I’m kind of nervous

I was planning on asking for this, you see. I hate the feeling though, idk if it’s fear of rejection or getting my hopes up…

Well, I’ve made a request of a certain lady, regarding my book ‘Only Until Midnight’ and I’m really hoping it will interest her.

If she says no I won’t be too upset, I think. I’ll ask some other people though.

I should explain:

You might remember that I mentioned how difficult Only Until Midnight was to write? So much so that I had to have a little wine to get through writing a particular stage of the story. And I was actually crying for quite a lot of it, because I kept triggering myself to capture how is feels.

This is what’s getting to me though. I’m not trying to have a whinge, but it seems that what I consider to be the most important part of the book registers as boring to people who weren’t raised by a covertly abusive parent.

Which is great, because on a lot of levels, I don’t really want people to understand how maddening and painful that experience is.

But on other levels, I actually hate that her suffering is still so invisible, even in my book.

I’ll actually feel like I’ve failed to write what I meant to if it goes unnoticed, and so I’ve asked a specialist CPTSD trauma councilor if she wouldn’t mind taking a closer look.

I’ve written it, but there’s no possible way that I can explain what I want people to see.

My Cinderella hides everything, you see. Even while she tells you plainly how it feels to live as she does, but I think her facade is what people respond to.

And I also think people are picking up on her reality too, in some ways, and it’s…

… Like, not to sound how I think it’ll sound, but I think it’s affecting the reviews. I think people are picking up on it, but still don’t want to see what she’s trying to convey. I think it’s rubbing people up the wrong way, in an odd way.

Now I know my book isn’t perfect, or complicated on the face of it. It’s not fancy writing, and it suffers (on reception) because I wanted it to feel like an authentic Cinderella, more than a re-imagining.

I guess what’s frustrating me is that people keep saying ‘Enjoy it for what it is’ (in various ways) but I want someone to SEE it for what it really is.

Because I know they will have SEEN, and not understood, what people like me lived through. I want people to know what that kind of abuse looks like, because it’s at once so subtle, and yet so easy to spot when you understand the dynamics.

I’ve seen it on TV even. Eg: Stephen Fry did a documentary on Bipolar disorder, and interviewed this ‘mother’ who was drugging her son and telling Stephen what a monster he was, how he tried to kill his sister and all of this total garbage. Meanwhile, this poor kid was so used to her crap that he was just trying to keep his head down and dissociate from the situation.

Meanwhile, she was literally getting off on the attention from Fry, and what a wonderful mother she was.

It’s such a frustratingly common dynamic, and I want people to just LOOK, just a little tiny bit more. Women, ‘mothers’ like this are so horrifically insecure that it’s literally their best children that they target. The smart ones and the kind ones, because they see who their parent is. Simple as.

It’s torture levels of mind games, and it can take a lifetime to heal from.

So I hope this lady wants to take a look at it. I really do.