Still editing!

I am still editing Invisible.

Here is the part I am currently on:-

In the hallway, the front door opened and then after a moment, closed again. Fran and Gary sat without speaking as if the moment was so sacred it required the silence of the sacristy. It took another few minutes for Alison to reappear and when she did, her eyes were red and puffy. “He’s gone,” she said, her voice breaking on the very first syllable.

 

How strange that it is me, comforting her, Fran thought as she rose from the chair with her arms wide, wrapping them tight around Jim’s twin. “At least his suffering is over,” she told herself and Ally. Whereas mine has only just begun. As painful and terrible as before, his death hasn’t brought an end to my anguish, just pushed it in a different direction, she realised.

Poor Fran... Happy Reading!

Life versus Fiction

At the moment I am editing the book about the woman whose life falls apart when she hears some revelations. It was a hard book to write and it's equally hard to edit. The emotions which pour forth from the pages are raw and gripping. And each turn of the page takes me back to my past. For after all, who of us hasn't stood chalk faced and shaking when we are told about something so fundamentally wrong in our relationship that it rocks us to the core?

The other day I became embroiled in such a situation. For the sake of those similarly enmeshed, I shall keep the identities private, as indeed the minute details of the situation... but to see such a thing first-hand and in real life was heart-breaking. Trying to mediate as I was and failing dismally, it was all I could do in the end to offer support and a shoulder to cry on.

But it made me think. My own life [until this very moment in time] has been filled with emotional drama, heights of delirium and depths of despair that I guess in one shape or form, I must have invited in. Had my friend also invited it into her life? As an outsider in the private inner realms of her world, I could only surmise that it was a possibility that she had. We lead the lives we do because of the choices we make within them. That, after all, was how I came to write Split Decision, about the consequences of a choice.

My friend has recovered but will she ever be exactly the same person that she was before she found out the horrible truth? Probably not. Because I think that day, a little piece of her died. And I know exactly how that feels.

And me? Well as ever I will channel that raw emotion into my books as I always do. You see when people ask me if I write fiction, I nod. But I know it isn't really fiction - it is a written depiction of life, a tome which has recorded the vagaries of life, love and of humans themselves.

Am I a writer? Yes. Am I an imaginer of things? Perhaps. But mostly what I am is a chronicler. Like it or not, that's what I really am.

Happy Reading.