So I did it. I finished a book in exactly ONE month. It was an epic journey but somehow this one just flowed. Usually when I write I spend a little bit of time before I start plotting and planning but this time I sat and I just wrote. And every time the voice of panic/sense screamed at me to maybe stop and think a little I ignored it and I sat and I wrote.

And the words just flowed. I did fewer revisions than I usually do and had none of the lying awake in the middle of the night moments where I try to puzzle out what happens next.

Admittedly it was my third book with these characters so I didn’t need to think about their personalities or puzzle out how they would behave in certain situations. I know them all inside and out and I knew the destination they were going to arrive at. I felt like I was observing them and then writing down what I was seeeing and hearing.

When I finished I jumped on the bed and high fived my husband and felt the layers of solitude fall away.

Then I turned to my to do list, which was racketing up into the hundreds of items and thought, ok, now I can come back to earth and actually get some stuff done. Then I double-checked the to do list and wished I’d stayed where I was, fighting demons.

It’s often said that writing is a lonely business but, damn me, is it. When I write I am so sucked into that world I don’t really inhabit the real world at all. For the month or months I’m writing I’m distracted and never fully present.

I hide from friends, am thinking of dialogue whilst cooking my daughter’s dinner, imagining fight scenes whilst I’m swimming, picturing how a main character would kiss whilst I shop for groceries (I spend a lot of time idly wandering the aisles in a daze). I turn down lunch dates, dinner dates, any kind of date because there’s simply nothing on earth I want to be doing other than writing.

It’s a hard place to be. On the one hand so enjoyable and all-consuming. On the other so lonely and mired in guilt at being more focused on the people in my head than the people in my life.


It hits me that writing a book is like falling in love, like being in love - obsessive, exciting, distracting, joyful and panicky all at the same time.

And always, the feeling when I finish and hit the save button for the final time, is above all else, beyond the relief and the elation, broken hearted.
Fated