Today is the day I will finally start talking about my debut novel.
In this post I will introduce the origins of my story, because after three months of blogging about my journey, I am finally at the stage whereby I know that, in a few short weeks, I will become a published author.

The thrill of excitement I get, just writing those words, published author, is incredible.
I can’t imagine how it will feel when l will see my book: the book I have poured my heart and soul into, available for pre-order on kindle.
It will be a culmination of three years of hard work and I am almost at the finish line.

Honestly, it’s hard to know where to start and how to introduce the story that I have written.
It’s not easy to condense down the process I went through as a writer to arrive at this finished book.
I guess it’s easiest to begin at the beginning:

This book started out as a bit of fun.

I was finishing up my creative writing course and as I often did, I talked to some of my close friends about the course and what I had been writing.
Naturally, they asked to read something and as I was still in the process of completing assignments, I decided to combine one of these assignments with something I thought they would enjoy reading.

Now, these friends, are the best kind.
The ones you can tell anything to because they keep your secrets, are completely honest and genuinely fun to be around.
I wanted to give them something they would devour, something that would make them laugh or perhaps even blush – I wanted a reaction!
I felt completely free, to write anything, because I knew nothing I could write would shock them.
So, I decided to write something really hot and sexy just to see if I could, just to get a reaction and just because I wanted to write something outside of my comfort zone and so unlike anything I had written so far.

I only had to write five hundred words, so every word counted and in the end I didn’t actually write a sex scene.
I wrote a chase scene, between a man and a woman from the woman’s perspective. But, from her view point you knew, she knew, exactly what the man would do once he caught her and exactly how the woman felt about that; the fear, the adrenaline, the need.
The whole passage was highly charged with sexual chemistry in a volatile situation. I loved writing it and it got the reaction I wanted from my friends.
I hadn’t shown anyone else my work by that point and my confidence soared.

The scene stirred something inside me. I found, I had really enjoyed writing it and I wanted to write more of the same.

It was naughty, full of anticipation and exciting.

Still, I already had an idea for a book and I had even written a few chapters, had a plan and detailed my characters.
My first book was to be about a woman recovering from the death of her child.
It is a story about being loved back to life.
I already knew that love would be a key feature of any story I wrote, because every piece of creative writing, I had written up to that point, contained some variation on the idea of love.

After I wrote that passage for my friends, I realised that my first idea, wouldn’t be the first story to leave my head.
I wanted to write something with more sex and less heart break, based in a reality I could relate to but no less impactful.

It is hard to say exactly what my debut novel is about.
Ultimately, I feel it is about right and wrong, love and heartache, misunderstandings and the fine line between them all.
It is about a boy and a girl and the decisions they make and the impact these have on their lives and others. It is about a boy called Cole Jackson and a girl called Abbey Fields.
They both tell their love story, as they see it and the story follows them as they make their choices and then bears witness to the fall-out of those decisions.