After receiving a bit of a hammering from life, my muse has been committed to The Home for the Temporarily Bewildered and Perpetually Confused. She smuggles occasional words out, written on tiny scrolls and hidden in the middle of cupcakes, but I get distracted eating the cupcakes…

Well that’s my excuse anyway for only being 30,000 words into my novel which I’d planned to publish this month.

I’m not all that upset about not writing at the moment. My life took another one of its many turns after my last blog post; that vulnerable (unusually for me), painful, honest bunching together of words that had me terrified to press the Publish button. Part of the resulting change was due to the actual writing of the post, but the major part was down to the responses I received in the comments and in emails. I want to thank those people who took the care and time to reach out. The words you sent were very helpful and the action you took meant even more.

What I was especially glad about was that there was no negativity and not one person advised me to look with gratitude at all the good things I did have in my life. Which made me do that on my own volition. The day after all the responses was a beautiful day in Ireland. I sat in the sun and thought about a lot of things. And the things that flooded into my mind were all positive. All the tiny and huge blessings in my life, from the smile I felt in my heart listening to the sun-baked dog snoring beside me to the astonishingly long list of positives in my life. I had meant to write out the pain in whatever words I could find, as an exercise in releasing it, and I ended up writing out all those good things. And I asked for what I felt was missing.

My life has changed since then. In a multitude of good ways. Most of the things I asked for have come into my life, definitely not in the context I meant, but in ways that are good enough. In fact, they are more than ‘good enough’, they are stunningly brilliant ( 🙂 I’m not normally an effusive person when it comes to praise so I’m trying to be better at that). And I’m taking the time to address the negative as it happens and to look for the positives and be grateful. It is working, in that the things that are happening are mostly positive, but also in the sense that I’m different in what and how I see.

About a week after I wrote that blog post. I watched a talk on TEDTalks about how we have all changed someone’s life, usually without even realizing it. I wanted to share that video with all the people who responded with helpful advice, a hug, an email, and to let them know that they are now heroes in my life and join the many people who have contributed in positive ways to help me get to where I am now i.e. blessed.

There are ‘small’ things that people do that affect others in ways they cannot even imagine. I read that it is a myth that when you land in quicksand, you sink to the bottom and die. Instead, you are stuck and are more likely to starve or die of dehydration or be drowned in a high tide. That the best way to survive is to try to float and if you have a strong stick you should get it under your back to support you and gradually start to move your feet and work your way out. At that bad time when my mind felt fractured and I was unable to do more than just float in quicksand, an almost stranger reached out and held a stick under my back. She did that by emailing every day, checking on me, supporting me, encouraging me to write if I could or not write if I couldn’t, and sometimes even just posting something for me or standing in the way of anyone who I couldn’t deal with. She didn’t have to do any of that, I was just a newbie author whose books she had reviewed and liked. But she opened a channel to me and flooded it with positive thoughts. She knows who she is (as I still bore her as much as possible with updates on my life 🙂 ), but I’m not sure she will want a public thank you (being all British and shy and stuff) so instead, have a look at her blog page and know, if you didn’t before, that’s she’s a wonderful person and the kind of friend you want to have watching your back.

I also have to mention a ‘little’ thing that a well-established much-loved author did that affected me deeply. I don’t usually comment much on Facebook, unless it is something to do with Clio, as I’m really quite introverted. However, when this author was featured in a weekend discussion on a Facebook group I just had to comment as she is also an introvert and I admire the way she handles the public part of her life. That she turned out to be a thoroughly nice person and that she was genuine and kind to me, exactly the type of person I had gotten the impression that she would be, was comforting and reaffirmed that sometimes reality matches up with the imagined image.

I’m mentioning these things because it is important that people know that even the little things they do can be life-changing for someone. I used to think that I couldn’t accept these acts of kindness without paying them back, but I’ve realised that rather than worry about paying it back when I may not be able, I need to pay it forward when I am.

The question that I asked of readers at the end of the last blog post was whether writers should write novels that explored the darkness while in the depths of darkness themselves. What I realised from the responses was that the question was not the right one, or at least it wasn’t the right one for me at that time. I will explore that issue and find the answer as I write the novel. What I know now is that my writing will always be authentic for who I am at the point in time that I write the words. And what I have discovered in my writing is that I am, and always need to be, someone who will search for the positive, the humour, and the light, even when I am in the depths of darkness. So when my eyes can’t see light, I need to wait until my heart can feel it and then the words with become clearer and the darkness will lose some of its power to blind me. In other words, there will always be good and positive people out there and I need to see that the rainbow of light they shine into my life will replace the colours that one person stole from my palette, until I am able to shine brighter for myself and hopefully for others.