Book update.

With the negotiations completed and the contract signed I am in the process of writing the next book. Although the title is yet to be decided it is about counselling drug users.

The last book - Working with suicidal individuals - was meant to be 70,000 words and it ended up being 90,000 and I was asked to reduce it. I finally got it down to 87,000 words and it was accepted. This time however I have been asked to keep it to 70,000.



The first chapter I have almost completed is probably going to be chapter four and it is on Harm Reduction. This topic will be found in the vast majority of books on drug counselling. It is usually quite dry and has been said a hundred times before but you really do need to have it in there.

I thought it was going to be about 1,500 words but it ended up being 7,000 and I am really happy with it. I mean really! It has ended up with a really good structure, looks at the overall area and then has lots of new and applicable stuff on the area. Most of it I have never seen in the literature before.



It was one of those situations, that as you start writing you begin to find out that you knew all this stuff, you did not know you knew. It just kept coming out as I wrote along. Problem is one tenth of the book is taken up with this one chapter!

Other than this, as with the first book the initial stages are quite taxing and hard. I have the outline of the book and I keep thinking of things I have written or know of in the literature and frantically putting them in all sorts of folders on my computer. But it’s like at times you have to keep four different things in your head at the one time as you don’t want to miss any. This happened with the last book and should slow down a bit soon I hope as I get most of it together in the right places.

But all in all it is good to have a new project like this. It certainly has my interest and I am motivated to do it. As with the last one when I write I have to let my Free Child run wild at times and then get it all down and together in the right structure and format.


Free Child


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