Stories Along the Way

I didn’t set out to write a novel.

I got shingles. 

And apparently, when you take a very active person, make her contagious, and tell her she has to stay home for two weeks, strange things can happen.

In my case, I wrote a book

I was contagious for about two weeks, which meant staying home and keeping away from people.

So I did something I rarely do.

I watched Netflix.

And ate everything I could set my eyes on. 

Apparently, being forced to sit still turned me into a couch potato with an impressive appetite.

After one too many shows with storylines that left me thinking,

Surely I can do better than that?

…I decided to find out.

And that was how There’s Something in Her Smile began.

I thought I was writing a fairly simple story.

There would be Ana — an attractive middle-aged woman with a radiant smile.

There would be a love triangle.

There would be romance.

Simple enough.

Except Ana apparently had other ideas. 

Somewhere along the way, my attractive woman with the radiant smile developed emotional intelligence, a complicated history, and rather a lot to say about relationships.

And my simple love triangle turned into emotional entanglement involving hiking, caregiving, menopause, grief and emotional repression.

At some point I realised I wasn’t just making up a character anymore.

I had given Ana rather a lot of myself.

Apparently, I had accidentally written myself an alter ego. 

The strange thing is, writing the novel turned out to be the easy part.

I had no idea what was waiting for me after I typed The End.

First came the beta readers.

Then the cold read.

Then line editing, developmental editing and proofreading.

Every time I thought I was finished, I discovered another version of finished. 

But eventually, the manuscript really was done.

And that was when I met Amazon KDP.

I naively thought publishing a book meant uploading a manuscript and clicking Publish.

Apparently not.

Suddenly I was learning about trim sizes, margins, bleed, spines, barcode spaces and cover dimensions — things I had never had the slightest reason to know existed.

At some point, I began to suspect that writing a novel was merely Amazon’s entrance exam. 

Somehow, after all that, it worked.

There’s Something in Her Smile was published.

First came the Kindle version.

And then, after considerably more arguing with margins, spines and cover dimensions than I ever expected to do in my lifetime, the paperback finally followed. 

And to think, none of this was planned.

I got shingles.

I was told to stay home.

I watched Netflix, ate everything I could set my eyes on, and became convinced I could write a better story. 

So I tried.

Somehow, that story became a novel.

And now it’s a book.

Maybe getting shingles wasn’t entirely a waste of two weeks after all.