Hi Reader!
My name is Christina Elvin and this is the story behind this website ….
From the mid-1990s until I retired at the end of the first decade of this century, I practised in the UK as a psychotherapist and trainer. In the early 2000s, I documented, and published in hard copy, some of the knowledge and experiences that I had gathered. (These books are still listed in the British Library catalogue, although they are shown as ‘no longer available’.) I retired in 2011 and these books fell off my memory stack.
When my hubby and I followed our elder son and his family to New Zealand and took up residency, we were surprised at the high cost of printed books here, although it didn’t impact us greatly as we are long-time Kindle users.
While waiting for our NZ residency application to be processed, I wrote a short story for my grandson, Rowan, to read and this re-invigorated my love of writing. This went into abeyance for a while when our residency was granted and we took a few years to become settled in NZ.
The story picked up again while hubby and I were volunteering at a seniors’ learning centre. I led a course in creative writing and hubby taught himself how to build websites while doing so for the learning centre. This proved to be a serendipitous partnership! I had explored possible ways of making my books available for a wider audience, looking, for instance, at Kindle Publishing. None of these were satisfactory as they all, involved unnecessary costs (and were a bit too ‘techie’ for me!)
By now, I had 11 books already written and had more planned. I wanted to make them FREELY available with as little hassle as possible. Recognising also that today’s readers are likely to be using smartphones and tablets, I wanted to produce them in a format suitable for such devices, as until then I had only produced them in an A5 printed format. It was then that all of the pieces of the jigsaw came together! With hubby’s help I found a lovely app called ATTICUS that enabled me to take my printed text and convert it into both printed (pdf) and e-reader (epub) formats and hubby produced this website whereby the books could be seen and downloaded by anyone who wishes to do so.
The only challenge now is to publicise its existence – which is where you come in …
