I woke up this morning to find a nice message in my in box from Dennis Palumbo, author of the excellent Writing from the Inside Out: Transforming Your Psychological Blocks to Release the Writer Within saying he stumbled across my blog and wanted to thank me after seeing I was saying positive things about the book.

Since I've only ever mentioned the book is passing, or in a very brief summery as part of my book review splurge I thought I would take the time out to just reiterate what a useful book this is.

Essentially it is a book written by a writer turned shrink who as part of his day job deals with professional writers who need therapy. It is based upon the column he wrote for the Writer's Guild magazine so he aint just some randomd guy, he knows his shit.

The book is about all the crap that writer's have to contend with in order to write; Procrastination, writer's block , not wanting to remove your favourite scene even though you know you need to, deadlines, finding inspiration, dealing with rejection, coming to terms with the loneliness of being a writer. It's all covered in here and more.

What makes the book so excellent is it never goes into psycho babble or intellectual mumbo jumbo, it always remains very much approachable, as if some guy was simply talking to you and giving you helpful advice. I don't think I would have enjoyed the book in the slightest if it wasn't so straight talking, so dont be put off the notional that it is going to be all touchy feely, it's not. Nor is it a cheesey self help book either.

What I especially like about the book is that each chapter is pretty short. In fact I don't know if you can call them chapters, they are more just little short pick me ups. Like if you are going to be pitching a project and you are nervous then go read the mini chapter on pitching stuff, got a deadline coming up that you are panicking over? Go read the deadline pages. Some of you may feel that you want huge sprawling chapters to feel that you are getting a deep understanding of everything, but the stuff in here is so helpful that even within the 3 or 4 pages spent on each topic you have learnt everything you need to know to get back to work.

I really like this book and would recommend it to anyone who wants to write because I think we all have to deal with this crap and sooner you can get past it the sooner you can get onto writing great stuff. There are so many insightful quotes and comments in here that you cant help but feel empowered by it all.

It gets two thumbs up from me.

You can read more about it on the guy's official website.