Breakfast today. Seeded gluten-free toast, a fried egg, crispy chili, and fried tomatoes. Sprinkled with sea salt and drizzled with best-quality olive oil.
I’M BACK!
Well, I wasn’t expecting to take a whole month off from writing, but that is what happened. I barely logged on to Substack; I didn’t write a WORD of my novel that is coming out in May. It looks like a 65k word crossword. A jumble of letters with words in there somewhere. Hopefully. I am getting back to it today, slightly nervous of what I will find, not gonna lie.
There is a part of me that feels horribly guilty, and another part (a much bigger part) that is smiling like a Cheshire cat. I cracked the code of burnout – take a fucking break. Who knew!
I was all set with fiction deals. I had a full-time amount of writing to do. But then I did MasterChef and my relationship with food felt emotional and deep, and so I pitched ‘Hungry Eyes’ because the need to write down my emotional connection to eating felt vital. And so among the fiction we threw in another cheeky little book. A book I felt I had to write. A love letter to my life so far. But it didn’t change the fact I still had the fiction to write. So, imagine that… writing a book, then adding another book on top of it that needed to be done first, but then immediately having to get back to the fiction because that’s been announced and it just needed to get done. My brain was exploding. Creativity shot. On top of parenting and needing to do other jobs to get paychecks and trying to look after myself and other people and not lose my tiny mind, and honestly, I’d find myself just sobbing at my desk.
I LOVE writing. I am rarely short of ideas. But I knew there was a problem because I had none. I’d sit and stare at the document, having nothing to give it. I just wanted to be in my kitchen practicing cakes. Anything but more words. I could barely even read. I’d open books and look at the words like they were insults. I was utterly worded out.
Order Hungry Eyes - It’s a belter, I promise. And if you enjoy my writing, maybe consider upgrading to paid on here too. It’s fun, I promise that too x
