Welcome to another blog hop. Today’s topic is:

What assumptions do people make about you when they hear you are a writer?

For the past 9 years I’ve told nobody I know (except Sam) that I write novels, and so nobody up until recently has made any assumptions. However, last week I made one exception and told one other person…

For some months now I’ve been taking an early morning walk which often takes me past a house in the village where a woman more often than not sits on the doorstep and smokes a cigarette. I started saying “good morning” to her, as it’s customary to do around these parts. She always responded, and we tended to leave it at that. About a month ago I commented on the lovely tree in her front garden. She was quite chatty after that, and we started to converse every morning.

After a couple more weeks we got onto the subject of reading, and she mentioned one or two authors whose books she liked to read. I recognised these as ‘misery-lit’, and I asked her why she tended to favour books that were so depressing to read. She answered that it was good to find somebody else who had lived through exactly the same traumatic childhood that she had experienced. After she had read Dave Peltzer’s autobiography that I had loaned her, she said it was tame compared to what she had gone through.

She began to open up on subsequent mornings to the most horrific abuse. I told her to write it all down and self-publish it, but she was not keen to do this. She told me that she had often thought of looking for somebody who could help her get her thoughts down on paper.

Well… I couldn’t stand by and let that opportunity go to waste, could I? I mentioned that I was a self-published author and lo and behold, I’ll now have a new story to type up in the winter. ‘Jane’ and I are going to sit together for an hour every weekday morning before I start work for as long as it takes for her to tell me her story. I’ll change names and places to protect her identity. She told me it was fate that we’ve met, and I have to agree. Her story promises to be rather horrendous from what I’ve heard so far.

I may have less time for social media in the coming months, as I need to put the hours in for the NHS as well, so please forgive me if I don’t comment on as many of your blogs as I used to.

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