Please don’t write me off because my New Year’s resolution to post a blog a week hasn’t even seen out January.. I have been helpless. My ADSL line has been down all week which rendered me completely hysterical. I am obviously addicted to the internet. I hurled abuse at whichever luckless employee answered the phone at Telkom so it was very humiliating when one of them pitched up this morning – a Sunday, no less – to find our new handset plugged into the wrong slot…

Anyway, back to blogging. I was diverted from the ADSL crisis by a friend’s birthday tea. I sat next to woman who told me about her ninety-year old sister’s recent death in Holland.  She’d been suffering with incurable cancer but that wasn’t the cause of her death. A doctor had come to the family home and administered a lethal injection – a release that both she and her family had chosen.

It would be different if she’d had Alzheimer’s. For a start, she could have been three decades younger. My research for Below Luck Level showed that it was perfectly feasible for the mother of my heroine to be diagnosed with Alzheimer’s at 59. I’m not a doctor so I’m not sure about the degree of distress suffered by such a patient. I don’t think even the doctors are sure. But I am sure about the degree of distress for the carers. I empathise with anyone who has to watch helplessly as their loved one disintegrates daily. Not overnight. It’s more insidious than that; a slow erosion of traits integral to the person you’re watching.

I don’t think i could bear it. That’s why I flew my heroine to the Dignitas Clinic in Switzerland. But even there, nothing’s cut and dried . I spoke to Professor Sean Davison who is spearheading the campaign for Dignity SA to legalise assisted dying in South Africa. The bill he plans to introduce to parliament later this year won’t provide an outlet for those suffering from Alzheimer’s or dementia. The chances of legalising assisted dying in South Africa without informed consent from the patient are zero. And patients suffering from any form of dementia can’t give that. My heroine admits that her mother couldn’t choose between tea or coffee, let alone life or death…

It’s not the same everywhere. Belgium’s euthanasia laws recently allowed 45 year-old deaf twins to receive a lethal injection when they learned that their sight was also failing. The courts agreed that their lives would be unbearable if they were unable to see the only person in the world with whom they could communicate. Belgian law is being amended to include children and Alzheimer’s patients with suffering that cannot be alleviated.

I know what my choice would be in those circumstances. I just have to hope that crime and corruption aren’t the only reasons that might make me think of emigrating in the future.

The best thing about my new career as a blogger is instant gratification. Push Publish and hey presto – my words are beamed out over the entire planet. They can probably be read by a team of astronauts en route to Mars. Publishing Kaleidoscope was an entirely different ball-game.

A blog is short. You can skim through for errors in the flash of an eye – it’s much more user-friendly than ploughing through a manuscript. Again. And again. I began to hate the story more every time I read it. I couldn’t make up my mind about the commas. Or the colons. The characters were even worse. Would they have said that? Could they have done this? When I could bear it no longer, I pressed print …

This unleashed a new panoply of problems. My printer was used to short snappy instructions. Print the electricity bill. Maybe an email from the children for me to read again before I went to sleep. It had never been expected to print an entire novel.   It took DAYS . It couldn’t deliver more than about ten pages at a time without going into seizure. The paper jammed. The ink ran out. One chapter heading started half way down the page which threw all subsequent pages out of alignment. I was tempted to throw the entire project into the garbage but eventually – there it was! Two hundred and fifty pages! Double spacing! Single-sided!

But then what?

I didn’t have an agent. Penguin’s offices were down the road in Rosebank. I’ve been reading Penguin books since the days when all their covers were orange and white. Imagine if there was a penguin on the cover of Kaleidoscope? I fed the pages into a brown manila envelope and drove down to Penguin. I left my envelope at reception.

It  was nearly a year before I heard from them. You can understand why I love to push Publish on my blog…

This year’s resolution is to write a blog a week on my brand-new web-site. I have a bad record with resolutions but I’m determined 2013 will be different. One click a week is all I’m asking…

There’s one resolution I’ve stuck to as a researcher. Start at the top. Don’t interview the office clerk.  Make an appointment with the National Director. That’s Jill Stacey, if the subject you’re researching is autism in South Africa. I couldn’t believe the warmth of my reception when I pitched up at her office in Greenside, completely lacking in credentials with regard to either journalism or autism. She was immediately interested in my very vague concept of a novel revolving around a child with autism. Despite her demanding schedule, she talked to me for well over an hour, giving me my first insights into an enigmatic disorder which is still not fully understood, despite the millions spent on research all over the world.  Jill has a son with autism so everything she told me carried extra weight.

And her help wasn’t confined to one interview.  I was introduced to parents, teachers and doctors. I was invited to an international conference to listen to specialists in the field. But most of all, I was able to work with individual children with autism – each one unique and special. I will always be grateful to Jill Stacey for the doors she opened – Autism SA is in excellent hands.