Were you ready to give up?

Yeah, so after I wrote the first draft of A Farm and Golden Cloak, which was called something different back then.

I did try to get that published and obviously got that rejected and in the meantime had written a second and a third and I was working on them and editing them and trying to pitch them and get them published as well.

And I felt like I had found my, as I said, I felt like I'd found my genre, I'd found my place, I knew what I wanted to write.

And I felt like the stories were strong, probably the strongest stuff that I'd written up to that point.

But yeah, getting those rejections over and over again, it does eat away at you.

And I consider myself quite a positive person.

So do you want to talk a little bit about just the community that you've connected with before or after getting the book deal or through the courses you've done?

the page because it's a hard thing to do

it is a hard thing to do um and i really had to focus on each character separately to get their um their journeys through grief onto the page um so i started with ben and indy indy indy came first she she came to me so vividly that how she appears in this book is how i wrote her in that first draft And her grief is very much based on my own experience, which I didn't lose my husband, but that's what gave me the inspiration for this book is that my husband had a close call with a bit of machinery on our farm only a few weeks after we moved in.

And I was actually watching at the time and seeing him you know, almost lose his life was that punch in the gut moment that got me thinking, what if I lost him and I was left all alone with, you know, this farm and all the animals and my two kids on our own? And so her journey was it came out quite organically from that question.

Ben was a little bit harder.

I really had to dig deep.

into how he dealt with losing his wife compared to how Indy dealt.

But he really, you know, he decided to throw himself into work after losing his wife and then he burned out and completely shut down and built up his walls.

grieve a bit and instead he's just doing that that guy thing that you do of just putting one foot in front of the other and hoping that things work out i mean the one that like really made me know so that scene with his footy coach with aaron there's been the whole situation that oh training's been cancelled or you know pre-season's been cancelled or and and that that pre-season training when we find out more details it broke my heart little bit with poor Noah just tell me about these kids they're great like on the page as a writer but oh they go through the ringer as well