I started writing this book because I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Not in a romantic, writerly way. More in the way that Parkinson’s apathy had stolen my ability to do almost everything else, and somehow this thing — this stubborn, demanding, occasionally tear-inducing thing — kept pulling me back to the keyboard at 3am when nothing else could.
Not Just Shaking is my memoir. Forty-something years on this planet, seven of them with Early-Onset Parkinson’s Disease, and this is the honest account of what that’s actually like. Not the tremor narrative. Not the inspiration poster. The real version — the non-motor symptoms nobody warns you about, the relationships that buckle under the weight of it, the cognitive prosthetics I’ve built just to stay functional, and the strange, unexpected ways the disease has forced me to rebuild myself from the ground up.
There’s also an AT-ST. Half-primed, in three pieces on my art desk. It shows up at the end of every chapter. You’ll understand why by the end.
The book is split into three movements:
The People — the ones who held things together when I couldn’t. Todd, Chris, Sarah, Purple.
The War — the disease itself. The gaslight years before diagnosis. The symptoms that don’t make the brochure. The healthcare system that nearly broke me.
The Architecture — what I built out of the wreckage. The external brain, the trading desk, the AI tools, the accidental systems that turned out to be a life.
I wrote it with Claude as my co-author. Not as a gimmick — as a cognitive prosthetic. My brain can’t sustain the kind of sustained effort a book requires. AI bridged that gap. I think that’s worth being honest about, and the book is honest about it.
It’s available right now on Amazon Kindle for $6.99. If you’ve been reading this blog and any of it has landed — this is where it all comes from.
If you read it, I’d genuinely appreciate a review. Not for the algorithm, though that helps too. Just because I spent a year writing the honest version of my life, and knowing it reached someone matters.
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