My academic writings have been widely published by mainstream publishers, but I find self-publishing my novels a daunting experience. Maggie Jackson's Odyssey is my third novel, and once again I'm publishing it under my own imprint - Christabel Press. I take comfort from the fact that even the greatest writers admit to wrestling with self-doubt and the lure of endless diversionary tactics. I find nothing quite so dispiriting as sitting alone in my study in front of a blank screen, wondering what on earth I am doing, making up stories and inventing characters to populate the pages of fiction that nobody might want to read.

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And yet that's not really how the writing process happens for me. A story arrives, like a seed blown on the winds of imagination and burrowing itself into some fertile niche in my soul where it begins to feed on words and images until it is so ripe that I must let it burst out of me. The need to write becomes irresistible, so that I move restlessly and irritably through my days, seeking escape in endless trivial tasks and time-wasting distractions until I surrender. The more time I spend on social media, the more likely it is that I am trying to avoid writing. 

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Sometimes a story begins with an event. I still have among my files a novel set in Lourdes, which emerged when a young person tragically took his own life when I was there on pilgrimage. Like another novel I'm currently working on, this story frightens me because it takes me to dark places that I would rather avoid. When writing The Good Priest, I had to push myself through barriers of resistance to contemplate unthinkable horrors. Between Two Rivers took more than twenty years to write, because its themes of vulnerable characters trapped in spirals of war and hatred sometimes repelled me so much that I had to withdraw for months and even years at a time. 

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And fictional characters are in themselves a mystery. Writing fiction feels almost godlike, not only in the drive to create living beings, but in the knowledge that they must suffer in order to live, and they must wrest freedom away from their creator if they are to become real. Again, I discover that I'm not alone among writers in experiencing that awesome and inexplicable process of letting go, of allowing fictional characters to elude authorial control so that at some point I become their scribe rather than their creator.

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Clearly, all these experiences and the words they engender come from within myself, for where else would they come from? They emerge from the forgotten or repressed dimensions of the self, where imagination feeds on memory and possibility, on alternative versions of lives encountered and events experienced, on all the what ifs and if onlys that would deflect us from the paths we have chosen or that were chosen for us, and allow us to inhabit different worlds. It is best not to probe too deeply into these questions, for to know one's sources too well, to associate one's characters too closely with real people, would I fear to be shocked and cowed into silence. The story asks to be told. The characters ask to be written. It is not for me to question why, but only to obey the impulse and trust whatever mysterious alchemy of language and spirit brings them into being.

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All this is true of Maggie Jackson's Odyssey, except that autobiography has played a much more significant role in this novel than in any of my others. The Good Priest drew extensively on my experience of the Catholic Church and on my experience of volunteering with a charity that cared for women sex workers on the streets, but it led me to explore dark imagined worlds beyond anything remotely in my own experiences. Between Two Rivers drew on my years of living in Zimbabwe for its sense of place, and some of its characters share the blended traits of different individuals I've known, but it is rooted in historical research of a period I experienced only from a distance, as a child growing up in neighbouring Northern Rhodesia/Zambia, terrified by the stories of violence and bloodshed seeping across the border from Ian Smith's Rhodesia.

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I am not the first person narrator of Maggie Jackson's Odyssey, a volatile, irascible seventy year old who delights and infuriates me in equal measure, and who is a somewhat unreliable narrator of her own life. But her marriage plays out across a time span that overlaps with that of my own marriage, and her story draws on memories of places I've lived in or visited over the years. Beyond that, it is a work of fiction. I leave it to readers to decide where to draw the blurred and shifting boundaries between reality and imagination.

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The joy of self-publishing is the creative freedom it allows for. I like experimenting with different genres of fiction. The Good Priest is a terrifying story of horrors and hauntings, where visible and invisible worlds bleed through the porous boundaries of time and place, unsettling the reader's ability to separate the real from the unreal. In Between Two Rivers, the horrors are all too real, but the novel is a story of love and friendship, sorrow and hope, woven against the darkness of war and racial hatred. Maggie Jackson's Odyssey  derives its comic façade from Maggie's ironic musings and sardonic humour, but it quivers with poignant themes of love and marriage, ageing and mortality, betrayal and forgiveness.

As I prepare to launch this third novel, I feel more gratitude than I can say for all those who took time to read and review my previous novels, for they have given me the confidence to keep going. If you would be willing to write an honest review of Maggie Jackson's Odyssey, I'll gladly gift you an advance copy as an eBook or paperback, and I'll throw in one of my other books, also as an eBook or a paperback, to say thank you.

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