Something specific happened last year that lit a fuse under my creativity. I wrote a bunch of books. I’ll tell you about the specific event after I explain that I’ve always wanted to be a published novelist.
Always. Ever since I crafted “Journey to Marshmallow Planet” in Grade 4. I wrote sappy romances that I thought were an easy route to publishing — they weren’t. I tried to write complex love stories, but didn’t have the life experience to make the characters resonate. Finally, a decade ago, I wrote a memoir — but it felt like a whole lot of whining.
Last spring, a stranger’s hug sent a jolt through my chest — a moment so visceral my nervous system reacted before I had language for it — I found myself writing again for the first time in years. What I discovered was staggering: the characters I wrote began sending “signals” my body recognized as safety. My glucose levels changed. My breathing is regulated. I started sleeping.
This wasn’t fiction healing me. It was my nervous system re-patterning itself through imagination, attachment, and inherited stories — the very things that had once harmed me.
I had nursed a thought about writing about my fifth great-grandfather — Andrew McClary, a hero in the Battle of Bunker Hill. He came from a family of Irish immigrants who settled in New Hampshire. McClary was a legendary man, and I was fortunate to find family stories online that made writing fiction flow naturally.
When I was looking for a distraction from a broken heart, I created love, passion, and resonance in my characters. Andrew McClary had a family code, a signal, that told his nephew Michael that he loved him. Only a glance, a touch. No words. Just a signal that sent love across time and space to those who felt they didn’t deserve it.
Ya. I went there. I wrote about that resistance to love I’d been surrounded by all my life. Those feelings of inadequacy, yearning, and aloneness. Andrew stepped into my writing as a natural hero.
He haunted me at night, alerting me to plot holes in Chapter Three and awkward sentences here and there. I believed his spirit was waiting for me to bring him to life.
Then I wrote about his nephew, Michael, who carried Andrew’s code throughout his life. He took care of Andrew’s newborn daughter, Nancy. She never knew her father.
Whenever I needed plot inspiration, I went to Ancestry.ca and found namesakes, infants who died at birth, and remarriages.
Then I realized my memoir had to change. I rewrote it a few weeks later, adding how Andrew and Michael became co-regulators of my nervous system. Whenever I was scared or unsure, I felt their presence—calm and loving.
After that, I searched the house for an old manuscript I’d written 30 years ago. I couldn’t find it — so I rewrote it from memory. The story became a psychological thriller about a provincial court judge who couldn’t show his feelings. I put him through hell, and in the end, he learned what it was like to let love in.
And do you ever wonder who the Douglas guy was behind the Douglas fir? I wondered that. Turns out he was a Scottish botanist who explored the Pacific Northwest with his Scottish terrier. His diaries are published in a book. I wrote a historical fiction about David Douglas — The Fir and the Forgotten Man.
Now I’m finishing a story about a Type 1 diabetic woman and her incomplete-quadriplegic friend who work together to solve a family mystery. Not sure who would want to read about these kinds of heroines, but I had to write it.
In case you’re wondering, ex-journalists write fast. I have the luxury of writing 12 hours a day, sometimes 3,000 words a day. I get obsessed with a project, and even a dog walk creates new ideas for where to go.
Last September, I had a procedure on my eyes — lasered holes in the iris — that dealt with a scary scenario where I could have gone blind within hours.
My glucose went a little crazy a few weeks ago, after I had to put my 16-year-old dog Gemma to sleep. Her brother and I still miss her.
And I’m about to put my house on the market to reduce my monthly living costs. I quit my full-time retirement job in November because I was too tired. I need to build a life where I can live on a pension.
Money from writing would be nice. I’m not counting on it, but I’ve also sent many queries to agents. A couple of manuscripts are sitting in publishers’ offices, waiting for a decision.
You never know. Might as well do what makes me happy, and that’s writing.
If you can’t find me here, I’m over at sandramccullochwriter.com
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