Hearts in Edinburgh

My first. I made the decision to self-publish, after three years of mum-brain (which came after four months of pregnancy-brain) – it’s a thing, I promise! I was running on caffein and very little sleep. My three-year-old has been and still is a horrible sleeper. So at the time I would be waking up three to five times at night. I’d be up at 7am, she had stopped her daytime naps a month before her second birthday, so there went my nap too. Not only was I a sleep-deprived mother, I was also in a strange country (yes, even after having lived there for nearly five years). I had struggled to adjust to life in Germany before my daughter arrived and now I was navigating the town and language with a kid – not easy to do without a family around.
Anyway, I had always leaned towards the Creative Arts. I never excelled academically and I didn’t particularly want to go back to a desk job. I loved writing. Always have. But I had a couple of issues:
1. My creativity had been dormant for a very long time – yay, motherhood!
2. I didn’t have much confidence in my writing abilities – no one had ever read any of my work before and I certainly didn’t want anyone to either.
Then one day, an ad popped up on my Facebook feed about Amazon Kindle Self-Publishing. I knew people did that sort of thing. I just never really knew how they got into it. I have of course done my research on traditional publishing and that alone scared the crap out of me – it’s the rejection mostly. For some reason I clicked on the bloody ad and I’m glad I did. My brain exploded – HELLO!!! Lightbulb moment. It was then that I realised that I can do this. I have a voice and I can finally let people hear it – okay, yes they can read it (doesn’t sound right though, does it?)
And so, one Friday night, after I put my daughter to bed, I grabbed my laptop, got into bed and I started to type. I had in fact earlier that day come out of the shower with an idea for a story. And I just let the words flow out of me, through my fingers and onto MS Word. I don’t recall exactly how I managed it, but I pushed out 15k words that weekend (in between meal times and cleaning and laundry and entertaining the kid). By Sunday midday, I finally completed my first draft of a complete story.

Now…I’m sure you want to know how this story came about…

Well, I’ll start by saying this: I believe that we all have ‘the one I wasn’t ready for’. Hang on, just hear me out for minute. Whether it was in high school, or summer camp, or maybe even a work event. There is that one person who could have been the one, had circumstances been different. If you think back, think really hard, there is that one person you just weren’t ready for because your circumstances (or their’s) didn’t allow for it. Or, you could say: the stars did not align for you both at that particular time. So my question to you then is this: what if the stars aligned for you now, many years later?
And that’s where Hearts in Edinburgh came from. From my ‘one that I was not ready for’.

This is a sweet story of love that literally stood the test of time. I call this a quick-read. Something you can read in one sitting. A fun summer, beach read. Or even better, under a warm blanker in front of the fireplace with a mug of hot chocolate. Why not head on over to Amazon and download now in time for summer! Or winter (depending on when you read this post). And don’t forget to leave your review (hopefully positive – I know! Shameless me!) when you are done 🙂