I left the end of my last blog post on a cliffhanger and promised I’d come back and explain more, so here we go but you might like to make a cuppa first as it’s a long one!…

2023 was the most incredible year for my books. At the end of March, I hit a milestone of 1,000,000 copies of my titles sold. I’ve just had my November statement through and this has now passed 1,250,000. One of my titles – Finding Love at Hedgehog Hollow – passed 100,000 sales meaning I joined the Boldwood 100,000 Club.

During 2023, contracts were signed for seven of my titles to be translated into five different languages. Two titles went into The Works and I was invited to feature in Yorkshire Life magazine.

I worked on five books, although it was part of the process for two of those titles so really four complete books and, on top of that, I ran two one-month courses, spoke at four festivals, designed and ran a half-day workshop at one of the festivals, presented a session at the RNA’s conference, prepared a presentation and spoke at a local RNLI event and attended the RNA’s Leicester chapter as a guest.

I feel tired looking at that list so it’s perhaps not surprising that I approached the end of 2023 feeling exhausted and burnt out although, looking back, it had been coming on throughout the year.

When writing for a publisher, you work to production schedule deadlines. When writing four books a year, those deadlines are tight. Don’t get me wrong, I LOVE a deadline. I’m (usually) really good at working towards them. Readers have seen books go up for pre-order which I haven’t even started writing yet and have asked how I cope with the pressure, but I don’t really see it as pressure as deadlines have always been part of my life. From my years of studying where I had homework to be in by a certain date through to my previous day job in HR where I’d have a deadline for submitting a report, designing a training course, recruiting for a position and so on. So, really, a deadline for me isn’t daunting.

However, there is a big deadline-related challenge which comes with writing so many books a year and that’s that it isn’t possible to just focus on one book at a time. I’m usually working on four books simultaneously. While undertaking various activities around the promotion of book 1, I’m editing book 2, writing the first draft of book 3 and thinking about the storyline, setting and characters for book 4. That’s a lot of worlds trying to inhabit space in my mind at one time. And that’s before we throw in menopause brain! Argh!!!!

Running the first RNA Learning course in March around my writing deadlines was tricky, but I’d designed and run it already the year before so I wasn’t starting from scratch. The September one was different. I’d proposed the structure maybe 18 months previously but, when I started designing it, I quickly realised it was way bigger than I’d anticipated. It was very naïve of me not to have realised that earlier – after all, it was all about writing a series which is a HUGE topic (so huge I had to capitalise it!) so it shouldn’t have been a surprise that designing it and pre-recording the training sessions took me twice as long as anticipated. All the while, I still had writing deadlines. 

I love training, I was delighted with the course and I know the participants got a lot from it so it was successful, but I finished the month with my head in my spin, feeling like I wanted to sleep for a week. Except I couldn’t because I was on a deadline!

Around the same time, we had some challenges at home. My daughter didn’t get the GCSE grades she’d been predicted or expected which was devastating for her, especially when it meant she couldn’t take any of the A Levels she’d planned to take, so there was a battle on our hands to get her into college. Thankfully she’s there now and very happy with a couple of subject changes, but this took it out of me emotionally.

My edits throughout 2023 were hard. Every single book needed quite major work and it wasn’t because I had bad ideas/weak characters or anything like that. It was because, at the point of submitting them, I hadn’t had enough time to step back and give them a polish so there were a few abandoned plot threads, some emotional scenes which lacked emotion, missing descriptions of settings and lots of typos. I even had to submit a couple of first drafts in the early hours of the morning after my submission deadline which weren’t quite finished – emailed over with chapters missing, an explanation of what would be included, and a huge apology. 

I hated it. 

While my editor is one of the loveliest people in the world and completely understood the time pressure and that this is not how I like to work, I wasn’t happy with myself. I’ve always worked with the ethic: If you’re going to do something, do it well. Submitting inferior work makes me feel like a failure and it was really pulling me down and sucking all the enjoyment from something I love.

This substandard work had a knock-on effect. Because of it, the first edits were huge and intense but the second edits – which should be just smoothing out and polishing – were also big. Instead of experiencing joy at creating a new story, I felt like I had dragged it kicking and screaming into the world.

In all cases, I was really happy with the finished book – I absolutely could not release something I didn’t love and believe in – but I wasn’t happy about the painful process of getting there. I knew something needed to change, but what? When you lurch from one deadline to the next, how do you step back and take stock?

Christmas at the Cat Café came out in mid-September and that was really my breaking point. I wrote a blog post at the time about some of the early negative reviews from reviewers hating cats, loving cats but not that many, and not understanding the concept of a cat café. Although frustrating because, let’s face it, the clues were there about there being a lot of cats in this story, I could roll my eyes and laugh at these reviews. 

What I couldn’t laugh at were all the negative comments about the main character having fibromyalgia – a chronic pain condition – which affected all aspects of her life. 

These reviews typically fell into two categories. The first was from those who didn’t want to read about a main character who was ill, ranging from the type that was empathy expressed but I read for escapism through to the more direct “a whiny self-pitying whinge about fibromyalgia” (direct quote from a 1-star review). I found these reviews very upsetting as one of the issues that those with fibro can face is a lack of empathy and understanding from those around them because what they have is an invisible illness so they “don’t look ill”. The idea that readers wanted it to remain an invisible illness and not read about it in a novel broke my heart for those who have fibromyalgia or similar conditions. One reader even called it a “misery memoir”. Wow!

The second category of review was where the book was accused of being more like “a self help manual for fibromyalgia combined with a lecture / text book on it” (2-star review). I’ve got another long quote here from a 1-star review which pretty much sums up what kept coming at me: “…seems to be just self indulgence of telling as many people as possible about Fibromyalgia. Oh my goodness it was constant. The story would progress a tiny bit and then whoa, back to pages upon pages of self indulgent waffle about fibromyalgia. I’m absolutely baffled at the positive reviews this book has been given, unless you really do want to wollow [sic] in pages upon pages of the innermost feelings of someone going through a fibromyalgia attack this book really has got very little else to it. I do understand that fibromyalgia is a widely misunderstood condition but I really don’t think writing a book like this is the way to educate the nation”.

Ouch! So that’s me told! I do feel that the second reviewer completely missed the point – that this IS a story where the main character has fibromyalgia and the whole plot is meant to be about how she adjusts her life and her dreams based on that because life with fibro is about adjustments. So of course fibromyalgia is going to feature heavily. If I only mentioned fibromyalgia a few times, I wouldn’t have been authentic to the character. If I made out that every day was fine and she occasionally had slightly tired days, I might as well not have used a character with fibro. And if I didn’t explain what fibro was, how could I tell the story when so many people aren’t familiar with this condition? Explaining things is not new to novel-writing. There’s usually a topic which I need to explain in every book I’ve written. Some are lighter like chocolate-making in Christmas Wishes at the Chocolate Shop, but it’s still educating.

At this point, you might be thinking I’m travelling down the negative review path here and how hurtful they can be, but that’s not the point of sharing this. Before I join the dots, I just want to clarify something. I love Tabby’s story in Christmas at the Cat Café and, despite all the negative comments about cats, cat cafés, and having a main character with a chronic pain condition, I stand by this story. I’m glad I wrote it and I’m really glad I had a main character with fibromyalgia. It might have attracted a lot of hate but, my goodness, it has attracted some love too. Apart from a couple of readers with chronic illness who had a pop at me – “As a sufferer of an invisble [sic] illness, in my case M.E. I was surprised to see the main character Tabby suffers with fibro … but when I read a book, I want to escape into a different world. I don’t need reminding how much pain I’m in daily or the exhaustion I feel” (2-star review) – I’ve had stacks of positive comments and direct messages from readers with fibro (or similar) thanking me for making them feel seen, for a book which gave them a few ideas about coping with their own fibro and/or hope, or for helping them understand what a loved one is dealing with. It has a great overall star rating on Amazon of 4.5 and 90% positive reviews/ratings (at the time of writing this) so it compares equally to all my other books. The main difference is that it has gathered more 1 and 2-star actual reviews rather than just ratings as those who hated it seemed to really, really hate it and wanted to rant about why, so I’ve felt the prod of the negative reviews more.  

Joining the dots, all of this ties in to what I was saying earlier about quality of work. The text book comments kept recurring, even in some of the positive reviews. If you see a comment made a couple of times, you can disregard it, but if it recurs that often, you should really start questioning whether there’s something in it. So that’s what I did and I kept coming back to the time pressure I found myself under and the lack of time to step back to perfect and polish the story. I can say that, hand on heart, I would NOT have removed any of the information about fibromyalgia. It is part of Tabby’s story and therefore part of Christmas at the Cat Café. It was the story I wanted to tell. But, what I might have done was smooth it out a little. Perhaps if I’d been able to do a third edit or another read-through, I might have spread out some of the more concentrated detail about fibromyalgia. Perhaps I’d have been able to remove some repetition. I say perhaps because it could be the case that these reviewers just didn’t like learning about fibro full stop and no matter how little detail there was, they’d still have been unhappy about it – invisible illness remaining invisible and all that.

Anyway, there I was in autumn 2023 feeling exhausted, emotionally drained, bruised from a glut of negative reviews, and worried that I might have put a book out there that wasn’t quite perfect. Okay, so perfection is impossible so let’s say a fear that it perhaps wasn’t 100% my best work even though I’d believed at the time that it was. What if A Breath of Fresh Air wasn’t my best work either? What if I’d peaked and everything was downhill from here?

Guess who knocked on my door? Yes, Mr Imposter Syndrome was back and laughing at me. He took great delight in pointing out that, after a run of charting in the Top 100 on publication day, The Start of Something Wonderful and Christmas at the Cat Café hadn’t followed suit. He rubbed his hands in glee as he suggested that my brand new Escape to the Lakes series could well bomb. Who do you think you are, creating yet another setting? All your readers will ever want is Hedgehog Hollow. They don’t care about any of the other worlds you’ve created.

I’d sit at my desk, trying to write A New Dawn at Owl’s Lodge and, after only managing a few sentences in the space of thirty minutes, I’d be onto Amazon checking chart positions and reviews and panicking that the bubble had burst. I’d gaze longingly at the UK Kindle Top 10 with IS whispering in my ear: Never gonna happen! And don’t even let it cross your mind that you could ever have what it takes to reach the #1 position because you don’t. Far from it! Mwah ha ha ha! 

I did submit the manuscript (in the early hours of the day after deadline) and it was in the worst state yet with a whopping eight chapters unwritten. I knew what was going to happen in those chapters but I couldn’t seem to get the words out despite hours and hours at my desk. I wouldn’t say it was writer’s block as I wasn’t blocked – I was just downright knackered!

I knew I couldn’t keep going on like this and the only way I could break the cycle of exhaustion – deadline – imposter syndrome – exhaustion – deadline… was to do something different. In my former role as a management trainer, I used to talk about control the controllables ­which is concept where you look at what’s going on around you and work out what is in your control and what isn’t and to stop investing energy/ worry/ fear on the parts that are not within your control.

I can’t directly control how many books I sell or the chart positions they reach. I can’t directly control whether people love or hate my books and whether they share negative reviews. But I do have control over the work I put out there and how I feel about it and the only way for me to make sure I never submitted a weak first draft and never doubted the quality of the final product was to give myself more time. So I proposed to my editor that I didn’t rush the edits on A New Dawn at Owl’s Lodge by trying to hit a pre-Christmas deadline. I asked if I could submit them in mid-January instead. Doing this meant the release date needed to be put back from April to May and it also meant that I wasn’t going to have time to release four books in 2024 … but that was exactly what I needed. Some time to step back, to breathe, to refocus and to find the joy in writing once more because it had gone.

But this created another problem in my head…

There are many things that a reader can say which are so flattering and one of these is that they can’t wait for the next book and this is often presented with good humour as: Hurry up and write the next one! / I can’t wait until [name of month of next release] – please write faster! How amazing is that? They’ve loved the book so much that they are clamouring for the next one. Wow! The thing is, when you’re already drained and fast approaching burnout, the brain can switch from seeing these lovely comments in the way they’re meant – as a huge compliment – and start seeing them as further pressure. My readers will go off me if I don’t write faster! / I’m letting them down if I ‘only’ release three books a year / They’ll find other authors who can feed their reading needs quicker and never return to me. And if I lose readers, I lose income and I might have to return to a day job… but I’m too long out of HR and would never manage to get another job! Imagine all that going on in your head and, deep down, you know it’s ridiculous and irrational but you can’t stop it? Argh!!!

So, back to A New Dawn at Owl’s Lodge, although the submission date for my edits had shifted by a month, the reality was it had only gained me a couple of weeks because Christmas was in there and I was going away for a week over New Year. I therefore needed to do some work on it in December. But I couldn’t seem to do it – hours sat at my desk without hours’ worth of work to show for it – so I decided to stop fighting it. I watched a stack of Christmas films, decorated the trees, wrapped gifts, labelled the storage crates in the garage, got my accounts up to date and progressed through a whole pile of admin tasks.

I thought I’d miss writing. Any time I’ve had several days away from writing in the past, I’ve felt like part of me was missing and have itched to get back to it. Normally, if I wasn’t putting fingers to keyboard, I’d be thinking about scenes, creating dialogue, working through plot points. But last December, there was nothing. I felt no pull to my manuscript. I wasn’t even thinking about it. And that was a bit scary, especially when this thought kept popping into my head: If I never write again, I don’t actually care. I knew then that I’d hit a very dark place.

I thought I’d do some edits while we were away for a week after Christmas. The awful weather should have made that possible because we spent so much time in the holiday cottage, but I just didn’t feel like it. Every day I didn’t edit was a worry because that already-changed deadline was getting closer. And closer.

I got back from our break not feeling particularly refreshed and panicking that I hadn’t left enough time to deal with the enormous editing job which included not only writing those missing chapters but also creating a new beginning to start the story earlier. So I controlled the controllable and asked my editor for one more week. Even with that extra extension, I was still struggling. I’d fallen out of love with the story. I had no idea what I was doing.

I do usually fall out of love and/or lose the thread with my books a couple of times during the course of writing the first draft and the way I overcome this is always to go back to the start, read through my work, and edit as I go. This gets me back in the story, reminds me of some seeds I’d planned which I’d forgotten about, and reassures me that it’s actually pretty good. As I returned to my manuscript last month, I really didn’t have the time to do this but I had to because, if I’d continued fumbling through it, it’d have been a mess.

Thankfully returning to the start worked like it had done in the past. My mojo returned but not quickly enough. I submitted at 1.14am the morning after my edits were due in, there was still one chapter missing, and I didn’t have time for a final read-through. Cue another panic that it would still be a mess. Thankfully, when the second edits came back to me, my editor was delighted with them. In fact, my lovely editor Nia said, “You have done a fantastic job… It was truly a joy to read this manuscript, and if the word count had been shorter I would barely have needed to touch a thing”. Phew!

Those edits have now been completed and I’m in a comfortable situation where I don’t need to immediately dive into the next book (Escape to the Lakes book 3). I will do this week/early next week to avoid the familiar Argh! I’ve only got three weeks to write this book! but I am loving the pressure being off.

I wrote a blog post for Boldwood at the start of this year to coincide with the release of A Breath of Fresh Air which is predominantly set across New Year and January. I’ve tweaked it a bit and pasted it below as it outlines my plan for 2024 where I have five goals to stop me ending this year burned out and feeling completely disorganised…

Be kinder to myself

I struggle with imposter syndrome and am constantly pushing myself to achieve new goals as though to prove I am worth it. I know my IS comes from years of being bullied in the workplace and repeatedly overlooked for promotions/bonuses because I didn’t do workplace politics and schmooze with the right people. I therefore repeatedly needed to work longer and push harder to prove that I was good at my job and I can’t seem to get out of that mindset. I need to stop berating myself for what I haven’t achieved and celebrate what I have while reminding myself that originally I only ever wanted to see if I could write one book (I’ve written 23) and, after that, my goal was to earn enough that I could leave my day job. Big tick there. Anything over and above that is a bonus and deserves lots of happy dancing (which might also help me lose weight and get fit – double bonus!)

Be realistic with what I can do

I’m such a people pleaser and will often agree to do things when I know time is too tight, whether that’s running a training course, reviewing a book or giving a talk. Sometimes I regretfully need to say ‘no’. I’ve started putting this into practice already and it’s making me feel so much calmer. I’m much more realistic with how many books I have time to read and review. At the end of last year, I turned down an opportunity to be on the judging panel for a short story competition run through one of my library contacts. It sounded amazing and I’d have loved to be involved but the reality was that I needed to read all the entries while working on my edits and it wasn’t possible to do both.

Find the joy in writing again

As explained, I crammed too much into 2023 so I’m releasing three books instead of four, I haven’t got any festivals or talks lined up and I haven’t committed to running any training courses. (Actually, that’s a slight fib as, after writing this section of my blog post originally for Boldwood, I’ve confirmed I’ll run a workshop at August’s RNA conference but designing and running that is nothing compared to a one-month course!) This should give me some breathing space to find the joy again. I love what I do and I need to find my creative sparkle again.

Get a work/life balance

I’ve been saying this for ages but I’ve never managed to do anything about it. This is the year where I get a grip. I have some ideas to help me structure my day better such as not looking at social media until I’ve written 1,000 words, aiming for 2,000 words a day, and writing these within a ‘normal’ working day, giving myself evenings and weekends off so that I can recharge my batteries and be with my husband and daughter. I’d like to read more. I’d like to do more crafting. I’d like to sleep better too, and not going straight from ‘work’ to bed might help!

Invest in me

I’m a trainer and a qualified coach so I’m all about personal development, but I often fail to develop myself. I’ve signed up to Sophie Hannah’s ‘Dream Author’ programme. I saw Sophie speak at the RNA’s Conference in the summer and she was so inspirational so I’m very excited about working with her. I think doing this 14-month programme is going to massively help me achieve the other four goals.

Although these five goals might all seem to be about me, they are all going to have a massive impact on my friends and family because I will be happier and have more time to be with them. Win:win all round!

Although it’s still early days, I am feeling a lot more positive with these goals in mind. The drop to three books this year has to be the biggie and that has already brought back some of the joy.

I haven’t been able to test the word count idea yet as I’ve been editing rather than writing but I have been taking most evenings off although I confess I have worked the last two weekends to finish my edits. That’s really a kick-back to them not being in a good enough state earlier on and I hope that submissions going forwards will be stronger at first draft and not require quite so much effort in the editing stages.

Now that I’m feeling more positive about my writing and less under pressure, I can look more objectively at Christmas at the Cat Café and my fears around that. Yes, perhaps I might have found one or two points to spread out the fibromyalgia details … but, then again, I might not have. Those reviewers might have raised the same comment if there was very little information in there. And, if I’d put less, those who’d found it helpful might not have done. We can’t write a book second-guessing what readers might or might not want. We have to write the story that burns inside us and I did exactly that. I told the story I wanted to tell in the way I wanted to tell it and I need to stop doubting myself.

I’ve never been good at self-care but I’ve realised how important it is to feel confident with my stories, to ignore the negative comments and to hush my imposter syndrome. I know there are readers who are disappointed that I’m not releasing a fourth book this year but I hope they will ultimately understand that three books from a happy, relaxed author who believes in themself is far better than four books from an exhausted burnt-out author who then drops and doesn’t write any the following year.

And if you’re still with me at the end of this tome, thank you for reading and thank you for your support. If you’re an author who, like me, hasn’t been looking after yourself, what can you control about your writing journey and what are the uncontrolables you can let go of? How can you restructure what you do to find the joy once more? For me, the joy is why I write. I love the buzz I get when a character develops and a plot comes together and I get a thrill from submitting my manuscript, knowing I’ve created a special story. I’m excited about having that back as I start writing Lakes 3 very soon now that I’ve stepped back and slowed down.

Before I go, I just want to give an enormous shout out to my husband who is always there with lots of hugs and encouragement, my bestie Sharon Booth (check out her amazing books here) who is always a tonic when things get tough, and my fabulous Facebook group, Redland’s Readers, who are so warm and lovely and great for picking me up. I cannot thank my incredible editor, Nia Beynon, enough or the wonderful Boldwood Books for being so understanding. They’ve been incredibly flexible and have never put any pressure on me – all the pressure I’ve had has very much been self-imposed! I even told Nia that I felt I might be able to return to four books for 2025 as I’m likely to get ahead now, but she suggested we play it by ear and make sure I’m happy with the pace before we even think about upping it next year. What a star!

Big hugs
Jessica xx