What should I tell you about myself? Let's see…
I have been writing prose, poetry and fiction for most of my life. It began before I was even at school. My father brought home a large Imperial typewriter from work and set it down in front of me. For years, that typewriter was my portal into other worlds and a thousand adventures.
A few years later, I discovered authors such as Stephen King and Clive Barker. The stories I read from those two authors alone, fed my passion even more. I was hooked on the written word and addicted to using them to create my own universe.
When I was 21 years old, I married and four years later I had a baby. I stepped away from writing for a while which is perhaps one of my biggest points of reflection. I will always wonder: what if I had kept going through those dark years...where would I be today...
I did write in another capacity though. When my daughter was in school, I went to university and instead of writing creative fiction, I was writing academic essays on child development for a BA with honors in childhood studies.
My marriage was already crumbling, I knew I had to do something to sustain my family if I ended up being a single parent.
I was right to set those wheels in motion. My marriage ended suddenly and somewhat aggressively but that was expected. It was then that I learned about domestic abuse. People still think it quite unbelievable that I needed someone to point it out to me that my husband was being abusive on multiple levels. After a period of recovery and a brief dalliance with anti depressants, I began writing again. My writing had changed. I felt as though I was on a mission to inform and educate. I was on a one woman crusade to tell the world about domestic abuse. But not only that, I wanted to send out a message that you can get out of a bad situation and still maintain a certain degree of humour about it. You have to, I think, to stay sane in crazy times. This brings me to me first publication: It Started With A Car Crash.
It Started With a Car Crash is my first published work of any substantial length. After spending sometime being published in various webzines in the horror genre, I decided that perhaps my own life journey was enough of a horror story to begin with.
You may wonder why I chose to write about my experiences of living with a sociopath. That's easy to answer. There are thousands of people in this world who are experiencing similar things. With any luck, and a sprinkling of fairy dust, some of those people might just read my story and realise that there is a way out, there is help out there, support and encouragement.
I lost so much of myself without realising it, hopefully, I can help stop other people loosing themselves too! It isn't the easiest thing in the world, to open your heart to the world and lay it bare for the vultures to dissect but it is one of the most rewarding experiences. It formed part of the healing process, the process we each have to go through individually, when we suffer a trauma on any level.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Jill-Maciel/e/B00SX9JKOW