Good day, everyone. I’ve been extremely busy over the past few weeks as I’m still getting adjusted to a few new things but I wanted to take a few minutes today to share something with everyone that I’ve been working on for quite a while and am extremely excited to announce that it’s finally ready to go.

A few months back, I was approached by my aunt, Cinda Thompson, to help out with a book that she’d been wanting to put out for quite some time. If you’re unaware of who she is, she’s a very talented writer whose poetry, short stories and memoirs have been featured in numerous publications over the years, including in a national best-selling anthology, When I Am An Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple. I’ve done some work for her in the past, finally getting some of her work out there on a digital platform. She’d been wanting to get her work online but just didn’t know how to go about it which is where I came in. About a year ago at this time, we launched Living The Revolution, which houses the majority of the work she’s ever done, including the poetry from her poetry book, At The Core, which was released many years ago.

I also created a focused blog for her, Diabetes: A Life Sentence?, where she writes posts from time to time about her more than 50-year battle with Type 1 Diabetes, which is also the focus of her latest and biggest project to date, So Where’s The Cure?, a new book with nine incredible stories about her battle with this terrible disease. Using the subtitle “Memories Of A Life With Type 1 Diabetes”, So Where’s The Cure looks at Cinda’s original diagnosis at just 11 years old and is filled with amazing tales of life, love, loss and heartache while also discussing the diets, medicines and costs associated with T1D, bringing a fantastic mix of everything you need to know about what she’s had to deal on a day-to-day basis for more than five decades. ol

And as far as my involvement goes, I was extremely honored to be a part of this project as the publisher. After being given all of the source material, it was my job to design and format the entire book to get it ready to go to print, which is actually a little more work than you might think. We had to take into account the audience that we were looking at, which we decided would need a bigger font size which changes a lot of different things as it pertains to margins and such when you’re putting a book together. There’s how much space you want after a paragraph, what kind of spacing you need within each paragraph, how the pictures that we wanted to use would fit and where they needed to be. We ran through a few different fonts for appearance and there’s spacing issues when transitioning from each format that have to be dealt with, which results in having to look at each and every page over and over and over to make sure that we’ve got everything done just right before going to the printer and after having seen the finished product, I’m happy to say that I think we got it just right.

Now, I’ve been doing the online thing for a while now and while it’s great to have hundreds upon hundreds of articles with my name attached to it, there’s just a little something extra to seeing your name in print, especially on that back cover that I designed, which is something I haven’t seen since those poetry books I was in more than 10 years ago.

While it was great to work on the project and receive a little bit of recognition for it, the credit here really does belong to Cinda. While the formatting and design and all of that is important, it’s the content here that really matters and it truly is exceptional. If you’re someone that suffers from diabetes or know anyone that suffers from diabetes, I highly recommend that you give this book a read. To order a copy, at the bargain price of $12.00 in print, you can contact Cinda on her websites or you can order one through me right here. I bet I can even get her to sign it for you as I made her do it for me. In addition, I also formatted So Where’s The Cure? as an e-book and you can order a digital copy of it for Amazon Kindle using this link for just $9.99.

I want to thank Cinda for the opportunity to work on this project with her. It truly was a great experience for me and I certainly learned a lot in the process about publishing, both in the print and digital world and even more importantly, I learned a little bit more about how this disease can have such an impact on a life.

Do yourself a favor. Check out So Where’s The Cure? and help support a great cause as the majority of the proceeds from the sale of this book will go towards the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation. The JDRF Walk here in Peoria, IL just took place over the weekend and was actually the location in which this book debuted. The JDRF is determined to turn Type One into Type None and this is a great way to help. And don’t forget that November is National Diabetes Awareness Month and this would make a great gift for someone you might know that could relate to the types of things that Cinda has had to deal with. Congratulations to Cinda on a job well done.