As someone who suffers from stress, anxiety and depression I have always found it easy in the past to turn the smallest of molehills in the largest of mountains.
No matter what happened I was likely to view a problem as the worst thing to ever happen to me, with the all too real possibility that my reaction to it would be to curl up in a ball and cray, while hoping that the problem would either disappear or magically resolve itself.
Recently I have become better at coping with problems (I won’t say I’ve become great at it, I’m a long way from that, but I’m certainly better than I was). I’m not sure if it is because the therapy I started towards the end of last year has begun to have a positive effect on my moods and responses, or because I have simply become better at dealing with negative situations.
Whatever the reason the timing could not be better because in the past couple of weeks I seem to have been surrounded by a veritable field of molehills. None of the problems I’ve been faced with have been big, but it has seemed as though every time I turned away from one problem I encountered another.
For the most part I have been fighting with problems related to my career as a writer. It started off when I put the 4th book in my Inspector Stone Mysteries on pre-order and I discovered that it was not added to the series page on Amazon.
After that I discovered that Amazon messed up again by getting the prices on my books wrong when I decided to adjust my pricing to bring it more in line with the regional pricing preferences of my customers. I’m sure some people are enjoying the fact that my books are priced at only a fraction of what they’re meant to be, and I’m always happy to find new readers, but I’m not happy that Amazon has my prices wrong.
Then I decided to update my paperbacks with the files that Draft2Digital provide because they have some nice layouts, only to have Createspace — an Amazon company — come up with multiple problems, including wanting me to prove for the umpteenth time that I am the author.
Outside of the writing issues there have been health problems with my mum, and a variety of other small difficulties.
In the past any one of these problems would have had me tearing my hair out, screaming, punching walls, or just curled up in bed crying from the sheer stress of it. Now, though, I have sent the required emails to try and sort the issues out, passed them off to the appropriate people, and stepped back to allow myself a breather, even stepped away completely and played a game to distract me.
I won’t claim that I have got the problem of making mountains out of molehills completely licked, but it does make me feel better than I am improving at it. I’m not there yet but I’m on the road to success, and not just with this issue.
Alex R Carver 
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