I am writing the book she couldn't

Me then. Me now.

I asked AI to make this photograph for me. It's a reminder not to write about her as though she were gone. I have spent a long time writing around her. Poems, notes in a phone on the side of the road, sentences on whatever paper was to hand. She didn’t get a book, she got through the day.

Heroine is the book she couldn’t write. Not because she wasn’t brave enough, but because she was busy surviving a house that had changed shape, and a new start that did not stay new.

The story is fiction. A child leaves 1980s London for Cornwall. A stranger makes the house brighter. Then nothing in that house is safe, and she is the only one who can see it. But I know that terrain. I have been walking it for over ten years in my head, and I am finally putting it on the page.

I’m not writing to rescue her, I am writing so that today-me can finish the sentence that little-me had to swallow.

If you want to be told when Heroine is out, click here. I will not fill your inbox. I will write only when there is a book.

Until then I am here at my desk, the work is quiet, it is ours.