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Blogs by Patrick Joesph Schnerch
The Motive Behind West Coast Literary Productions 7/22/2009 7:26:07 PM
Many authors have their own reasons for writing books and I am not any different. I don't entertain my audience, lift their spirits or have happy endings. In my work, happiness is in short supply. People with mental illness, addiction or are homeless have difficult times cracking a smile. My first book "ADRIAN" tried to enlighten the audience of the possible affects of mental illness and alcoholism in a fictional story. I actually wrote about things that I am totally against and that is discrimination, stigma and unwarranted fears about these conditions.
I played into the audience's hand by writing about these conditions in a way that the average person has always believed to be truthful and appropriate behaviour towards mental illness and addiction.
Within a captivating story, bits of reality was intertwined in a way that did not seem to enlighten or educate people about these conditions as it was well diguised in the plot.
The story was nothing more than a bunch of crap from the top of my head, which in fact was under the power of psychosis during the whole writing of the book. Drowning with alcohol abuse, I wrote the 400+ page book in nine months from cover to cover with a single brush stroke. It was published even though there were no rewrites, revisions or editing.
The raw piece of work captured a time in my life where reality was very rare in which mania, delusions and alcohol controlled every aspect of my life during those nine months.
While pickling my liver, I started a personal mission to bring out awareness and the truth behind these conditions through literature. Weaving between sanity and insanity, I started a writing campaign to bring about this awareness.
The second book was "The Peaceful Warrior: Memoirs of a Damaged Mind and Soul." This book is EXTREME!!! This was a collection of broken memories and haunting experiences. This book goes way over the edge and made a lot of people uncomfortable. The raw honesty made peoples skin crawl.
This book is the closest thing to feeling insanity without actually living it and this really scared people. I felt that for the truth to be known, it had to be brutally honest to serve its purpose.
The third book was written while sober and properly treated for my mental illness. "The City of Gardens: The Other Side of the Fence" took bits and pieces of the other two books already published to provide awareness of mental illness addiction and homelessness in hopes of eliminating stigma, discrimination and unwarranted fears against those living with these conditions.
Facts, figures and statistics paint a bleak future for Victoria, BC, Canada. The city implemented a five year plan to house and support 1,550 homeless people within that time.
"The City of Gardens Collection" is a seven book series documenting the successes and challenges the city is facing during this implementation of the plan.
The reason for my being is to spread the truth behind these and remove the "us" or "them" segregation and unite as humans. We all bleed red, everyone has a heart and it is about time that we us it.
