We may define therapy as a search for value.

Abraham Maslow

I haven’t managed a blog post here for a couple of months. Life—life off-line, in real space—got in the way. Big time, too.

Not just in the way of writing blog posts, but in the way of writing **anything**.

I was dealing with illness and death in the family, and between sorting out funerals and wills and selling property, I found I didn’t have the headspace to do anything other than plod on through each day. And when that was over, and I could look around and take notice again and start thinking about getting back to my ‘real’ job of writing and giving that my all, the issues at Dreamspinner came to a head. I won’t rehearse that here, because it’s a well-known (and continuing) story, but I’m by no means alone in deciding to take back my rights. But what I will say is that Dreamspinner didn’t cavil at all at returning them, so kudos for that courtesy. Royalties are, of course, another matter.

So, instead of cracking on with my current WIP, I found myself frantically trying to sort out those books (luckily not many!) that Dreamspinner had published. At the same time they were returned to me, I took back the third Rafe and Ned novel that I’d just submitted. Instead of settling in to write about glass-making and shadow magic, I spent weeks scrabbling to get good development editors and line editors signed up for the third Rafe book, sort out the cover licensing and internal art for all three books, re-edit the first two back into British English (Rafe is as English as I am and had felt a little constrained by trying to think and write as if he were from New York rather than Wiltshire), and get them back out there for sale with as brief a delay as possible. For several weeks, it felt like, my time at the computer was spent doing ruddy admin, not writing new books. Seriously, my life just caved in completely.

Those brief moments when I could turn back to Scrivener and the current WIP, and write things like “The day I discovered I had a second mother was the day the Company’s security attack dogs arrived on Hekat from Earth, looking for me.” were pure gold.

The soul-suckingly horrid months of September and October taught me that writing is the best, the very best therapy in the world — my loved ones aside, of course! Those brief gold moments kept me going. I relished every few sentences I could manage between more mundane and time-consuming things that just had to be done. When I clicked Scrivener open, I was back in charge of life again. And not just my life, but my characters’ lives as well. They’d better dance to my tune, darn ’em, the way I was dancing to everyone’s tune but mine. It was marvellously empowering. Affirming. I could do this again. I could push all the crap to one side and just crack on with what I love doing the most.

After all, writing is the perfect way to express all those feelings and emotions that are hard to speak about out loud. We’re pretenders, we writers. I can pretend that the stress, the discomfort, the sadness, the sheer overwhelming awfulness of death isn’t happening to me. It’s my characters who are feeling these things, and my fingers drumming on the keyboard are recording their reactions, their growth, their melt-downs and, I hope, their eventual triumph. My way of getting some distance so I could think straight, has morphed into my character finding the space to do the same thing when she’s confronted with a stressful, emotionally-taxing discovery, and, to keep the parallel going, with an unexpected death.

That old joke about the river in Egypt? Oh yeah. Displacement is a way of life.

But I can’t recommend writing-as-therapy highly enough. It works for me. I’m pretty much back to pre-September life, and writing Shadowglass helped me get there. My world is returning to normal. I’m getting the value back.

What’s your trick when life not only has knocked you off your feet, but is kicking you while you’re down? What helps you all deal? Do share!

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments on everything from marketing employment schemes to organizing conferences for 10,000 civil servants to running an internal TV service. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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