The novel should have been finished and published within a few months. But then I released The Troubles Keeper in October 2016. That little baby captured readers’ imaginations and sold very well. Suddenly my days were not only filled with writing, but also with the business side of publishing. But you don’t want to hear me complain about my busy life. So I’ll simply say this was one part of the challenge.

Then the next detour arrived via my best first-reader, my husband Franco. He loved the initial few pages he read, filled with William ranting about Orelia. At this stage, I had thought, at seventy pages I was more than half way through.

“Do you think maybe you need another character, a break between the William chapters? They’re a bit intense,” he said.

Off traveled my imagination. “What about a few scenes with Orelia as a child?” I replied. I saw the kitten and the trouble this brought. So Nem was born, with a plan to add only a few chapters to compliment William’s.

Oh dear, little Nem didn’t want only a few chapters. She wanted half a book. So my one hundred-odd page novella became a five-hundred-page novel to accommodate a prima-donna who grew to fascinate me. The more I told her story, the more I began to see a complex battle of wills between the two. Each character challenging their own demons as well as each other.

I also wanted to play a little game with you, wonderful reader. To have you empathize with Nem and cheer for her. At the same time, I hoped you’d dislike William for his envious ways and root for his comeuppance. Then, in a gradual evolution, the characters would exchange roles. William would become the hero and Nem through Orelia, the somewhat evil antagonist.

Then we come to challenge three. Always in threes, right? Behind that door we find the usual culprit of trouble in the twenty-first century. Technology.

Halfway through the original draft, I began to use a new program. This, though, confused everything. I ended up with chapters of my story all over the place and me feeling as if a cloud hung over my writing. In the distance a huge mountain of re-arranging and messiness awaited, weighing daily on my mind. Never again, I tell you. Word works just fine for me.

Then I heard about a program, Dragon Dictate, which allows a user to speak their work instead of typing. So the second half of the first draft I wrote while driving, walking, and would you believe, folding clothes. Pretty neat, right?

By the time The End appeared on my screen, it seemed impossible what you just read wasn’t always the story I intended to tell. This is the magic of writing. How it all comes together feels like a strange blessing. Never more so than with Best Seller, the project I called behind the scenes, that damn book.

Now to the inspiration …

Who doesn’t occasionally look at someone’s success, especially one who appears undeserving, and think it must be luck. Or that’s not fair. It dawned on me, this envy can be quite rampant in an industry like publishing. Then if you took the emotions to the extreme, therein lay a good story.