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This book will show you what it's like to live with Synaesthesia, using art, poetry, and laughter.
Synaesthesia?
Synaesthesia is a condition in which one sensation (for example, touch) is transformed into another inside the brain (for example, sound). I experience audio-visual and visual-audio synaesthesia mostly, but scratching and scraping feelings can also cause flashes of light to show up in my vision. For the most part it is an unobtrusive part of my life, but sometimes I will find it hard to concentrate or read if noises are too noisy, or smells are too smelly. During one of the worst synaesthesia moments, I got lost in Salford on my way to a friend's comedy gig, because the nearby church bells were too loud, so I couldn't read my map. I was an hour late.
Synaesthesia is not treated as a disability, and yet having it can impact our lives in profound ways. I can't read properly when a loud noise triggers a visual disturbance, and yet I'm a novelist. I managed to become a novelist because I didn't give up, and worked around this disability.
And it's also a superpower. When I grew up, if an adult said someone had a 'loud shirt' I would agree with them and take it literally, because it is loud. When cartoon characters think, the thoughts are always external, typically in a different style or colour palette. Blues music can sometimes literally be blue.
In my most extreme moments of synaesthesia superpower, I am a psychic. My brain's natural ability to swap one sensory input for another means that I can register electricity in the air as colour and sound. The most notable example of this was in 2008, when I worked out precisely where a lost camera battery was on a beach, by following the waves of green light emanating from the stone it was trapped under. I had not been on that beach before, and was asked by the person who lost it to help out. I ran ahead of our little search party, followed the green lights, reached under a rock, and got the camera first time. This one is notable because it's one of precious few super moments I have witnesses for.
Synaesthesia helps me avoid rainstorms, write things in a new way, and be ahead of the competition. But it also means I can't be around loud eaters, barking dogs, smelly babies, or loud city centres. For those things, I long ago developed unhealthy coping mechanisms, including a minor addiction to migraine medication, and drinking before getting on the train to gigs.
Those days have passed in favour of better coping skills, but I am writing this book to show people the full story, the full adventure.
Cider weakened my synaesthesia, so naturally I found myself drawn to it when I was overstimulated.
Why write this book?
To make you laugh, and to raise awareness of a misunderstood neurodivergence. This book is for anyone who sees things differently, who stood out but didn't know why at first, who finds lights too loud and music too bright. It is for anyone who wants to be understood, or who wants to understand the world a little better.
And for those of you without synaesthesia, this book has a noble, lofty goal: To give you synaesthesia for a day. I have plans to make that happen. This is not going to be a block of words, it is going to be an interdisciplinary masterpiece of art, colour, poetry, comedy and dreamscapes that will rewire your mind to better understand the way I, and many other synaesthetes, see the world.
Some good news already.
My work on Synaesthesia has already got the attention of two leading disability writers.
What do supporters get out of this project?
Right now, you can get the eBook before anyone else. You become an Advanced Reader. You'll help me by leaving reviews on Amazon on the day it comes out, and in return you get to see the book long before anyone else.
In the future I want to add a hardback or paperback option. I really love the cover of this book and it needs to be made.
Weird title.
I know, but when I was younger I did not know the word synaesthete. I called myself a Synaesthenoid because I wanted to anchor myself to something. Like many teenagers, I wanted an identity. I was also a fan (still am) of Gary Numan. His fans are called Numanoids. I spent my childhood wondering if there was anyone else like me in the world. So today I am writing this book so more people don't feel alone. I want the world to understand us.
Who is writing it?
Hi, I'm Phillip. I write Comedy and Science Fiction. Two of my most popular characters, Stephanie and Lax, both have their own unique forms of synaesthesia. It has informed my work since before I knew it wasn't 'normal'. When I was studying Writing at university, I sometimes struggled to concentrate in class, and I never knew why until I graduated and began researching Synaesthesia. But don't worry, this book won't be dry and boring. Like I said earlier, its noble goal is to show you what Synaesthesia is like, in book form.
In fact, I already tried this once before with my multidisciplinary sci-fi-comedy-poetry book WHO BUILT THE HUMANS? which became a bestseller on Amazon in 2022. That book was a collection of 47 short stories that, read in different orders, gave the reader a different feeling or conclusion about the end of the universe. It was my first attempt at truly synaesthetic fiction. It was funny, dark, and weird. I have also written poems about synaesthesia before, and the best of these will show up in Synaesthesioid.
Hello to my old fans.
To those who know me from my comedy or my fiction, hi again. I've got a lot of interest for this project from people in all sorts of places, so Synaesthesioid is becoming my main thing for a while. I'm querying some of my other projects. But because Synaesthesioid so new, so unusual, and about a topic many people don't know about, I am self-publishing here with the help of the brilliant people behind Crowdfundr. I was very careful when selecting which platform to use, and I believe Crowdfundr are the best people for this book.
Raising awareness.
If funded, I will be taking this book to literature festivals and performing speeches to raise awareness of synaesthesia. I would also like to use a scan of my brain as the author photo inside the dustjacket. That might be hard to do, as at present, doctors tell me the wait is very long.
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