Sapphic Romance from the Heart

When I first planned to write Unspoken, I expected to have it complete within three months.

This book was always meant to be quieter than the others in the series. More inward. More emotionally precise. But life has a way of shaping the stories we tell, sometimes in ways we don’t choose.

During the time I was writing it, my family was moving through an ongoing crisis. My dad experienced a serious mental health breakdown, one that required immediate attention, constant advocacy, and an emotional vigilance that left very little room for anything else. In tandem with that, my mum’s dementia continued to progress, bringing with it a steady erosion of familiarity, certainty, and the roles we’d all known for so long.

There were long stretches where writing simply wasn’t possible, because the headspace just wasn’t there. Creativity requires a kind of quiet focus, and that quiet was being thirstily swallowed by worry, exhaustion, and the practical realities of caring, supporting, and simply getting through each day.

Progress came in fragments. A scene here. A paragraph there. In the beginning, five weeks of nothing at all.

And yet, Unspoken kept waiting.

This story about silence inside a marriage, about loving someone while feeling lost, and about mental health struggles that are invisible to the outside world ended up being shaped by the season it was written in. Not directly, not autobiographically, but emotionally. The themes of endurance, vulnerability, and choosing to stay present even when everything feels overwhelming became sharper, more honest, because I was living them as much as I was writing them.

The delay in publication wasn’t a lack of commitment or passion. It was the reality of balancing creativity with care, art with responsibility, and storytelling with the very real work of showing up for the people I love.

I’m sharing this not as an explanation that’s owed, but as context, because stories don’t exist in isolation. They’re written by people living full, complicated lives, often carrying far more than what appears on the page.

Unspoken took longer because life demanded more. And while that was difficult, I believe the book is stronger for it. Quieter, truer, and written with the patience that only hard situations teach you.

Thank you for waiting. And thank you, always, for reading.