Karlton B. Douglas's Blog

Today through Sunday March 8th my book Chronic Illness is free in the Kindle store
http://www.amazon.com/Chronic-Illness...

This is a book I spent a decade writing and revising and updating. I share my experiences and the things God has taught me over the years. Hopefully you will find the information useful in your own journey.
God Bless.

Depression is a horrible, nasty, miserable, painful, life-stealing mental illness. More people die from suicide than from auto accidents according to the CDC.

So how can depression be related to creativity? I think that sometimes a side effect of suffering depression is that authors/writers are made so miserable in this world that they strive to communicate their pain, and even create new, better worlds.

Creative people have a high incidence of depression according to a 2010 Health.com article. With 9% reporting an episode of major depression in the previous year.

I have wondered if such creativity is a bit of recompense from God for the endless misery depression has caused us. I will not say it is an even trade, but it is better than nothingness of depression alone.


Depression can force us to live inside of our own heads, we often suffer in solitude. We have lots of time to think, perhaps too much time to think. Our misery forces us to look for something bigger and better, perhaps moves us toward God, for we have many questions for Him, much like Job of the Bible.

And our depression can push us to create, to express, to release our painful experiences and emotions into art, literature, simply creating to escape our misery, perhaps this side effect of depression brings a bit of light out of our dark experiences.

I hope next year to publish a small book titled "Surviving Affliction". The book's focal point will be on depression. I pour many of my struggles and experiences with suffering and the related depression into the little book. It is my creative, side effect of my own depression, as with much of my writing.


Worth Reading:

http://arstechnica.com/staff/2014/10/...

If you are struggling with suicidal thoughts:

In the U.S. call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline.

If you live outside of the United States please contact health care workers or counselors in your area.

My ebook: "A Gathering Of Ghosts And Other Bizarre Stories" is free at the Kindle Store September 30th through October 4th.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00O15BRCK

Description:
In these twenty-one short stories you will find a Halloween prank gone awry, encounters with supernatural beings, time travelers setting history right, alien visitors in the dark, a dragon and its rider visiting on Halloween night, and plenty of ghosts.

I hope you will check out the book and if you are willing to do so, leave a review at Amazon to share your thoughts with other readers.

Thank you!

Stories are part of our DNA. Going back to our early ancestors sitting around campfires, stories have been an essential way for us to communicate great truths, inspire, teach, and to simply entertain.

It is tempting to believe that books and stories are no longer important in our modern age. People have the Internet with social media to communicate, there is text messaging, video chats, and we have uncountable video games, also 24 hour news channels, Youtube, an endless number of ways to interact and connect and be distracted.

Long ago when I was a teenager and there was no hint of an Internet, no video games, and three lousy television channels out in the country where I lived. Communication was face to face, our party-line telephone was useless. It was a different world from the smartphone world we live in today. And books were the main source of entertainment.

Ebooks have made telling stories easy today, they are both inexpensive and highly portable. Anyone with a smartphone or cheap tablet can read ebooks. Classics by great authors like Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and the complete plays of Shakespeare are completely free and easy to find. We are living in a flood of stories. And new authors have very little to hinder them from telling their stories and getting those stories into the hands of readers quickly. This is an amazing time to live in.

Of course the down side of this awesome time is that we must compete with the entire ensemble of technology, including streaming music, videos, games, everything that the Internet brings, and more television channels than any human being ever needs or even wants.

Nevertheless, there is a human need for stories, whether it is the latest popular series on a cable television channel, or an audio book playing in the background, or a modern hardcover bestseller, stories are who we are, an essential part of us.

We have an ongoing battle living in an attention deficit culture today. Every few minutes a new shiny thing reaches out to grab our attention and distract. The smartphone is the main culprit with its constant sounds and notices popping up. But there is much to steal away attention in this age. Yet we have on our side the need, just like a need for food and water, an inborn need for stories. It may be that television and streaming video is fulfilling some of that need, but I believe the creative, imaginative hunger within us desires something more.

When we read we also create. Watching a video is mentally lazy. The creator of that video has no need of our imagination beyond simply invoking "secondary belief" or suspension of "primary belief" so we can accept the story being told. Yet reading books or listening to audio books requires active imagination. The author may do a good job of describing a scene or a character, but our imagination automatically fills in the details, begins to work, is drawn into the creative act. Reading is not passive, it requires something of us, yet rewards us by taking us out of ourselves and into somewhere else. We learn, we experience, and we participate in a event that is greater than the endless distractions in our daily lives.

Stories are here to stay, no matter where the technology takes us. Perhaps one day we will simply plug in and download stories into our brains, but the fact is we need stories, and we always will, no matter the delivery system. The need for stories is hard-wired into us, and by creating and ingesting stories we are involved in an age old process that fulfills an ongoing need, an endless longing. Yes, we will always need stories.

Long before the Harry Potter books were ever heard of, while working at my mundane factory job, I imaged a teenage boy riding upon the back of a griffin. I began to put the story together in my mind as a way to distract me from not only the mindless automaton job I had, but also from an illness that I would later be diagnosed with: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Health issues have been closely tied to my association with books and writing. While there are weeks, months, and even some years when I can hardly write or even read for any length of time, yet when I am able to focus, both reading and writing have proven a great and important escape from my numerous health issues. I have heard that writers have a high incidence of depression. Yet I rather think that people who have chronic depression are more prone to write--they are creating a better, or at least a more interesting world than the one they are living in.

I am paraphrasing, but I believe J.R.R. Tolkien said that for a man living inside a prison, escape is not a bad thing.

I have been something of a book hoarder, a habit I have mostly broken now. I loved to buy books, too many of which I never read, yet to me a book is a chance to have an adventure, to live another life, to have new experiences, and travel to different places. So each book I purchased was not just a book to me, but a piece of "hope", an investment in an enjoyable experience to come. Yet that only works so long as you have room to store all those books. I started running out of room and even filled up my garage, yes, the hoarding of books had to go. And then came ebooks, which thankfully, do not take up anything but digital space.

Finishing a book is a nice feeling. With books you can live more than one life, you can live as many and varied types of lives as you wish. You add to your own life experiences, you feed your imagination, and you exercise your brain when reading.

I find myself even more depressed when my mental fog from Chronic Fatigue Syndrome ruins my ability to focus and read. It adds insult to injury, as reading to me is therapeutic, and those times when I am unable to concentrate and read are the very times I need to read most. Occasionally I find myself borderline between being able to concentrate well or not, and then I can do some light reading, or listen to an audio book, though I may miss portions of the story. When I was quite young I took reading for granted, something I don't do now.

My grandmother was a voracious reader. She mostly read romance novels. I thought she had a sixth grade education, but my mother told me my grandmother actually had to stop school after the third grade, and she was self-educated, taught herself to read and write. It astounded me that she could read an entire box of books while I was still on a single novel. She read until she was quite old, and she stayed mentally sharp up until she hit her 90s. I suspect she stayed so sharp mentally because she read so much. So when I can do so, I try to read, not only because I enjoy it, but because I think it helps my overall mental clarity despite my CFS.

My most popular and most important book is: Chronic Illness. I wrote it after living with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome for many years. Other serious health issues also fed into that book and its ideas and my beliefs as well. A major experience of affliction for me has been the Crohn's Disease that nearly took my life.

I must mention some important non-fiction books that have helped me so much over the years, center-most is the Bible. I have found the Psalms in particular to be comforting in my affliction. The Discourses of Epictetus have been particularly helpful in anchoring my mind and emotions in difficult times. And lately, Simplify by Joshua Becker has helped me to regain perspective and reconnect what is valuable and what is not in my life. So books not only entertain, and help us to escape, they can also transform and shape our lives.

I hope this blog post gives you some idea about who I am as a writer, and how important books are to me. I think my strengths as a writer are two-fold: I can communicate, and I have a good imagination. "Chronic Illness" is written with a focus on communicating with that individual who is suffering, and needs a bit of encouragement, and not just empty promises and unrealistic expectations. "Griffin Island" is a short novel for young adults or anyone in the mood to read a light fantasy. "Nandrin" is a strange animal, my weird little Science Fiction book. It should be considered PG-13 and I hope the main character's off-color words do not offend my Christian friends, but this is an eighteen year old boy who is not overly religious and I felt I needed to be true to his role in the story. My other books are collections of short stories that readers have seemed to enjoy. You will not be seeing a 500 page tome from me. My Chronic Fatigue Syndrome and other health issues prevent that type of focus for writing. My stories and books have been put together over decades, I am not a prolific writer due to my health. And I must credit lots of help from editors, copy-editors, proofreaders, those who formatted, and did cover designs for my ebooks. I am very grateful for lots of help with my books.

My hope is that with my fiction I entertain, and with my non-fiction I encourage. If I have done that my books are a success.

Thank you for taking time to read my blog and for visiting my author page!