To be honest, I no longer am; the creative writing process for this project finished yesterday! I started writing this book in July 2023, but it was not exactly a continuous process as I did a bit of travelling during that time and there was period in December in which I did no writing at all. By my estimate this book has taken only 6 months to write! That is an all time record for me.

Of course, the work has not finished entirely. After the writing comes the editing. I have already started this process, going back to the very first page and deciding that I need to change the title. My original choice was ‘Why Me?, which seemed like a fair question for the protagonist to ask. She wakes up to discover herself in hospital after suffering a savage attack by a serial killer. Four other women have been attacked previously and they all died, so why did Jessica survive? That is the question that drives her part of the story and leads into the supernatural element. At the beginning this seemed appropriate, but a thriller has to be a complicated beast and this plotline was too simple. To muddy the waters I broadened the tale by including the police hunt for the killer and introduced a few more characters. When I wrote the conclusion, in which the police investigation and the supernatural collide quite spectacularly, it became clear that the title no longer reflected the whole of the story. I have another title but it does not feel right. This is not a new situation, I had similar problem with ‘The Devil Within US’. Fortunately, as I am only a quarter of the way through the revision of the manuscript I still have time to decide what the finished book’s title will be.