Warmth of Snow (Paperback) | Released: 02 Dec 2019

It's an autobiography. It's a vampire novel. It's a collection of poems. It's original hand drawn art that replaces the lack of photographs from my childhood. It's the only way I could tell the story of my real life in a way that any good person might be able to digest. It's a tale of brutal child abuse and molestation. When I first started writing this, I had an idea of what I wanted it to be. It became something very different. At first, I felt it should describe my life. Then my life began to read like a how-to guide on creating a psychopath. Putting pen to paper, fingers to keys, to record my life's events became something more like describing dreams rather than making a catalog of my craziness. Mostly to soften the blow to the reader, I ran with the whole dream thing. In the end, recalling my nightmares and walking with the ghosts of the past transformed the size, shape and flow of the entire little book. It began in part to reveal how a person with severe Quiet-Type Borderline Personality Disorder remembers life. Then the artistic side took over and painted on a layer of mental illness. Fat and fleshy, patched together like a Frankenstein's Monster, my life told like sour poetry about internal wars. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder can be a serious bitch.What to tell, what not to tell? Should I rend asunder with impunity the secrets yet empowering the cruel faces of my past? Should I bring up the OCD or the suicidality - the co-constitutive sisters clamoring for first prize in the race to the oubliette? Obsession, compulsion, impulse and the incessant yip of the neighbor's ankle-biter oozed with frozen ichor the carnality of chemically-damaged lungs buttering opium withdrawal like an overstuffed sour cream and cheese burrito...with extra cheese.So the autobiography became far less linear. It morphed into an exploration of how I had coped with life happening to me rather than an exploration of my having lived one. And I hadn't coped with it very well at all, either. I had coped as best I could with the restrictions imposed upon my grotesquely malformed little brain. Ah that lazy little brain! The written work had become a novel about vampires. Vampires were far less terrifying than what had actually occurred against my childhood. Blood drinking monsters were like the sugar to help the medicine go down. Suddenly it fragmented in the frivolous manner of a tarnished silvery mirror shattering with its scintillating splinters splaying across moldy ceramic floor tiles burling up from decayed timbers in an abandoned movie theatre in a ghost town in a radioactive region of the Mojave Desert's dry spot.Then it was perfect. All of the archetypes were there. The villain. The other villain. That one that seemed like a villain but was actually a different type of villain. A moldy burrito. Even the hero showed up. Albeit far too late to be of any help when she did so, the hero showed up. So she got her own story of frailty and fecundity but without the feta.