It's a shame I can't actually take my heroine through the last four years of my life; she's going to have a mini squashed down version of my experiences.
Today, though, while writing Maya (that's my new heroine's name), I realised this character is the closest based on me. All my others have been younger, single women, with no children, searching for their one true love. Maya is on a different journey. I didn't want to make her a divorcee, so I've made her a widow. She is in her late thirties, but the dreaded forties (which we all know when we reach them isn't so bad after all) are on the horizon.
When her husband died she was very much still in love with him, so her journey is going to be harder, haunted a little by the ghost of her husband, having him high on a pedal stool in her memory.
I've chosen children that are of similar age to my own too. Only because I'm not sure how teenagers properly act yet - having not got one (yet) - and although I remember my children younger, they're better as research at this age, because I can see what they're doing. Maybe I can even blackmail them... "do that and it'll go in a book!"
This morning was a trying day with my kids, I'd lost the plot... the will to live... And the emotions of an intelligent single mother, fed up with the nagging and mundane repetitiveness of the day to day stuff rubbed off onto Maya. She drinks wine, too. Maya's story is coming easily to me.
I've got the hero in mind, and I will need to weave some online dating adventures of his own in. Luckily I've been given some male perspective on this too. At the moment I just can't decide what he does as a job but the good thing about writing is, I can weave it in later. In the meantime, I'll just try to write 3000 words a week, and aim for this first draft to be finished by the summer.
