Having finished writing my last book (Prostate Cancer and the Man You Love) in May of 2012 I wondered how long it would be before another one got started. And here I sit on a cold morning in January, writing the first chapter of my next book. Well, really I should say “our’ next book – because this one is being written with the talented Alicia Merchant.
I met Alicia in November 2012 at the Young Adult Cancer Canada conference in Toronto. I’d been invited to do a keynote address and two workshops – and after one of these workshops I was talking to some of the participants, and this lovely young woman came up to talk to me. I’m not sure how long we talked, but I immediately knew that she was the one who would help my write this next book – a book for and about young adults and adolescents with cancer.
I never really plan what book I will write next, and truth be told, I always think that after I complete a book that it will be my last. And of course that has never happened. In preparing for the talks I was giving at the conference the idea of this book started germinating – but I needed to meet Alicia to figure out how to do it. She is a cancer survivor, editor, blogger (http://alittlebitworse.wordpress.com), deep thinker – and not in that particular order. She is feisty and funny and sarcastic and honest – and everything that I need to be laser sharp with this book. Alicia is doing interviews with young cancer survivors across North America and she will then edit the transcripts and I will weave the theoretical and practical tips into the stories from the interviews.
The book is due to the publisher at the end of May (yes, this year!) and I hope to have it in my hands later this year. There is lots to do – I have piles of papers to read, lots to think about, and a fair amount of travel in there too. But there is more to this than just writing a book – I know that I am going to learn life lessons from collaborating for the first time with another writer – and more from reading the interviews of young people who have gone through what most of us cannot even begin to imagine. Here goes – another adventure begins…