Introduction

 I'm in mourning for my baby daughter, who died some months ago. The time before she died, when she was very ill for many months, was very traumatic too. For the past year I've been trying to write a novel as an escape from all the pain and trauma. It started as a reason to go into another world, where the most devastating reality of her disabilities, and of other extremely devastating losses that had happened over the last few years, didn't exist. I’d been a hobby writer, and at one time a poet published here and there, throughout my life, and periodically a journaler, and so to a pen and notebooks and the document apps on my phone I turned. This has continued to this day. I’ve been writing about characters who had been in my head for decades; characters invented when I’d so much wished my unhappy life was different and started to imagine an ideal one in my head. I started writing with a scene I’d once written out of a sudden compulsion about twenty seven years before in my head but while inventing an entirely new story. In the words of Violet from the movie Bound, “I told myself I wasn't really there, and so none of it really mattered” .. completely tuning out, and going into a fantasy world in my head, has always been a great talent of mine. I soon found I was writing compulsively at every spare moment. I started off trying to write the story in chronological order, for a few chapters, but I soon abandoned that and just wrote down the scenes that I'd long imagined, plus new ones I was getting and the dialogue I was mentally receiving.  Due to this, I don't actually know if my “novel” will ever actually knit together and get finished. At some point, I will hopefully try to do that and maybe not too far into the future. I may publish chapters and more here. I may upload my writing to somewhere else and link it to here. I am trying to write well, but much more my writing is about feeling better.  Trying to write this novel has helped me so much and still does for it's a mood boost that relieves my grief and the struggles of my heartbreak, a relief for which I don't feel guilty in any way, for it helps me to stay strong and carry on, both for my daughter on earth and for myself. Myself because, although I've given birth, (twice), I also matter. Though in my view the trend is that mothers are treated as if we don’t matter in my country, in many countries, throughout the world, we in fact do. We’re not identical to nursemaids and babysitters once a baby leaves our bodies, and we’re not inferior beings. Mothers have every right to be healthy and whole in their entirety and whether we are or not also affects our families and people most significantly so I think it's a good thing I have something that strengthens me with some joy and is bringing me healing.

Trying to write this novel has brought up a lot of stuff from my earlier life that I was heavily carrying, and it's felt good to express it, to release that burden. In my writing I like to focus on cosiness, family love, helpful community, romance and glamor.  On meaningfulness, the jewels of life, not the dross. Of course there's Cinderellas in it, as a beautiful butterfly would never come into its existence without struggling out of its cocoon, but I'm always making sure they end up at the ball. I think that there's just one character who suffers only in life and then dies, but she has a granddaughter who loves and cherishes her most dearly and puts her on a pedestal in her memory.

I don't really care if people don't like my writing or rate it poorly. People enjoy it or are impressed with it or they're not. Everyone’s got haters as that's human nature. My heart is so broken by loosing our baby that when I’m not escaping into fantasy or being emotionally affected by my other daughter that's all I can really feel.