Writing Leah. The sub-plot came first.  I had that story years earlier.

Once upon a time you hardly ever heard the word ‘divorce.’  The first time I heard it was such a shock! Here I was, waiting for marriage – and others were getting divorced.

At one point I seemed to be hearing the word everywhere I went – but rather disturbingly, the shock factor was missing.  It was as if society had moved the word from Tragedy status to Normality.

One day, I was doing my shopping in the local supermarket – just standing in the queue, waiting to pay for my goods and the cashier was chatting away to the woman in front of me.  Yes – they were talking about divorce – so casually it could have been about the price of bread.  I stood, horrified that the word was being as trivialised as a can of baked beans.

That is why the written story in Leah had to be one of shock, and pain, and loss – a tragedy!

I found a break-up scene playing in my head as if I was watching a movie.  The sounds of the voices were interspersed with the sound of the wedding vows. This was the story in my head that existed long before I had the idea of writing the book. I wrote it down but it was years later when I developed it into a whole sub-plot …. where the reader would only feel the loss if they first got to know the character.

Please understand my pre-occupation with the topic was not a judgement on people’s actions; it was the despair of an onlooker who, for many years, was standing at the starting line -waiting, hearing of the shattered dreams of strangers.

That is what Leah is – a book of Waiting.