Surrender Now is a memoir of vivid and extreme states of consciousness: set between Melbourne and Byron Bay between the years 2010 and 2013.
The novel chronicles my recovery from amphetamine addiction, adventures on the spiritual path, and falling in love with a mystic at a meditation ashram. I have written through life experience to illustrate the flow of feelings and events that align with the miraculous; that is, how combinations of ordinary circumstances bring about powerful shifts in consciousness.
I have removed the archives of Surrender Now from the homepage. You can download the ebooks for the first three volumes using these links.
Praise for Surrender Now
I will again recommend Nicola’s Surrender Now because she embodies the wild woman archetype like no one else. Nicola’s serialized newsletter is a journey full of brokenness, healing, inspiration, frolic, and magnificence. She handles this myriad range of expressions with humor, sensual grace, and unparalleled rawness. Her eloquence and wisdom permeate through the essence of her work encouraging her readers to heal while showing them all the messy bits that made her journey unique and yet relatable.
— Swarnali Mukherjee, Berkana.
Nicola’s work shines light on the consonance between storytelling and life. It inspires readers, like myself, to embark on a journey into discovering the sublime and transcendent, as we navigate through the material joys and pains of reality.
— Josh Pillay, Wait! Just Listen
This is powerful, introspective writing about ‘miracles and the miraculous’ in life. Nicola writes with honesty and courage, even about difficult thoughts and emotions that many of us find impossible to confront. A newsletter to be read in quiet.
— Rohini Chowdhury and Shaiontoni Bose, The Story Birds
When I read Nicola's stories, I often pause and think, "damn, that's a stunning line." Like no other writer I follow, her words reflect the beautiful yet terrifying workings of my inner landscape. Her motherly wisdom drips from the screen into my consciousness. I'm better for it.
— Alex Olshonsky, Deep Fix
Reading your writing every week, and talking about it with you, has been a steady and cumulative source of inspiration for me. Your voice is so clear, moving so naturally and seemingly effortlessly between the contemplative, the hilarious, the reverent, the literary and the colloquial. It so you, it's so us, and it has unlocked the passion and self-belief in me to rediscover and develop my own literary voice... I am devouring and savouring every morsel as soon as it arrives in my inbox, and talking to you in my head about it..
— Josephine Collins, author, The Way Out
Through pure-hearted storytelling, Surrender Now shares a message of letting go that so many in this 'modern world of control' need to hear. Nicola shares her whole self in her writing, evident from her pieces' emotional depth, which has made me both laugh and tear up. Surrender Now is emerging from a place of love for life and writing, a wholesome example for me as a novice writer writing my own close-to-my-heart stories.
— Jibran el Bazi, Meaning-Making