Overcoming adversity to write new ebook

Books Writing as Guy Dulac, Hunston’s Paul Marshall has overcome considerable difficulty to write his new self-published ebook Summer Snow, available on Amazon.

“I have had a couple of bad things in my life, injuries and other things that have made me disabled.

“As a child, I had a severe head injury. I was run over by a car when I was four. The implications I have only really found out recently, but people used to think there was something wrong with my hearing and with my eyes.”

In fact, he has got permanent migraine syndrome, vertigo and complete imbalance.

“At school I suffered because I could not track a page. When I was reading, I would go back to the beginning of the sentence again and again. It was almost like a form of dyslexia.

“There were parts of sentences missing and like a constant snow moving the page around.”

If he knew he was going to have to read out loud in class, he would count up the paragraphs and work out which ones he would be reading – and then try to memorise them.

“And then about 19 years ago I had some injuries to my back on a couple of occasions and ended up doing about three rehabilitations.

“I had popped about three discs. That affected my life and stopped me doing exercise and so I put on weight.

“I realised that I didn’t always have difficulty getting through, but had to have a different way of coping.”

Paul reckons he has read only about 30 books in his life, but he started to wonder: what about writing one?

At school, it would take him a year to read a book. He wondered if he could actually write one in a year.

“Most of my things come through experience, though not the Holocaust (which key to the book) obviously,

“But I have always had a decent amount of imagination, and I tend to dream. And my dreams are almost like a film, and film has been one of the great joys of my life.”

And that’s how the current book began.

“The story concerns a Jewish family who survived Auschwitz and Bergenbelsen. Largely set in England in 1987 but with a memoir that stretches back over 70 years, it has a twisting plot that endeavours to show the human psyche in its rawest form – and the need to survive at any cost, although, ultimately, I think the book is about the universal condition we call love.

“The story is told from multiple perspectives with differing recollections of the main protagonists.

“It is my first novel and has been written, I hope, to be accessible to almost everybody who would like to read it.

“Although simply written, the book is inevitably very graphic in places and was going to be originally aimed at young adults but has been released for adults.”

Paul is a member of Chichester Writers’ Circle.

“Previously, I have written short stories in the horror and sci-fi genres that have just been collected and published into an anthology.”