Always on
This project successfully funded on 12th February 2026, you can still support them with a donation.
Princess of the Borderland - a book to raise funds
Poole, England, United Kingdom
Aim
I'm writing my story "Princess of the Borderland" to raise £8,000 to cover private medical bills to give quality of life
Princess of the Borderland is a story about my life - wedged in the borderland between life and death. It's a way to share my story, chapter by chapter with you, my supporters and raise funds for immediate medical needs.
A bit more about the project...
Princess of the Borderland
When you touch upon a borderland, such as death, while still living. It feels like something worth sharing. I want to give something back.
From this borderland it becomes acutely important not to waste breath. When you realise, when you really understand, how limited and valuable breath is. Every thought and word along with my breath creates the path ahead.
Let's pretend we are meeting for the first time and make an instant connection. I ask you to trust me and enter a dream-space - a white-walled art gallery. The room is bare and marble and in the centre there is an exhibition piece, veiled beneath silk grey cloth. A skeletal, mischievous figure, is dancing around and beckoning to us to unveil what's beneath. He keeps flickering into view and out, a blink and he's back. But our eyes are transfixed by the central veiled object. Our mind curious to see, at the same time resistant - what if it's death beneath the cloth? Is it not better to turn away? But finding the courage that only comes from intense curiosity "of the cat" we draw back the cloth and find the entirely unexpected.
Let's unveil it together, death, from a borderland.
This is a personal journey. I want to share the incredible experiences from the natural, animal and liminal realms - where I've found support and help this last year of living with a terminal diagnosis. A different sort of terminal, where I'm no longer boarding the plane. Instead I sit in the departure lounge with you all and write my own runway.
In return for your kind support. There will be behind the curtains insights, incredible heroines and heros, acts of courage and fantastical events that may lead you to wonder if I'm writing a fiction.
However, if I don't write these as truly as they have occurred, there may be a missed opportunity here. I feel certain that others will recognise my story as something bigger than themselves, as I have done. I leave a door slightly ajar for people who find themselves in a similar crisis or situation. Death. Transition. Endings, it could be a relationship or a job even. Identity shifts that lead you to dust off an internal compass hidden under books and mental thoughts. It's never lost.
To question the story that gets told to you in the confines of a medical office and a textbook institution. Only, now you get to write your own story.
I plan to share the funny moments too, well, I found them funny. Like Ricky Gervais says, humour gets you through the hardest of times. But don't take my word for it. A doctor of mine, in our last treatment of 2025, along with "Happy New Year, Nicky" told me that he was glad I'm still here to share my self-ingratiating humour. It has been the highlight of his year.
❤️Why I’m Writing This Book
There's a strange clarity that only serious illness brings.
As someone, looking death in the face (and living with a stage 3b lung cancer diagnosis, as a non-smoker). I’ve realised that those of us who have arrived at the borderlands between life and death, each of us have something important to reveal. This is my story to share with a friend, that's you! Even if we have not met.
With the time remaining to me I find it impossible to close my eyes or turn away. I must keep them open and write what I see. A dial has turned up the brightness.
I aim to share my story, even the most bizarre moments and there have been many. And the funny ones, surprising bubbles that burst open the gravest moments. My dog loves it when I laugh. There is something so universally warm and comforting about laughter and in way of return"doggy-fart, gladdens my heart".
I aim to approach this book with the curiosity of an investigator. To act as an observer of a new and unfamiliar land. As well as, share my own personal story from a year and half of misdiagnosis to the sudden leap into lung cancer, lurking all along. Could I relive this past year in the same way - with the knowledge I was suffering from a terminal illness? I doubt it. I am grateful to arrive at the end of a story only to begin again rather than carry Atlas's rock up a mountain ahead, knowing what was coming.
My "soldiering-on" oblivious to what it all meant - mentality - was digging a fateful grave. But is the timing of death really fated?
Questions I may ask as I write:
💚What death reveals about how I lived and how I now prepare to die now I've been given a second chance
⭐The philosophies, myths, and cross-cultural teachings about death
❤️The psychology of dying that I am realising (including the psychosynthesis lens and Tibetan book of the Dead)
💙What gifts can be found hidden in the darkness of illness.
The modern avoidance of death — and its cost
This will be part me, part investigative journalism, part spiritual inquiry, and part collective testimony.
A book that unveils something hidden in the dark.
💛 Why I Need Your Support
I am currently in a cancer treatment journey. Fundraising for my medical needs has slowed down, and my ability to work in the traditional sense is limited. What I can do is write each day.
There is a curative route, currently unfunded by the NHS and there are also the daily medical bills to keep me stable on treatments I have started. My aim is to extend the time afforded to me past a blink of a year and to a long filled life.
Writing this book is not only a calling — it’s also a way to support my medical needs while creating something meaningful for others. Strangely, I feel as though the book I am writing is a proof of life to come.
💸 Your Pledge Supports: £8,000 Goal for immediate medical needs.
I also have a Patreon community for more regular donations and chapter reveals. www.patreon.com/nickymerlin
Cover piccie by A Billion Clicks Photography
Funding method
Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made