Guest Post

Depression: Why Did This Happen? Will it Come Back?

/ granonine / 2 Comments

Fourth in my series on depression, first published Dec. 28, 2012

granonine's avatarLinda's Bible Study

There are so many factors that can play into depression.  Today I’m going to cover as much as I can in a reasonable amount of space.  This could well end up being a multiple-part topic.

Let’s look at genetics first.  One of the questions I always ask a new client who presents with depression is, “Who else in your family, in your own generation or your parents’ or grandparents’ generations, has had a “nervous breakdown,” or been given some sort of medication for nerves, such as Valium?”  Almost without fail, there is someone.  Typically, there will be more than one in the family tree who has suffered from depression.

So, is there a “depression gene”?  Honestly, I don’t know.  I found some articles on the subject.  Here is one link you may find interesting.  Just remember, this whole topic is in a very new state of research:

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40908471/ns/health-mental_health/t/depression-gene-really-exists-new-study-claims/#.UN3FjOTAeSo

What I…

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Growing Your Mailing List with Instafreebie

/ kimberleycooperblog / 7 Comments

Welcome to the Cow Pasture, Guest Contributor, Kimberley Cooper – Kimberley Cooper Blog

Firstly, thanks to Sheila for giving me the chance to chat with the folks that visit her blog. Nice to meet you all. I’m based in the UK, so please excuse any spellings and expressions that you might not be familiar with.

Ok, so this isn’t a ‘how to’ as much as a ‘what happened and can anyone else benefit?’

Probably like most of us who like to write, but even more, would like to get a little money in for our efforts, sales have been so-so. Enough that the tax man wants to know but not enough to make an appreciable dent in the monthly bills.

So now, with two novels in the bag, a novella, and two short story collections, it seemed like a good time to take a month off writing and concentrate on promotion. Because hey, writing is one side of the coin, but letting people know that you’ve written something that they may (or may not) be interested in, is the other.

I’m an avid user of Facebook. I keep my private page and my writing page pretty separate, and that works well. In late October on my private page, up pops details of Instafreebie. And me, being always keen on a bargain noticed one word. FREE. So I had to click, didn’t I? But being hopeful and untrusting in equal measure I also had to see for myself that there didn’t appear to be a catch (I haven’t found one.)

  • You can set up a package that doesn’t cost you anything. I tried this for a few days, and it means you can give away copies of one of your books (you decide how many copies or when to end the giveaway). Originally that was my intention – give away a few copies and hope people liked what they read and then bought some of my other stuff from Amazon. But after a couple of days when I’d given away close to a hundred copies, it occurred to me I was missing a trick. This option doesn’t allow you to collect the email addresses of the people downloading your book. And if those people didn’t head over to Amazon, I’d lost them forever.
  • So I went to the next level of Instafreebie. Currently, $20 a month allows me to link Mailchimp to my Instafreebie account, and between them, I get to record who is downloading my book. And then I can email them directly with what else I can offer. And write off the cost against tax.
  • There was another piece of advice I picked up on growing your mailing list, from Facebook – offer more. Don’t just offer the minimum you can get away with, but more. So I sent a ‘welcome’ email to everyone who joined my mailing list via Instafreebie/Mailchimp and offered a free copy of my quirky dark fantasy novella Adventures of a Girl Death Demon. And readers contacted me in droves. I had some great back and forth conversations via email with some, and YES, more sales started appearing on my KDP dashboard and Createspace account.
  • So that’s a result for me. As is the hundreds of people on my mailing list that I wouldn’t have had, that I can email when I have new content to offer. And setting up an account with Instafreebie gave me a chance to join their closed Facebook group which coordinates promotion of books so that you benefit from a much wider audience, potentially.

So, am I pleased to have done it? Oh yes. The first promotion that I took part in has finished, but I’m still seeing new subscribers joining my mailing list at almost 50 a day. And I’ve joined another promotion which is more long-term, so I hope that will steadily raise my numbers further.

I haven’t got any connection with Instafreebie or Mailchimp; this is just the experience of how it’s been for me. Yours may well be different. But it might be worth a go … whatever you decide, good luck, and here are links that you might find useful.

www.instafreebie.com

www.mailchimp.com

If you enjoyed Kimberley’s post, let her know, and as always, I’d love to hear from you. Talk to me. Tell me your story and look for me on Facebook at SheilaMGood,  Pinterest,  Bloglovin, Twitter@sheilamgood, Contently, and Instagram. You can follow my reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

Trains and Planes (but probably not boats)

/ wendyunsworth / 2 Comments

Guest Contributor Wendy Unsworth

img_1923This week, like many, many people, I will be traveling home for Christmas. There will be several stops along the way. Purchasing tickets, planning the whole thing out, has prompted me to ponder on where home is for me these days and in a wider sense, the meaning of home.
I have always been a wanderer! Unlike my siblings and wider family who have all stayed in our hometown, on the Lincolnshire coast of England throughout their lives, I moved away in my twenties and just kept going.img_0038
I think it must be that way for many who leave the family area; they go seeking something new and then move again and again.

I’m certainly not complaining; travel, I believe, has greatly enriched my life. It has also taught me a great deal. There have been wonderful experiences, excitement and times that simply remind me how precious life and health are.

No one who has seen a img_1924Zambian mother, nursing a child, sick with malaria, laid low during a military coup, or been cut off by flood waters, will ever feel that they have a right or need to endlessly moan about the late bus or the long queue at the post office. Or whether the supermarket is going to change the stock around again so that you can’t find a damn thing…

So, home to me has been many places and, in all the most important ways, those places are still home. When I think of them, I miss them all, and if I were there right now, I know I would feel part of it again, and feel as though I was home.

At present, I am spending half of my time in Scotland where my ‘official’ home is (that’s where all the bills land!) but also a lot of time in the Alentejo region of Portugal where my son and his beautiful young family live. This area of Portugal is dotted with cork oak forest, and small hamlets and the pace of Life is slow.

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In Scotland, I have the advantage of living in a similarly, small community (with my daughter and son-in-law) but also within easy reach of beautiful, historic Edinburgh or the magnificent and wild Highlands.img_1925
I am not enamored of concrete jungles and always feel at my best with nature around me. So rather than think of home I like to think of my special places and the special people who inhabit them. Some of them I will probably never go back to, but that doesn’t mean I don’t think of them. Amongst those people, family, friends and sometimes strangers, I know I would always feel welcome and a part of their world.

So wherever you are this Christmas, in the heat of the sun or knee-deep in snow, I wish you the company of those dear to you and the feeling that you are home. A glass of wine, a gift or two and, of course, a good book!

Merry Christmas.

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If you enjoyed Wendy’s post, let her know, at Wendy Unsworth, and as always, I’d love to hear from you. Talk to me. Tell me your story and look for me on Facebook at SheilaMGood,  Pinterest,  Bloglovin, Twitter@sheilamgood, Contently, and Instagram. You can follow my reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

More on Medication for Depression

/ granonine / Leave a comment

Third in the series on Depression. I had forgotten how long this whole series eventually became. Lots of good feedback on this one, good ideas for future posts.

granonine's avatarLinda's Bible Study

There is a third class of antidepressants known as MAO Inhibitors, or MAOI’s.  You can read all about them here: http://pharmacist.hubpages.com/hub/What-Are-MAO-Inhibitors.

As with the others, the targets of this class of medication include serotonin, dopamine, epinephrin–all the so-called “feel-good” chemicals that the brain produces.

The question I’d like to address today is, “If depression can be treated without medication, then why take the pills?  Wouldn’t it be better to get to the root of the problem instead of just masking it?”

There are some assumptions in those questions.  I hear the questions a lot, because unfortunately, there is still stigma attached to taking medication for “nerve problems,”  or “emotional problems.” People of faith worry about depending on medication instead of God, believing that if they could just pray enough, read the Bible enough and deal with whatever their lack of faith is, they’d get better.  What follows is how I answer…

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