Twelve years ago I was living in a different town, married to a different man and living a very different life.

Put simply I was a very unhappy person, afraid to try and get out of an abusive marriage.

But I like to think that despite the dark days, a lot of good came from those very unhappy times, I learned a lot, I became a better person in the years that followed my eventual departure from the relationship and I also wrote a lot of fiction as a way of escaping from the trap I’d got myself into.

One story, which I named ‘Purgatory Hotel’ was a fixation of mine for a long time. It was inspired by a Nick Cave lyric – ‘In God’s hotel, everybody’s got a room.” While that lyric ran around my head I got to thinking about what if the afterlife was a hotel, specifically what if Purgatory – the waiting room – was a hotel? What if you did something really bad and you got sent there, with all the other bad people and you had to repent until you got to check out and go to Heaven?

And so my novel was born, a story about a girl who wakes up in Purgatory and can’t remember how she died or what crime she committed to get sent to the in between world.

I created a whole world, an afterlife of my own imagining, a decrepit old hotel, mouldering out on the edge of forever with a library full of books where everybody’s lives are being written in dusty old books as they happen. The writing stops when the breathing stops.

And my anti-hero, my victim/perpetrator has to read her whole life, each tragedy, each sordid detail, and each terrible decision as part of her punishment until she can remember her awful crime and why she ended up dead. After all you can’t ask for forgiveness when you don’t know what you did wrong.

The main characters, Dakota and Jackson became people to me, their dark hours became mine, and their brief happiness’s a source of joy to me. All this darkness born out of an unhappy life. And looking over my words now I can see the inspiration, the parallels I pulled from my own unhappy existence and placed in a fictional world. Part escapism, part exorcism.

Then twelve years after I first scribbled the ideas out on the back of my payslip envelope, a publisher said yes.

Crooked Cat Books are an indie publishers and they were just one of dozens I submitted my twisted little tale to. Lucky for me, they saw something worth printing.

So this November ‘Purgatory Hotel’ will be published and I feel like at last I can let go of my characters, stop trying to change them and leave them be, let them be who I made them to be.

Writing is hard, not because it’s a mammoth task. For me writing is hard because I don’t know when to stop, I can’t say how many edits I made to the book over the years, how many name changes, how many lines I’ve deleted. There were years when I just totally ignored it and left it behind as though I was over it and would never do anything with it.

I even self-published it under a different name but I knew I was not happy with it yet and pulled it back. All writers are different, all have their own process, my process is to sink deep into that world, write and write and not think too much about it until I go back to re-read it after I’m done. And then I find I need to add more, say more. A line of great significance in the story – “You should know by now, it’s never over.” Might as well have been me talking to myself.

The road from that day where I first scribbled the notes for the novel has been long, but it’s amazing how much life can change in 12 years, I have left the dark corridors of Purgatory behind.

I served my time.

I am glad to say the sun shines brighter these days, I am happily married and I can honestly say I am more grateful than ever for the good things in my life.

 

Purgatory Hotel will be released through Crooked Cat Books this November.