, Calgary readers of this fine blog have travelled to:

the old Woodwards Department store, Chinook Mall, with Miji Campbell

Rouleauville aka Mission with Rona Altrows

Inglewood with Shirley Black

Heritage Park with Clem and Olivier Martini

Bowness with Anne Sorbie

and downtown Calgary during a not-so-unusual May snowstorm with Marina Endicott.

What a great tour of Calgary locations!

To research my  journey to Provence, France — Van Gogh land — I read The Complete Van Gogh by Jan Hulsker, Director General Emeritus of Cultural Affairs of the Ministry of Culture of The Netherlands.

Read isn’t the precise word. This is a coffee table book with plates of the painter’s entire works along with a fair amount of text, including excerpts from Van Gogh’s letters. Some of the text I read, other parts I skimmed or skipped, such as the author’s discussions on why he dates X sketch for June and not August, or for Van Gogh’s Arles rather than his St. Remy period.

The book’s presentation of the plates in chronological order made it interesting to follow Van Gogh’s evolution as an artist. He began with sketches of hands and people and gradually developed his techniques and style.

The vast number of drawings and paintings shows that Van Gogh worked hard. In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. I have no doubt Van Gogh put in his 10,000 hours before creating his masterpieces.

The Complete Van Gogh also reminded me of the writing rule: Write What You Know. While many writers question this rule, Van Gogh certainly applied it.

He painted and sketched people he knew. His landscapes, for which he became famous, were done of his immediate surroundings. He painted his bedroom in Arles. During his self-imposed confinement to a mental asylum in St. Remy, he painted the view from his barred window. His famous sunflowers abounded in Provence, where he spent many of his most productive years.

It shows that genius can create wonders of anything.

While researching a holiday to Provence, France, I stumbled upon The Van Gogh Blues: the Creative Person’s Path Through Depression by Eric Maisel, Ph.D.  My husband Will and I plan to spend a week in the town of St. Remy, Provence, where the painter lived in an asylum toward the end of his life. During that time, Van Gogh painted a number of his major works, including The Starry Night.

The Van Gogh Blues turned out to be less about the painter than about depression, the disease many believe he suffered from. Others claim schizophrenia or epilpsy might have been the problem that led Van Gogh to cut off his ear and ultimately take his own life.

Maisel’s premise in The Van Gogh Blues is that creative people suffer from depression more than the non-creative. He offers no statistics for this. His view stems from his observations as a family therapist with a Ph.D in counselling psychology, a creativity coach and a creative writer who regularly contributes to Writers Digest magazine. He concludes that depression arises from the creative person’s need for meaning and his or her clash with the facts of existence. Non-creative people don’t seek as much meaning in their lives, either due to their personality makeups or the fact they already have enough meaning. For instance, the unwaveringly religious find enough meaning through their faith.

It follows that the collapse of traditional religion makes depression more common today than in the past, Maisel asserts this is true, but I wonder. I also question his statement that explorers, military personnel and professional atheletes have zero rates of depression. The reason, he says, is that these occupations contain built-in action and meaning.

Depression arises, he claims, when creative people fail to work toward the meaning they need. This can involve procrastinating, taking a job that doesn’t answer their creative needs, drinking, eating too much chocolate, anything to avoid the blank page.

Those who put in the work are bound to bump against the facts of existence. A writer’s book can’t find a publisher or it does and fails to sell. This provokes a meaning crisis that, if not handled well, leads to depression.

Maisel does admit that biological or psychological factors might also contribute to depression. Therefore, people shouldn’t necessarily avoid medication or therapy. But he believes these factors aren’t the primary cause.

It almost makes depression seem a positive trait, since those disinclined toward it are non-creative (lesser?) beings.

What the The Van Gogh Blues did most for me is make me feel pretty good about avoiding serious depression during my twenty plus years of writing. If it weren’t for the facts of existence — rejections, disapointments, criticisms — I would love the writing life. Nice to know feeling some misery about these downers is normal.

I also agree with Maisel that the solution is action — keep writing. Although, now and then a little too much chocolate or wine is nice.

Recently, I was intrigued by a newspaper article titled, U.K.’s New Grammar Rules Say What!?!! Banning exclamation points could make them ‘cool.’

In my writing classes, I have long taught students to avoid this punctuation mark because it is ‘telling’ not ‘showing.’ Exclamation points tell the reader, My last sentence was exciting! Amazing! Incredible! Awesome! The writer should show this with her words as well as engage the reader by letting him decide for himself how amazing the statement was. 

For my serious writing, I never use exclamation points. Well, I’ve relaxed my rules lately, so I might insert one or two per book.

Emails are another matter. When writing them, I don’t take the time to shape my words to be sure the meaning I intend is coming across. Exclamation points are a convenient shorthand. In emails, I feel anything goes punctuation-wise. I don’t tend toward strings of exclamation points or question marks, but if you want to portray yourself as an enthusiastic, casual person, why not?

Likewise, in emails I make liberal use of emoticons for fun and to avoid offending a recipient with any thoughtless words. I often use parentheses and dashes. In books, when I find more than one phrase in brackets per page or two, it makes me feel the writer is too lazy to construct sentences that flow into the next.  Occasional parentheses can be funny; too many are jarring (they jerk the reader out of the narrative).

In the newspaper piece, gripes about the British school system’s new ban on exclamation points were largely against making this a rule, as opposed to teaching students the negatives about exclamation points and to think carefully before using one.

I think the ban will tend to lead to this kind of teaching rather than result in the elimination of the dreaded punctuation mark, or make it cool for rebellious youths.

One educator objected to the ban on the grounds that it will confuse students, when the exclamation point is used so frequently by world leaders. He notes that Donald Trump’s website is littered with them (“I won’t let them take away our guns!!”)

Trump likes them? That’s the best reason I’ve heard to ban the exclamation point!!!!!!!!!!!!!!