SA Laybourn | Go on… You can do it.

Seven years ago, I was just starting out on my writer’s journey. I’d written a
couple of historical novels which I was enthusiastically peddling to agents and
was keen to keep writing. Part of that was due to the fact that my job situation
wasn’t the greatest, and I’d just survived a tussle with US Immigration. I was
living in a small town in south-central Arizona, and wanted to escape the
stress. So, when a fellow writer challenged me to take part in NaNoWriMo—the
annual writing fest where you hammer out 50,000 words in the month of November—I
couldn’t resist.

But, what to write? I stared out of my office window at the railway tracks, the
desert and the Pinal Mountains, and came up with an idea. The story fell
together fairly quickly. I’d set it in a small town in south-central Arizona, in
the near future, when the tanking economy had left the place half-deserted and
dying. It didn’t seem too unfeasible. The town I worked in was surrounded by
big, new housing developments, partly-finished and forlornly dotted with ‘for
sale’ signs. Banks had been repossessing deserted homes and I hadn’t signed off
on any new housing permits for ages. It was easy enough to look a few years down
the road and paint a bleak picture.

The story took on a life of its own. If I wasn’t writing, I was thinking about
it. I love that total immersion, when the story grabs me by the throat and
doesn’t let go. It was weird to drive down the street where Ellie ‘lived’ and
see it how I imagined it—the cacti in the front yards replaced by vegetable
gardens. And seeing Main Street as it would be in my novel, half-deserted with
tumbleweeds bouncing along the cracked asphalt.

I kept writing, reporting my progress each night on the NaNoWriMo website. I was
doing great, on track to hit my target. Then, about a week in, my dear cat,
Maggie, who had been ill, took a bad turn. I took her to the vets, they kept her
in. I missed my ridiculously fluffy girl. Missed her tiny meow and her grumpy
face. Then, the news I didn’t want to hear. She was too ill to save and had to
be put down. We’d been together for twelve years and, suddenly, she was gone.
NaNoWriMo didn’t seem that important anymore. I grieved, hugged our two
remaining cats and wondered whether I could keep writing.

I did. Burying myself in EMPTY PLACES proved to be cathartic. Ellie’s troubles were far worse than mine and I couldn’t leave her stuck on a lunatic’s mountain compound, dressed in clothes straight out of Little House on the Prairie, and listening to long, droning sermons in a cavernous church. So, readers, I dived back in and finished the story…in twenty-eight days.

Life moved on. I let that first draft languish on my laptop for a long time. I
forgot about it. Then, last year, I stumbled across it, opened it and
thought…yeah, I can do something with this. So, it’s out in the world now, a
little memory of a not-so-great time in my life.

If you’d like to find out more about EMPTY PLACES, head to totallybound.com!