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  1. A friend of mine, who is a wonderfully gifted writer and all round excellent person once gave me an excellent piece of advice. 

    Writers are so much more intelligent when they're writing.

    He's not wrong. He rarely is. Since I like to refer to myself as a writer, let's forget the massive hiatuses, and pretend the I have a modicum of intelligence and have been writing for you all this time. However, I am making a more manageable commitment to actually saying the things that I want to say on here - Instructions Not Included will now be receiving a weekly update. 

    Speaking of writers, let me talk to you about one who does write regularly, and is therefore far more intelligent than I am!

    You may or may not have come across Adam Brown, who is Senior Editor over at Diatribe, and an all round nice guy with a lot of knowledge. I had the pleasure of participating in his session at Children With Diabetes - Friends For Life 2017, about Writing About Diabetes (yes, I know, I know). He spoke to us about his great book, Bright Spots & Landmines. I had seen it popping up all over my social media in the lead up the 2017 conference and had been meaning to lay my hands on a copy. Being the nice guy that Adam is, he let me have a copy then and there. 

    There was one, teeny tiny thing however. It's a problem I find with a lot of otherwise fantastic books about D-books. 

    They're always in mg/dl. Which, you know, I understand. If you're from the US and you're writing for a majoritively US based market, you want to write in their 'money'. For the rest of us out there, however, it's somewhat frustrating - I've sat with a calculator and pencil, dividing all the measurements by 18 and jotting things down in margins many a time. So I decided to actually do something - I asked Adam if he would do a mmol/l version. 

    And this is what he wrote down for me.

    The end result?


    That was an email from Adam recently saying he wanted to let me know personally that he'd been good to his word! And not only had he done a Kindle version, but he'd also done a full on, hold it in your hands, honest to god hard copy.

    So I took a moment to catch up with him again at Friends For Life 2018 (yes, that is now THREE conferences I've been to, which is really hard to believe) -see below


    It is a great book, I really do recommend it. I'd love to see it really making a splash over in the foreign lands that are mmol/l speaking versions. So what do you do if you want to get your hands on a shiny new hard copy of this 

    The  All-Important Giveway Related Bit


    So I have ten copies of Adam's book to give away. A kind request - please only enter if a mmol/l version is actually going to be useful to you or someone you love. Otherwise that's a lot for me to spend in postage!


    • Entries are going to be open until the end of Sunday 12th August (that's UK time!) 
    • Winners will be chosen at random from a hat. 
    • To enter your name into the draw, comment on this post. 
    • You can earn an extra entry by following me on Twitter (@instructionsni) and sending me a tweet with the hashtag #brightspotsgiveaway 
    • Check back here in the week commencing 13th August, as I will be announcing the winners on that week's post.
    • If a winner does not get in touch with contact details, I will redraw for an additional winner and reach out to them.
    Good luck everyone, and I'll be back next week, trying to sound intelligent. Or at least honest. Let's go for honest. I can manage that.