Twenty years ago, I published my first book. My 34th is due out next spring. Here I reflect on the grit and the glamour of the writer's life - and on how much things have changed in since 1994.

Twenty years ago this week my first book was published - Unlawful Carnal Knowledge: The True Story of the Irish X Case was subsequently banned in Ireland, which made it an overnight success north of the border.

As a journalist on the Daily Telegraph, I was working full-time but took the week off to promote my book and enjoy a series of low-key celebratory events with my agent, my editor, and a few close friends who presented me with champagne and flowers. I signed some copies at a bookstore in Belfast (after a bomb scare), and my editor in Dublin took me for a splendid lunch at the Shelbourne Hotel.

In 1994, there was no mention of ebooks or interactive electronic editions, and neither Amazon nor Audible existed. I wasn't expected to hire a publicist, choose which voice-over actor I'd like to recite my work, or spend hours each week updating my social networking pages. I wrote a piece for the Sunday Times and appeared on Irish telly and the BBC, but nobody expected me to take part in interactive Skype chats with book clubs around the world, or attend public speaking engagements where I'd be cross-examined on my subject matter.

Life seemed simpler then.

In the two decades since my first book was released, I have had almost every publishing experience one can imagine. There have been gruelling and not-so-glamorous international book tours with horribly early starts, glittering launch parties in New York, London, Hollywood and Suffolk, and hours trapped in airless radio studios doing down-the-line interviews. I've been filmed for the NBC's Today show, TV stations in Paris, Gibraltar and Rome, sat in on Pebble Mill and The View, and had a Hollywood movie star unexpectedly pick up the bill for the Manhattan launch party of my first novel, The Sense of Paper.

Movie rights have been repeatedly optioned on Tomorrow To Be Brave, my book about the only woman in the French Foreign Legion, and I was with actors Caroline Quentin and Kevin Whately at the premiere of the TV mini-series that was adapted from my book Footprints in the Snow. I've appeared on BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour to talk about the first Gulf War. I've given talks on the same subject to Government officials and sat gratefully in the green room of countless TV studios while my clients such as Goldie Hawn, Barbara Sinatra, Deana Martin, Haatchi & Little B, and Uggie the dog went "out front" to promote our work.

I've been deafened by hysterical fans who'd queued all night for the signature (or pawprint) of a star whose memoir I'd just penned, and I have criss-crossed the world First Class to stay in the sort of homes and hotel suites that most can only dream of. I also lived for 18 months in a crummy pension on the outskirts of Paris, resided in a smelly B&B in Humberside, and made my home for while in a Travelodge in the Home Counties.

To keep me on my toes, a television crew from the Swedish equivalent of Newsnight recently flew in from Stockholm to film me speaking about the history of post-traumatic stress disorder because of my book Shell Shock, and later this year I'll be giving a talk to more than 100 National Trust volunteers to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War.

From my clients, agents, and publishers over the years I've been presented with a variety of gifts including a shopping trolley full of sex toys, a Cartier watch, a Harrods pillow, a straw hat, a designer handbag, hampers, a solid gold bookmark, and enough flowers to fill an abandoned Borders store. Publishers have presented me with several framed book jackets as well as beautiful leather-bound copies of my titles, and I have a gratifying number of framed bestseller lists mounted under glass.

In this my anniversary month, my 33rd book has been published - The Beat of My Own Drum, the ghosted memoir of the American musician Sheila E, whose childhood sexual abuse almost ruined her life until she found healing through music. I represent myself these days, and the editor who worked on the book with me was recently made redundant, so there were no cards or flowers from her. If it weren't for my long-suffering husband there would have been no celebrations, and only a few of my friends even appreciated the milestone.

Meanwhile I sit in my garret in Suffolk, completing my 34th book - Born Survivors - a Holocaust memoir that was discovered, researched, written and agented entirely solo. The research for this project has taken me to San Francisco, Nashville, Auschwitz, Prague, and Bratislava, and the book will be launched at the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria next May, followed by a three-country book tour and months of publicity.

To keep my American publishers happy, I recently had to complete a 10-page questionnaire that asked me to provide a comprehensive resumé and reviews, several hi-resolution author photographs, and the name and address of my publicist. I was instructed to give a full list of my titles, including all editions, dates of publication and numbers of copies sold (by my reckoning over a million all told).

They wanted the names of any academic organisations I belonged to, my media contacts, lists of any honours and awards, and articles I had written. They asked for an explanation of how I came to write this book, a snappy précis (including my assessment of its relevance), plus the flap copy, my opinion of its likely market, potential readers, lists of any known competitors, and an assessment of how it might "benefit" my audience.

I am to name people to whom advanced bound galleys should be sent (I suggested Stephen Spielberg), which awards I'd like to be nominated for, and the name of the speakers' bureau that represents me. They want to ensure that I have a Facebook and Twitter presence, they need my Skype and FaceTime details, and asked what I've posted lately on Pinterest, Voxer, Tumblr, Google and any number of other sites, some of which I have never heard of.

They automatically assume I have a website but would like to know whether I also have fan pages, engage in live chats, message boards, blogs or provide email newsletters. Tellingly, they didn't ask for the numbers of the phalanx of assistants I'd need to employ if I were to keep on top of all this, as they seem to be suggesting.

Twenty years is a long time in this business. For 17 of them it has been my sole source of income, and of that I am very proud. Many of the changes that have happened have crept up on me while I just kept writing and trying to do what I do best. It is only on such landmark occasions that I can pause to reflect on the evolution of the industry and wonder where it might take me from here.

With many of my ebook sales outstripping hardbacks for the first time, and the digital age firmly in charge of both how I work and promote myself, I have had to evolve too. The good news is that there is still a hunger for words in whatever shape and format they take. Here's to the next 20 years of writers like me still wanting to write, and readers still wanting to read what we have written - when we're not on Voxer, that is!

Born Survivors by Wendy Holden will be published by Little, Brown May 2015.

www.wendyholden.com 

Shell Shock Revisited

SHELL SHOCK

by Wendy Holden

SIXTEEN YEARS ago I wrote a book about the history of shell shock - or Post Traumatic Stress Disorder as it is now more popularly known.

     The book, which accompanied a Channel 4 documentary series, was published 18 months after I had returned from Iraq - where I reported on the First Gulf War for the Daily Telegraph - and long before I realised I was suffering from a form of shell shock myself.

     The effects of my experiences in the desert have never left me. I am still plagued by nightmares of mass graves, bloody torture chambers, and rotting corpses. I often ‘sleep-run’ to escape imaginary attackers, trying to throw myself from windows or hurl myself down stairs.

     I have broken several bones and snapped my husband’s ribs twice as he tried to contain my nighttime thrashings. We now have mountaineering ropes fixed at the top of the stairs, which are clipped to metal shackles each night before we go to bed.

     When I wrote Shell Shock: The Psychological Trauma of War (recently reissued on Kindle to mark the anniversary of the First World War), I had little understanding of the effects of war on the mind.

     For months, though, I listened to the moving testimonies of WWI survivors and immersed myself in the records of the amateur psychiatrists who tried to fathom what ‘molecular commotion’ was caused in the brain by the shock of exploding shells – hence the misnomer ‘shell shock’.

     Even though the history of war-related illness goes back centuries, the flood of cases in WWI caught the medical establishment completely off guard.

    The medical enthusiasts who flocked to the fashionable ‘new science’ because of the massive numbers of mental breakdowns didn’t yet know that they weren’t caused by something physical but by human minds torn between self-preservation and duty.

     Idealistic young men wholly unsuited to homicide had marched joyously to battle with very little training or preparation. The conflict was expected to be short and sharp. “It’ll all be over by Christmas!” was a popular cry.

     But war on the western front was different from any fought before. The nerve- shattering properties of the new killing machines brought mental resistance to saturation levels. Under a never-ending bombardment of bullets and shrapnel, men were unable to sleep or even think. The trenches offered shelter but also imprisoned and immobilized, creating a powerful urge to escape.

      Men drowned in the shell holes or were sucked into the wet mud. Mules and horses were maimed and lay suffering. Human corpses littered no man’s land to be eaten by rats. The sense of helplessness was exacerbated by the terror of mutilation that pushed men to the brink of mental illness for the first time in their lives.

     There was no glorious battles to be fought with honour; just a pitiless life under siege. The prospect of being blown to pieces was a fear that flesh could not support.

     No one was immune to the horrors and none could tell who would crack. Few knew what to do with the grimacing, twitching cases who either ran from the lines or lay crying in their trenches, tormented and ashamed.

     Terms like ‘knocked silly’ or ‘got the wind up’ abounded and some 300 ‘malingerers’ were shot for cowardice, while hundreds more were dispatched to ‘loony bins’ for a brutal regime of cold baths and padded cells.

      With a serious manpower crisis and a war to be won, much of the early treatment was nothing short of brutal. There was no shortage of guinea pigs so hapless soldiers were prodded and poked, filmed and mistreated. Radical therapies were tested, including high dosage electric shock treatment that sometimes killed patients. This kind of experimentation would previously only have been possible on animals.

     Officers were generally treated differently than the rank and file and were prescribed rest, silence, occupational therapy, even a milk diet - but that didn’t make their own personal hell any easier.

     Few were able to express the horrors of the battlefield quite so well as the soldier poets such as Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, both treated for shell shock. Sassoon wrote poignantly: “By night each man was back in his doomed sector of horror-stricken front line where the panic and stampede of some ghastly experience was re-enacted among the living faces of the dead.”

     The doctors enlisted into the Royal Army Military Corps to care for those whose minds gave way had little medical history to go on and no clear guidelines. Symptoms were confusingly diverse and might include paralysis, blindness, speech loss or impairment, hallucinations, amnesia, chronic depression, schizophrenia and suicidal thoughts.

      The top military brass continually refused to accept shellshock as genuine and feared mass panic in the ranks. Crucially, shell shock wasn’t admissible as a plea in a court martial for cowardice or desertion for which the ultimate penalty was death. From the military viewpoint men were either ‘mad or bad’ and the doctors were frequently reminded that the ‘A’ in RAMC stood for Army.

     But what to do with the thousands of gibbering wrecks sent back from the front, especially when ‘cured’ they would only be sent back for more. Psychiatry was on the fringes of acknowledged medical practice and the theories of some psychoanalysts like Freud and Jung were considered shocking, but something had to be done. And so the science of military psychology was born, designed to remove men’s moral objection to war.

     It was only thanks to the compassion of psychiatrists like Charles Myers and W.H. Rivers that a more sympathetic approach was eventually adopted. Rivers developed the ‘talking cure’ and believed ‘anxiety neurosis’ came about when men were torn between the desire to run away and the obligation to fight.

    The sight of a corpse – especially of someone familiar - was the most common trigger for mental breakdown as the image continually haunted a man’s dreams. Worn down with the mental struggle, a soldier’s body found a clever way out by exhibiting signs of serious illness to provide him with an escape route.

    The fledgling study of the relationship between war and madness came to represent a revolution in military attitudes to the fragility of men. It was later responsible for the setting up of modern systems of diagnosis and the treatment of mental illness.

      The death penalty for cowardice was abolished and terms like ‘war neurosis,’ battle exhaustion’ or ‘combat stress’ came into parlance. Those affected were given compassionate treatment instead of being forced from the army without a pension. Still, it wasn’t until 2006 that the executed ‘cowards’ of the trenches were pardoned.

    The First World War undoubtedly became a touchstone of horror by which all later conflicts would be compared. It was also a watershed in the acceptance of invisible injury. Most of the symptoms witnessed then have been seen in veterans of every war since.

    With screening and preparation coupled with the birth of forward psychiatry, soldiers, journalists and civilians are better cared for than ever when they are sent to the front line to witness things that may scar them mentally forever.

     As conflicts continue around the world, there is still much that the military and the rest of humanity needs to learn and understand about how the most extreme of human experiences can deliver a severe trauma to the moral and mental state in what will always be a battle for the mind.

·               Shell Shock: The Psychological Trauma of War by Wendy Holden is now available on Kindle, price £4.99

So, 2013, you came and now you are leaving us. Someone once said that Time is what we all want the most but use the worst. Did I use you well this year? I like to think so.

Having seen the new year in riotously with good friends in our adopted county of Suffolk, England, in January we mourned the loss of a dear friend who – at 95 – had filled our last 25 years with love and laughter, wine and song. God bless you, darling Nicky. We shall never forget you.

I rolled up my sleeves and went back to work with someone who turned out to be not at all as they seemed. I am not one to dwell on negatives and am a great believer in karma, but rarely have I encountered anyone quite so toxic *shudder* Fortunately, I made a new friend in the process and bonded even more deeply with an old one. Thank you, Claire and Carly.

What the universe kindly offered me as an antidote was the purity of Haatchi and Little B, the delightful duo of seven-year-old Owen Howkins and his beloved three-legged dog. After the success of my Uggie, The Artist book – which was published in Italy this year and will be published in Russia in 2014 (in addition to the UK, US, and France along with an app we developed separately), it was wonderful to go back to writing about people and animals who epitomize nothing but goodness.

Haatchi & Little B was voted ‘book of the fair’ at the London Book Fair in March and will be published by Bantam Press in February in the UK. It will also be published in Germany, Brazil, America and elsewhere. If you haven’t seen this adorable pair already at Crufts or on the Paul O’Grady Show and elsewhere do watch out for them on TV and at book signings.

Continuing on the canine theme, in April my novella Mr. Scraps was published online as an ebook. Inspired by the true story of a dog named Rip who was the first search-and-rescue dog during the Second World War, Mr. Scraps is a heartwarming story of courage, love and devotion that appeals to parents and children alike. I wrote it for my niece and nephew and hope it will be published as a paperback specifically aimed at Year 7 students later this year.

I also published my first novel The Sense of Paper as an ebook outside the US. First published by Random House New York in 2006, it is still in print in America but I wanted to make it more widely available. I designed the jacket myself and had fun revisiting something that I first starting writing ten years ago.

In between travelling back and forth to the US and spending the summer in Italy again, I also finished up the remarkable memoir of Sheila E, the world’s most famous female drummer whose story of redemption through music will be published by Atria in the US in the autumn. To the Beat of My Own Drum is moving and courageous and I am delighted to call Sheila my friend.

Talking of friends, I spent much of the year in California and elsewhere engrossed in the research and writing of my third book with Goldie Hawn. The Wellspring of Joy continues our bestselling 10 Mindful Minutes series and is to be published worldwide in October. In this latest book Goldie helps us to rediscover the joy we are all born with but often lose sight of along the way, especially in our frenzied lives.

2013 wasn’t all about work and in our thirtieth wedding anniversary year, Himself and I managed to spend some glorious time in Suffolk, Devon, Spain, and our beloved Italy where we also slipped away to Venice. We had visitors from Scotland, Holland, and America, and I reconnected with the indomitable ‘Lady Blue Eyes’ Barbara Sinatra, as well as our old friend David Richardson. We also made some great new friends - especially Will Howkins, Colleen Drummond, David Keough, Ayesha Adonais, and Jen Bergstrom – with whom we have unfinished business!

With the London Book Fair in April and three new books coming out next year I shall be busy helping to promote them as well as updating and publishing as an ebook one of my recently out of print titles, Shell Shock: The Psychological Trauma of War.

To keep me out of mischief, I have a fascinating and intensely moving new war story to research, another novel burning away in my brain, and an unusual Hollywood memoir to write. I shall be adapting a screenplay I wrote into a stage play, helping a friend publish her YA memoir, and will be eagerly awaiting the first draft of a screenplay based on a bestselling book I wrote a decade ago. Plus, whatever else the tide brings in….

Roll on 2014. May it be a happy, healthy, and productive year for you all xx

My first born child

THE SEED of an idea was planted long, long ago. A painter friend told me that he’d remortgaged his Suffolk house in order to buy up the last known supply of the same make of watercolour paper used by JMW Turner.

I was astonished that he set such store by the paper he clearly revered. An amateur dabbler myself, I’d assumed it was purely the talent of the person behind the brush and not the materials that mattered. I was wrong.

A cursory investigation into the illustrious Whatman paper company in Kent and its connection to some of the greatest artists the world has ever known sparked something in my sub-conscious that eventually led me to writing my first novel.

The Sense of Paper started out as a love story - a tale of obsession with paper and with art – set in the wild coastal landscape that I had moved to. I had no clear idea of an ending, or even a middle, when I began it and – although I’d written many other books – this experience was different and exhilarating.

There were times when I didn’t feel to be in control of my fingers as they flew across the keys as if my magic. I watched the words they typed scroll out on the computer screen and marvelled that a hidden part of my brain was purging itself of its secrets and dreams.

I never intended the book to be remotely autobiographical but I didn’t seem to be able to prevent that. My experiences as a journalist on a national newspaper and – for a while – a foreign and war correspondent – spilled out of me in a torrent and before I knew it I had both a middle and an ending that was dramatic, obsessive, and tragic.

The novel-writing process took me two years. During that time I wrote two other (non-fiction) books, which were published with all the attendant publicity. The Sense of Paper felt to be my secret – my own little world into which I could immerse myself day or night and find release.

Although I was an established non-fiction author with hopes of being a novelist too one day, the idea of offering up my finished creation to public scrutiny scared me. I showed it to my husband and a few close friends first. All urged me to get it published. My agent loved it and immediately sent it out into the big wide world.

As a journalist for more than 20 years, I knew all about rejection. Like all reporters, my copy was often thrown back at me to rewrite and I was well accustomed to the feeling. The rejection letters from publishers were a new experience for me, though, and they stung.

My debut novel, they said variously, was ‘remarkable', 'astonishing', 'brave', 'lusciously textured' and poetic.’ They loved the contrasts between Turner’s life, the Suffolk scenery, and descriptions of some of the more brutal war zones of the modern age. After due consideration, though, more than thirty of them passed on publishing it because they couldn’t be certain which pigeonhole to place it in. (I was somewhat comforted to read recently that a book that is currently on the Man Booker longlist was rejected 47 times before it found the right home).

“But is The Sense of Paper a thriller, a mystery, or a romance?” one publisher asked my agent. “How do we market this?” asked another. “Where exactly would we place it on the shelves?” The view was that it didn’t fall into any neat category – something which others might have seen as its unique selling point.

Fortunately for me, an editor at Random House, New York, felt differently about my work. She loved Paper so much, having read it in one sitting, that she rushed into her office at 6am the following morning to catch her boss and demand that they publish it.

They did, in the autumn of 2006, to widespread critical acclaim. The reviews were amazingly gratifying after such a tortuous path and I still receive emails from fans begging me to write another, similar book.

Goldie Hawn, my friend and co-author on another project, hosted a glittering launch party for me at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel overlooking Central Park. The night was all the more poignant for the fact that it was my first major outing since recovering from viral encephalitis which had almost killed me and confined me to bed for a year.

The Sense of Paper is still in print in the US seven years on but is now published as an ebook in the UK for the first time. It is still something of which I am proud. People say that parents will always favour a first child over later children, no matter how hard they try not to, because of all that they went through to produce it. I feel the same way.

Since Paper was published, I have gone on to write many more books – all of them published and all very different. They are mostly the biographies of remarkable women whose lives read like works of fiction. I have also written a novella, Mr Scraps, about a dog caught up in the London Blitz, two screenplays, and have two unfinished novels on file which I hope to have the time to finish one day.

None of them, though, can ever mean as much to me as The Sense of Paper.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/The-Sense-Paper-Obsessions-ebook/dp/B00E83ONZI/ref=sr_1_1?s=digital-text&ie=UTF8&qid=1375782460&sr=1-1&keywords=The+Sense+of+Paper