My Writing Process for The Highway girl Book

To be honest I didn't have a writing process. My writing process was simply to steam-roll through my own negative thoughts. Every one of my 'nay-says' I rammed through. I felt like a runaway steam train, like the ones in the the Wild West movies. My steam train crashed through all my own negative thoughts. So, for example I'd think “this book is rubbish, I should stop.” This thought would jumped out like one of those warning train signals flashing out onto the track but instead of taking heed, instead of slamming down on the brakes, instead of pulling down on the whistle, I steamed on and crashed straight through the signal. Or another thought was “who do you think you are writing this book” and my visual was a car stunt chase. Like all those movies laden with car stunts crashing through and over things (I also have to include The Dukes of Hazards ). Cars crashing through barriers, gates and hay bales. Every James Bond movie, every Jason Bourne movie, all those Jackie Chan movies. But instead of stunt men and women driving, it was actually me driving, my imaginary self. Driving and crashing through every single negative thought. And by the end of the book, it felt great!!

As a side note. Years ago my dream was to be a stunt woman. I had spent so many years in and out of the different film studios, Pinewood, Shepperton, Twickenham. I loved watching the crew at work more than the actors. The stunt people were super cool and got to do super cool stuff.

Thanks to a stunt man contact of my Dad's I asked him about becoming a stunt woman on his team and instead of hearing about the glamour and the excitement and all the cool stuff, I got a real reality check.

“Are you willing to brake bones?” Was his first question and before he could even get to all the other reality checks my answer was clear. I convulse at the sight of blood, would literally implode if I saw a broken bone let alone mine and brushing off any deep wound with a 'its only a scratch' would be said whilst vomiting. So reality check...stunt woman, not for me.

However, I love motorbikes and cars and still have the stunt woman bug in me, so in order to appease that itch a few years ago I did do a stunt woman driving course. Which was incredibly fun, fulfilling some of my car stunt dreams but most importantly I felt incredibly cool. I had my little toe in the cool tribe of stunt dudes and dudettes. So if there is any stunt team out there who wants to employ a writer who does a great hand brake spin, then I'm your girl.

However, I digress, back to the writing process. So suffice to say all my stunt dreams have stayed purely in the imaginary and not the literal. I imagined myself bombarding through every negative thought, and they were pretty constant, desperately trying to de-rail me. But I crashed through them all. And I let the story and the writing do the rest. My real job in my writing process was to keep the negative thoughts out of the way so the story could safely get to its destination and be told and then hopefully read.