WIP: Live With Me, Sorrow

Sam wakes one morning to find the bedroom he shares with his partner, Joseph, to be haunted by his grandmother, Beth. Only, Beth isn't dead. She lives in an aged care home across town.

Disturbed by this presence in his life, Sam slowly confronts the grief he feels at a broken family, and begins to ask himself why the halls of his home were once full of colour and music, but have recently fallen so quiet.

This story, set in 2008, is a development of a novella I wrote several years ago and left to gather dust in the drawer. I've always come back this story, though I've never known what to do with it. It was always about two relationships: Sam's relationship with Beth (and by extension, his parents) and his relationship with his partner, Joseph. But only in this most recent iteration have I injected what might be called magical realism, the haunting by his still-living grandmother.

For the last six weeks I've been writing (at least) 500 words every morning to get back into a writing habit. Five hundred words isn't too many, once you get started, but as a writing tip it helps to set yourself an achievable daily goal. More than once I found I'd written 1,000 or 1,500 words 'by accident' because I found myself in a flow. Since the start of February, I've written around 30,000 words.

And today I finished the first (re)draft!

Now it goes back on the shelf for another six weeks to give myself a bit of distance from it.

Live With Me, Sorrow is still a work in progress. But if you want updates, feel free to sign up for my email below. And if you want to read a book that I consider an inspiration for this one, I recommend Not Dark Yet by Berit Ellingsen.