Hopefully Not Gratuitous Writing Eight Weeks After a Stroke

Eight weeks ago tomorrow I had a hemorrhagic stroke - a brain bleed- from which I am improving daily. At first I could not wield either spoon or toothbrush. My handwriting was illegible. My speech was impaired - not finding words but articulating them and making my mouth work. Now you would be hard-pressed to notice that my face is a bit different with the right side of my mouth fairly in-congruent to my left when smiling or that I almost always drool slightly on the right. For an author/speaker like I am, this relatively minor stroke hit me in major ways. It has taken all these weeks to gain enough stamina to do a half day of very entry level clerical work before I must sleep again. My mind functions as well as always but it gets tired fast and it takes forever to read material that requires concentration because I keep having to take breaks. Driving is still too hard - not manipulating the car, I can do that! - maintaining the global awareness and concentration. It physically hurts my head. I can walk about half a mile before I am too tired to continue and before it is obvious that my right foot drags. I take a cane when I go for a walk. I'm not sure how long it will take for me to function at what used to be normal, or if I ever will, actually. But there are so many things to be grateful for - the stroke happened where I could be cared for instead of some random rest area between northern Vermont and southeastern Missouri - or France or England, for that matter. It was a minor stroke with comparatively few lingering impairments. I received final approval for my PhD two weeks prior to the stroke. I was invited to contribute a chapter to a peer reviewed academic book just two weeks ago - long enough into the recovery process to know I can fulfill the assignment. Thankfully, I have an assortment of books already written and formatted for sale on Amazon, both for kindle and in print. This gives the potential for income during the interim where I am challenged to have the energy to work and to look for a new position, hopefully in Lexington, Kentucky, thanks to my finished doctorate. So, there is a huge silver lining and the opportunity to focus on marketing these books -starting with the one I hope someday to see as a feature film, my novel about the #metoo incidence of sexual (and other) abuse in the context of the Protestant American church. So, once again I am paying close attention to this blog, to my www.teamlesley.com website, to Facebook, Twitter @LesleyBarker and LinkedIn. Hopefully, as I take time to reflect on this recovery process as it impacts my work and writing, you will not find it gratuitous or self-serving but receive it in the vein it is offered, reflection, analysis, musing, wondering and wandering....

By Lesley Barker

You wanted to know what else I'm writing....

Suppose Aileen, a young college graduate with a history degree, got hired to develop children's programming for a history museum thanks to the interference of her very pushy, very affluent grandmother who is acting out of guilt for the drop-out dad her only son proved to have been. As far as Grandmother is concerned, his first offense had been to side-step attending a respectable seminary and go traveling rogue as a contemporary Christian singer/preacher with charismatic tendencies. She might not have intruded so directly into Aileen's life had her mother not died just before the girl started college or if her son had been man enough to pick up any of the parenting obligations. 

Neither Aileen nor her Grandmother would ever have guessed that one spring morning the body of this same son and father would wash against the same bank of the Mississippi River where his daughter and her dog just happened to be walking. Amazingly his was not the only dead body to end up in Aileen's way....

This will be my first murder mystery. It's pretty well plotted. I'm done with the first chapter at least for this first draft. Right now it does not have a working title, though.

I started working on it last spring.

Then the tourism season took over followed by a huge turnover of my museum staff and truly this is the first time I have had to do anything but muse over the story since its beginning.

My plan is to spend about 10 hours each week writing it beginning immediately.

When it is finished, I'll let it percolate while I write another story which has been brewing for at least ten years...research is mostly done, plotting is done, it just needs to be written. I'll tell you about that one another day. In addition, there is one more pretty well developed novel and about five nonfiction books in my mind. Hopefully in the meantime I will recruit enough of an audience for Pastor's Ex-Wife that women who share Terry Soldan's story will be willing to contribute their own in the forms of letters to Terry.... which letters will become the sequel to Pastor's Ex-Wife.

I have a friend who recruited his readership by playing Mafia Wars on social media. It worked for him and now he has some traditional publishing contracts for his sci-fi fiction. It makes me jealous but not enough to emulate his strategy....I'll just blog along so you all can watch what happens......

Btw, today Pastor's Ex-Wife became available for sale on any ebook platform you like via smashwords.com. It's been for sale as a Kindle book for almost a year. If you haven't read it yet....there are links to the right on this blog....just saying.....:)