The sun poked through a lush tree canopy, a chipmunk scurried across the deck, cicada buzzed, and waves lapped lazily onto the beach. I stared out from the screened in gazebo and knew I was in my nirvana. So why—not for the first time—did I want to hurl myself off the dock and sink to the bottom of the lake? Simple. Because my characters were throwing tantrums, and my story had decided to ditch me and take a hike down a dark, windy, dead-end alley. You might say, all a bit much. Who was I kidding? I couldn’t write a book. What a world class idiot I was to assume once I’d landed on MY story, that the cosmos would fall in line, and the most brilliant words the world had ever read would float like motes in a sunbeam onto the page. WRONGO.
That afternoon, I did the only thing I could do. I sent out an SOS. Cryssa, my friend and a fellow writer, knew all about chasing wayward characters down dark alleys.
Hey, girl. Hate to bug, just wondering, you still got that lifeline handy?
Took some doing, but she got me out of the reeds and safely back on dry land.
Take a break. Go for a walk. Things ’ill look different when you get back.
I did, and they did.
For real, a shift had happened. I returned to a scene that suddenly clicked, and characters who’d wandered back. Oh, and they had a story to tell me. Yeah, that was the thing. They spoke, and I listened instead of the other way around.
I got through that day, but I’m not going to lie, it wasn’t the first, nor the last time I felt overwhelmed by this story and figured I’d be doing the world a favour if I just quit. But here’s the thing, I’m a stubborn mule—also I grew up with a mom who never let me quit anything I ever started—so I stuck to it. I continued to write, and to workshop, and to edit, and to edit, and to edit, until my characters told me they were done talking.
Fast forward to today. I’m here in a different gazebo, staring at the cover for my debut novel, Look Over Your Shoulder—pre-order e-book now : https://books2read.com/u/bzGr7z Print version available October 21, 2025, just saying—and feeling pretty proud of myself. It’s happening. Woot!
Moral of the story? The highs and lows of this journey were monumental, but they do say, it’s not the destination, rather the journey that matters. True that. Along the way, I learned how to write. I learned how to give and receive critiques. I learned fear and disappointment are part of the process, for sure, but they’re not good enough excuses to quit. I found my tribe, and I found my voice. Oh, and I decided that writing was easy peazy—not!
And ya know what—I’ma gonna do it all again.
Sharon Overend 