A World Without You

Q&A Part 37: How did it feel to write this book?

@JoannaPaula8 asks: I'm very excited to A world without ♡ I wonder what inspired you to write it and how was the experience?

I've talked a little bit about the inspiration before in a previous answer, so I'm going to focus on the second part of your question, how did it feel to write the book.

Because something really important happened to me while I was writing the book. 

I got pregnant. 

And the book--inspired partly by my brother who died due to his mental illness--meant that I had his death playing heavily in my mind every time I wrote the book. A World Without You isn't really about death, but it reminded me of someone who died, and that made me think about death--and of course, there is some death in the book, and anyway, I feel like I've written the word "death" a million times here, so I'm going to stop.

But at the same time as I'm writing so much about death, I'm growing life. It was such a strange dichotomy; writing death, feeling life. It shifted everything for me. It made the book even that much more of an emotional journey. It forced me to look to the future, not just the past. It created a balance--not just in the book, but in me too.