If you are suffering today, perhaps walking your own grief journey wondering how you can bear the pain, wondering how long you will feel like this, I hope these words offer a little comfort.

The book blogging community over these past few weeks has felt like being enveloped by a warm blanket, wrapping me up as they shove an energy bar into my hand and tell me to ‘keep going’.

I am thrilled to announce that Simon & Schuster (UK/ANZ) have acquired two new novels I’ve been working on. The first of these, The Search Party, launches in January 2024.

If you are one of my blog friends, you might know I’ve been quiet for a while.

The last couple of years have been a ride. Ups and downs, personal happiness and painful losses, framed by the pandemic that affected us all in so many different ways. I think my silence was driven by the need to withdraw for a little while – to heal, to explore, to live … and to write.

Writing is a lonely pastime. It requires discipline, tenacity and a certain amount of faith in an idea, an idea that you must stay invested in for months, sometimes years. It’s an endurance sport. A static, desk-bound marathon, during which it’s all too easy to fall at the hurdles of self-doubt or procrastination.

I’ve decided to compile a list of all the tricks and tips I’ve learned to beat them …

There is a general consensus that broken hearts are fertile ground for creativity. The break-up album. The affecting, painted canvas. The revealing memoir. Joan Didion wrote eloquently about loss and grief after her husband’s death in The Year of Magical Thinking.

… So I go for a walk and I find a bench with a view and sit for a while looking out over the countryside, staring at a patchwork valley of hills and fields, watching the summer swallows dancing in a blue sky. And as I sit there on the bench thinking about you and all the many memories I hold on this sad-strange anniversary day, I notice the brass plaque nailed to the wood beside me.

I am a writer. I spend my days stringing words together to create stories. It’s a lovely job and I’ve been lucky that publishers have wanted to share a little of my work.

Only my writing hasn’t been going so well lately…

The finest of words written by Maya Angelou…

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

Last night saw the culmination of months of hard work from a great many people when the very first winner of the Richell Prize for an unpublished writer was announced at a drinks reception hosted by Hachette in Sydney. Sally Abbott was awarded the Prize of $10,000 and a mentorship with Hachette Publisher Robert Watkins for her wonderful, dystopian submission Closing Down.

Sometimes I play a stupid game with our iPod. I put it on shuffle and ask Matt to send me a song. I know it’s ridiculous. I know ‘shuffle’ is a piece of apple software – an algorithm – rather than the ghostly hand of my husband reaching out to send me a sign. I know in these moments I’m a mad woman clutching for evidence of something beyond death. But it’s surprising how often something meaningful comes up.

Hachette Australia has announced a new Prize for emerging writers, set up in memory of my husband and their former CEO, Matt Richell. Established in partnership with The Guardian and The Emerging Writers’ Festival, The Richell Prize is an exciting new initiative designed to offer financial and practical support to some of the very best unpublished writers working in Australia.

These days I am so full of feelings. It’s as if someone has turned a dial to amplify my emotions — good and bad. I feel them reverberate more deeply within myself. Moments of love and joy make me soar and tingle. Moments of pain and sorrow make my chest ache and tears pour uncontrollably. I feel my feelings more fully.

Last night my gaze fell upon a poetry book sitting on my shelves. It’s a book a friend gave to me a couple of years ago and it’s been resting there for a while. The thing that caught my attention was a yellow post-it note sticking out from between its pages. I’m pretty sure the last time I looked at the book there was no yellow post-it note. Intrigued, I turned to the marked page and this is what I found.

We performed a vanishing act a few weeks ago, leaving the house and the cat, packing the car and driving all day under a Simpsons-esque sky until we arrived, finally, at my Dad’s house.

… and then your son asks if he can visit the place ‘where daddy died’ and so you wag a morning off school and drive down to Tamarama while the rest of the city sleeps and you find the gulls lying upon the beach with their beaks tucked under their wings, and you kick off your shoes and walk down onto the sand amidst sculptures that have washed-up like treasures from the deep, and you watch as your boy scrambles onto the cliffs and picks a tiny yellow flower which he carries down carefully for you, and you attempt to answer the hardest questions, questions without answers …

I have been wrestling with an ugly beast. For a while it bided its time, pacing behind bars, gathering strength until finally, a few days ago, it broke free.

In a faint attempt to strive for something familiar, I thought I’d post about the books I have been reading over the past two months.

It’s hard to believe, but today is the 49th day since Matt’s death. There are 49 days of mourning in Buddhist thinking and on the 49th day everyone thinks and lives a happy day, saying prayers and doing all positive things to make a joyful path to the next reincarnation.

Earlier this week I stood outside in our courtyard, balanced on a wooden bench, picking dead leaves from the vertical garden my husband and I installed just a few weeks ago. It’s been unseasonably warm in Sydney and the new plants are thriving – mostly; yet here and there curled shoots have fallen by the wayside, lost in the shock of their recent transplant. As I stood there with the sun warming my back and a hand full of crisp, brown leaves, my mind raced ahead to a vision of myself as an old lady stooped over a garden, pruning dead shoots and faded flowers. I have been asking myself in recent days how long this pain will last, but standing up there on the bench, I was struck by the sudden realisation that this pain isn’t going anywhere.