Conceived in nightmares, wrought from despair is a tag line I use to describe Darkly Dreaming, and it’s literal. A couple of years ago my brain stopped working the way it was supposed to. I started suffering hideous, vampire riddled, nightmares, and I experienced aural hallucinations of the door bell ringing, the door knocking, or my alarm going off every time I fell asleep. I became highly strung- easily startled, and permanently convinced something awful was going to happen.

I’d been stressed out before, but this was different. This went on, and on. Eventually I accepted there was something properly wrong, and went to see my G.P who diagnosed severe anxiety and depression. I had been living on adrenalin for so long, I’d broken me. After my appointment I sat in the car and cried and cried. I cried all day. I was a support worker, and foster carer, I was the one who helped other people. That woman who sat in the surgery and confessed her terrifyingly irrational thoughts couldn’t be me. But it was.

That was my lowest ebb, at that point I realised I had a choice: I could crumble under the weight of all my responsibilities, made impossible by my illness; or I could acknowledge that the worst had happened, I had nothing left to lose. Which was a bizarrely liberating realisation to
reach- all my fears had come true. I could seize the freedom this failure offered and have a go at pursuing that dream life that I’d always ‘one day’ed, and ‘when we win the lottery’ed.

I still don’t know exactly how I took my bleakly barren brain, that quaked at remembering what I’d gone into a shop for, and wrung Darkly Dreaming, my first novel that I am so proud of, from it. I can only thank my tribe of trusty criticals for all their love, support and nit-picking. It wouldn’t be the book it is, and I wouldn’t be the woman I am without them.