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Jonathan Harnisch

Jonathan Harnisch

About

Author | Mental Health Advocate | Schizophrenia | Artist | Blogger | Podcast Host | Patent Holder | Hedge Fund Manager | Film & TV Producer | Musician

Along The Watchtower

Along The Watchtower

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Description

<p><strong><em>A tragic warrior lost in two worlds... Which one will he choose?</em></strong></p><p>The war in Iraq ended for Freddie when an IED explosion left his mind and body shattered. Once a skilled gamer as well as a capable soldier, he's now a broken warrior, emerging from a medically induced coma to discover he's inhabiting two separate realities.</p><p>The first is his waking world of pain, family trials, and remorse—and slow rehabilitation through the tender care of Becky, his physical therapist. The second is a dark fantasy realm of quests, demons, and magic, which Freddie enters when he sleeps. The lines soon blur for Freddie, not just caught between two worlds, but lost within himself.</p><p>Is he Lieutenant Freddie Williams, a leader of men, a proud officer in the US Army who has suffered such egregious injury and loss? Or is he Frederick, Prince of Stormwind, who must make sense of his horrific visions in order to save his embattled kingdom from the monstrous Horde, his only solace the beautiful gardener, Rebecca, whose gentle words calm the storms in his soul.</p><p>In the conscious world, the severely wounded vet faces a strangely similar and equally perilous mission to that of the prince—a journey along a dark road, haunted by demons of guilt and memory. Can he let patient, loving Becky into his damaged and shuttered heart? It may be his only way back from Hell.</p>

Story Behind The Book

Envision a blend of a mentally ill mind with unsurpassed resiliency and fiery intellect and your result would be the brilliant Jonathan Harnisch. An all-around artist, Jonathan writes fiction and screenplays, sketches, imagines, and creates. Produced filmmaker, fine artist, musician, and published erotica author, Jonathan holds myriad accolades, and his works captivate the attention of those who experience it. Manic-toned scripts with parallel lives, masochistic tendencies in sexual escapades, and disturbing clarities embellished with addiction, fetish, lust, and love, are just a taste of themes found in Jonathan's transgressive literature. Conversely, his award-winning films capture the ironies of life, love, self-acceptance, tragedy and fantasy. Jonathan's art evokes laughter and shock, elation and sadness, but overall forces you to step back and question your own version of reality. Scripts, screenplays, and schizophrenia are defining factors of Jonathan's life and reality - but surface labels are often incomplete. Jonathan is diagnosed with several mental illnesses from schizoaffective disorder to Tourette's syndrome; playfully, he dubs himself the "King of Mental Illness." Despite daily symptomatic struggles and thoughts, Jonathan radiates an authentic, effervescent, and loving spirit. His resiliency emanates from the greatest lesson he's learned: laughter. His diagnoses and life experiences encourage him to laugh at reality as others see it. Wildly eccentric, open-minded, passionate and driven, Jonathan has a feral imagination. His inherent traits transpose to his art, making his works some of the most original and thought-provoking of modern day. Jonathan Harnisch's struggles with his mental health conditions are interlinked with the incomprehension of non-sufferers, which provokes him to explain his reality. He has explored a range of media, including film, music, and now the written word, to help the general public understand exactly what it feels like to suffer from schizophrenia. By fictionalizing the day-to-day meetings of multiple personalities, he is illuminating a corner of psychiatry that few understand. As an author with schizophrenia, Jonathan Harnisch is ideally placed to share the unusual perception commonly defined as 'mental illness'. Harnisch is not dealing with an altered reality, but a double reality. His main characters, Ben Schreiber and Georgie Gust, perfectly illustrate how two lives can share the same body.

Media Links

Personal Experience Illuminates Schizophrenia

🔗 http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/6/prweb11970769.htm

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Reviews

<p><span style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">A fragmented debut novel about life lived under a fog of schizophrenia from author Harnisch.</span><span style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;"> </span><span style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Benjamin J. Schreiber has...tried to rob a bank with a cellphone [and lands] in therapy [where he] explores his alter ego Georgie [who], like Ben, depends on wealthy parents. [The money enables Georgie] to explore...kinky sex [with] Claudia...[and he] succumbs to a...love only his...mind...could produce.</span><span style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;"> </span><span style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">At one point...Harnisch introduces himself as a mentally ill artist in a string of beat-like sentences: &quot;Thoughts. Thoughts bombard my head, my brain. My psyche.&quot; </span><br style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;" /><span style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">-</span><i style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;">Kirkus Reviews</i><br style="font-family:verdana, arial, helvetica, sans-serif;font-size:small;line-height:normal;" />  </p>