Sleeping Solo: One Woman's Journey into Life after Marriage by Audrey Faye Read Free Book Online

are
full of scenes dripping with tears and laughter and sometimes both, all of it
deeply seated in the heart of family.
    Yeah.   Not hard
to see how that might run into a bit of a snag.
    So while I did the necessary work to get my December release
through the last rounds of proofreading and formatting and holiday launch, I
contemplated my next book with something akin to dread.
    I wasn’t eating, I wasn’t sleeping, I couldn’t even stay warm.   How the
hell was I supposed to write a book full of goopy, family-affirming love?
    I started the next book at the beginning of February,
steeped in the weird mix of wild waterfalls and the cauldron of hate spewing
from my basement.
    I gave it a freaking awesome effort.   I warned my readers they would only be
getting two releases this year instead of the usual four.   I signed up my amazing writing coach
(that’s code for insightful butt-kicker), battened down the hatches, and got
the next book underway.   I steered
it into a storyline I thought I could write—one focused on an eleven-year-old
girl in peril, and the love that would come together to call her through it.
    The first half of the book went fine.   I slowed down, got better sleep, wrote
what felt good in a day, and tried to soak in the ways that writing served my
soul.   And on the days when I simply
couldn’t put two decent words together, I learned to be gentle with myself and
go commune with the beach instead.
    I even got partway through the typically calamitous
middle.   Middles are always hard,
because I write by the seat of my pants, and that usually results in some big
holes by the time I’m muddling through the middle.   But I’ve been through this process for
thirteen books, and it always comes together.   Sometimes I write the ending and then go
back to the connecting bits.   Sometimes I just apply liberal amounts of duct tape and bubble gum and
the book miraculously holds water.
    But things felt different this time.   I kept doggedly writing scenes, trying not to despair at how many words I was
throwing out because they were terrible, even as I wrote them.   Pretty sentences, void
of meaning.
    Void of feeling.
    It’s hard to write an ending drenched in love and family
when your own is riding stormy seas.   And in this case, it was very hard to use the eternal heart of family to
call an eleven-year-old girl home.
    My girl’s going to have to be made of sterner stuff.
    I could write the words—but I couldn’t mean them.   I couldn’t imbue them with the
conviction they needed, and I knew the story was flat as a pancake because of
it.   The piece of me that had always
ended up in my words—the heartbeat of my fictional family—was
bleeding.
    Telling my readers they weren’t going to get this book was
one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.   It felt like I was giving up on them, on my son’s future, on my
promises, on financial security.
    But it also felt absolutely necessary.
    Writing is an act of creative love.
    I’d tried tapping into my past, to slide myself emotionally
back to a time when I channeled these books more easily.   I can’t begin to tell you how much that
hurt or how much those words sucked.
    Sometimes, you just can’t go back.
    I finished the book.   And I knew it wasn’t gonna fly, even as I sent it off to my story editor.   After thirteen books, I have pretty good
instincts—and this one just didn’t get there.
    I stared at it for another week, hoping for one of those
really cool moments when the dots start moving, make a new shape, and stuff
untangles into a thing of beauty.   But it didn’t come, and I knew why.   I’m not an outline writer, not a plot-and-structure kinda girl.   I have picked up a few pieces of writerly craft along the way, but the truth is, I write by instinct.   I feel my way through a book, through
the pacing and plot and character emotional arcs and everything else.
    I feel .  
    It’s like flying an airplane.   Some