How a Broken Radiator Delayed My Next Book

At the tale end of 2018, I spent three productive months planning, researching, and writing 18,000 words (close to half) of the first draft of my next book. Little did I know that before January 2019 ended, I would be not be writing any more of it for 27 months.

The way my wife likes to tell the story is that what happened that January began with a broken radiator. We could get it fixed or we could upgrade it to a nice shiny towel heating one… It was a fairly simple decision. One thing led to another (in a way you may or may not be familiar with yourself) and we decided to move house.

What!? I know, right. How does a broken radiator lead to moving house?

Well, we were chatting about a radiator, but we came to realise we were also talking about our commitment to the house and the city we were living in. Out of that tiny bathroom radiator our hopes and dreams for the future spiralled out. It took us a few weeks to get there, but we realised “now” (as in January 2019) felt like a good time to end our eighteen year stay in Scotland and move closer to our family. Something we had expressed wanting to do for many years.

Which brings me back to the radiator. We still needed to get it fixed. And with it there was suddenly a long list of things to fix, a kitchen refit we hadn’t finished, rooms that needed a fresh coat of paint, excess stuff to store or pass on (basically all the things you put off doing until you decide to move house) all so we could rescue our house from the chaos of children and into a showroom worthy of the best estate agent listings. (For those of you who want to know for future reference this transformation takes about six weeks). 

As a part-time author, part-time publisher, and part-time supermarket worker, as well as a father of three and sudden showroom-homemaker, something part-time had to shift. So my writing was put on hold. With my publishing commitments, our house sale falling through three times, having to move into my parent’s house so the kids could start their new schools in September, and moving into our new home just before Christmas to find the renovated property we had purchased trashed inside by the previous occupants (and the ones who had renovated it…) meant that there was more unforeseen DIY and decorating (far from my favourite things). And then a pandemic hit.

Lockdown proved productive from a publishing perspective (my business Cookies and Oxygen Publishing released two amazing fantasy novels within months of each other at the end of 2020), but it wasn’t until my long-term publishing projects were released that the space I needed to return to writing loomed invitingly on the horizon.

Then my wife and I contracted Covid-19. My wife struggled for four weeks. I was symptom free except for some shortness of breath, but then I lost 15 weeks (over a quarter of a year!) to Long-Covid fatigue. I’ve never known anything like it before.* 

So it has taken me 27 months from that broken radiator, but today not only am I celebrating the first day in 5 months that all three of my children have each spent a full day in school, I was also finally able to return to writing the first draft of my next book. I’m so excited! In a couple of weeks I’ll let you in on what it’s all about.

* I’ve since read that 1.1 million other people in the UK were struggling with Long-Covid at the same time I was. Apparently, 1 in 7 people take 12 or more weeks to recover from Covid-19. There is still so much we do not understand about this virus. SOURCE: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-56601911.