Are You Ready For It?
Cue T-Swift
I'm back! And it's my TEN year pub anniversary!!!
It's been over 2 years and below I'm going to fill you in as to why. It's sad and, if I'm being completely honest, it's tragic, but I'm on the other side of it now and I have a new release coming October 27th!!!
THE REASON
If you follow me on IG, then you know that I lost my brother a few years back to a boating accident when our whole side of the family was vacationing together. I was emotionally and psychologically paralyzed for pretty much two years. How people process grief is very different and there are no timelines and while I wish I could have found a way to carry it better sooner, I was not in control of that.
So if you read my posts on IG, when my brother was killed I was almost finished writing a contemporary romance that I was all set to release in the summer of 2021. The last day I worked on it was the morning of the day my brother died. I didn't open that document until a month ago. It's hard to summarize everything here, but if you want to know more you can pop over to IG. I cleared my IG right after he died because I couldn't stand to look at anything that brought me joy. It felt wrong, so I'm just starting to post again.
THE BOOK
Chasing Waves - The story behind the story - Part 1
I can't remember what initially inspired me to write Chasing Waves because I have forgotten a lot of random details of my life surrounding my brother's death, but I can tell you what inspired me to finish it and maybe that's even more important.
The last day I worked on this story before my brother died was on the day he died. Being that this story was a grief journey and involved a huge water element, which was connected to the way my brother was killed, it seemed near impossible that I would ever finish Chasing Waves. However, two years later, the grief journey my MC goes through is what made me want to finish it. Once my mind started to work better again, I wanted to read everything I could about grief and how people moved forward after a traumatic loss. It was hard to find much fiction tagged as such, so I relied heavily on nonfiction. I honestly just needed to see people making it out of the thick of grief and onto the other side of it living and not just surviving. It might sound weird to some, but maybe this resonates with others that are carrying grief. It's really hard to see through grief, and for me, maybe because I'm bipolar, I don't know, but it was soul-crushing for a very long time. I didn't know if I could truly live with any sort of joy again. I had so much processing to do and reading about others, fiction or nonfiction, going through the same thing made me feel less alone in my journey. Maybe there are a million fiction books out there that are based around a grief journey, but damn if I couldn't find them when I needed them most. Anyway, writing this has also helped me process my grief and learning better how to carry it while still allowing myself to feel some joy, too. There's a lot of hope within the pages of Chasing Waves and in my own life now, too.
Thanks for being here and listening to my journey after loss.