This is what I call a true to life imitating art example. The author of this article, an author of fiction, never imagined her life would take such a turn, like that of the characters she had created.
On the life of a writer
I have tried since I began writing fiction in 2011 to encourage all writers, would be writers and anyone who has the love of the written word. That’s not because I am so confident in my own writing. In fact, In the beginning, like everyone else, I couldn’t even admit to being a writer. I just got on with it and started with my crime trilogy (The Blue Woods Trilogy). I found it difficult to end my stories because the plots just came fast and despite only intending to write one book I had to write three!
It took me a while to grow into being an author, but I just loved the freedom of letting my imagination run riot. It helped as I began to suffer a few balance problems and became quite deaf in my right ear that I found myself becoming more of a recluse than anything else. In August 2014, with two of my trilogy published and my third at the editing stage, I ventured out to meet a friend and had a bad accident when I fell and smashed my face on the railway platform. Given I didn’t trip, it prompted me to find out why.
The resultant Health investigations and my Christmas MRI scan were to make me realise that life and writing meant a great deal to me. I felt an urgency about my books which spurred me on to publish my third in the trilogy Boxed Off before Christmas and carry on with my nearly finished book Breaking Free.
I travelled to Wales between Christmas and New Year, as I was writing my book Breaking Free and needed some inspiration. It was a book I began about a character that had dropped out of the plot of my first book and I wanted to know what happened to her. I am a ‘free flow’ writer and let my plots come naturally. It was a new venture for me, written as all my books are for me as pure enjoyment, and I wanted to try a new genre, crime yes, but with a twist of the paranormal, and a historical element (WW1 and specifically a Welsh Regiment), so I took myself off to Wales and Caernarfon Castle and found my ghostly ending at the Royal Welch Fusiliers Museum within the castle.
It turned out to be an apt title as on my birthday a month or so later in February 2015 I met a neurosurgeon and was introduced to Hamish (this is what I named my tumour) who apparently had been with me for a lot of years, but was now getting spatially greedy and would soon press on my brain stem. He and I were parted in April 2015, one year ago. It is only when someone tells you that there could be some dire consequences having such an operation, and they list them just in case you are unsure how serious it is, that you realise how precious life is. I thought about all the books in the world I may never be able to read, let alone write.
I decided that should it be a success and I came through I would use Breaking Free, now finished but in need of editing, to do this during my convalescence. It was a good idea as one of the things that came out of the operation was an inability to write or type and I used the editing and social media as the means to teach myself again. It was complicated by having double vision, so most of the editing and the beginnings of the book (I dedicated it to “Hamish, my tumour, without whom I would never have tried humour”) were done with only one eye. I am just publishing, A Penny for Them, which kept me amused during the early recovery days. Now one year on I am well, my hearing has returned, my eyesight is sharper than it was, and without sheer determination (and the brilliance of my neurosurgeon) I wouldn’t have published two books!
I am a great believer and have been all my life, in that if you really want to do something you will. From the age of 15 years, all I wanted to do was write fiction; I left it a little late to start but once begun, nothing was going to stop me. I tell ‘all writers, would be writers, and anyone who has the love of the written word’ or indeed something to say, just write, don’t worry about the rules people want to force on you, let it flow – after all you can tinker with it later at your leisure.
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