Toxic relationship stories are having a bit of a moment, and whether it’s realising that your partner is a gaslighting piece of shit, or coming to terms with life after a controlling ex, the stories to be told are varied and powerful.

The main books I’ve read that have covered this of late can often be dismissed as ‘women’s fiction’ or ‘chick lit’, neither of which are good enough terms to show the depth and sensitivity they exude when dealing with a really delicate situation.

Toxic relationships can come in all forms (and not just romantic) and there can be relationships so toxic that you’re both bad for each other. That’s not what I’m talking about here. I’m talking about the ones that can be qualified as abusive. Where one party wants to control the other. It’s done so subtly in some ways you’d barely notice it – from calling you ‘crazy’ when you show any emotion, to flying off the handle unexpectedly, to punishing you with the silent treatment.

Relationships with a ‘bad ex’ aren’t just about being cheated on or finding yourself unappreciated – they’re experiences that need time and space to heal from. To undo the damage, figure out what’s real and unlearn all those strange behaviours.

In most of the books I’ve read that cover this area, the friends have struggled to deal with the emotionally abusive ex, either stating their dislike outwardly, encouraging her (yes, it’s usually a ‘her’, that’s not to say it always is) to leave him, or waiting around until she finally does (and realising it might take a few tries).

I always really feel for the friends in that situation, because you don’t want to leave your friend isolated, enthralled by someone who is bad to them, but you also can’t get through. You just have to wait.

Some brilliant books that dealt with abusive or toxic exes that I’ve read in the last year included ‘Don’t you forget about me’ by Mhairi Mcfarlane, ‘The Flat Share’ by Beth O’Leary, ‘How do you like me now?’ by Hollie Bourne and ‘Our Stop’ by Laura Jane Williams.

In my upcoming novel, ‘Before We Part’, there’s no doubt that Loll’s husband Darren is a nasty piece of work (although he’s always capable of sinking lower in people’s estimation – arsehole that he is). He’s never explicitly abusive, and to many readers I’m sure he’ll just look like your standard ex – pretty shit.

What makes the relationship more complex is how Loll feels about it – how she’d built her life around someone else’s opinion of her without even noticing. How she’d forgotten to be herself, because it was easier to be someone who made him happy. When someone chips away at us, day after day, when they identify the things that are ‘wrong’ with us, until we start to believe we really were irrational, or unfair or overreacting…it’s hard to claw your way back to ‘normal’. It’s hard to even see what that is anymore.

My story is not about Darren, and actually, what I love is that he has screwed over two women and neither of them let their story be about him. Because it’s about them – their friendship, their love, their growth, their history. Their adventures. And that takes guts.

So, tell me: have you read a book with a toxic relationship? Have you read a romance where you thought it seemed unhealthy? Have you read any of the wonderful books I’ve listed above, and what did you think?

I was having a think about the end of Game of Thrones (again). Now, wherever you stand on the final few episodes of one of the most popular television shows in recent years, I think we can all agree that endings matter.

I’m not sure anything is capable of evoking such disappointment or elation as an ending. And when it comes to Game of Thrones, I just kept thinking about the three main female characters (beware, *spoilers* ahead):

Dani’s ending was the most disappointing for most, mainly because her descent into madness was so far from the place she’d come from, as a kind, caring and balanced leader, focused on freedom from oppression and good lives for her people. She started to believe in her own destiny, her ego overtook her mission. It made sense, it just suddenly all happened very quickly at the end.

Cersei’s storyline, whilst she could be a nasty piece of work, was always motivated by love of her children above all else. She was the quintessential helicopter mother – her children were the priority. They deserved the kingdom, they deserved control, they deserved the best. It was that cut-throat determination that was her downfall. Her ending was probably the one I had the biggest issue with, because they’d tried to humanise her before her ending. She didn’t get what she deserved. She’d always been strong, unyielding and despicable to get what she needed, to survive. Her ending didn’t reflect that.

But Sansa, there was the ending that saved the show for me. A woman who had grown from a selfish young girl who expected nothing beyond being cared for and looking pretty, to a leader who put her people first at every turn. Sansa was for the North, above all. Not ego, not personal gain, but power enough to give her people a voice and a seat at the table.

I was reading about the idea in fiction that women who have dealt with abuse become fighters because of what they’ve dealt with. On the outside, that looks like a sensible argument. After all, when we’ve had to fight to overcome trauma, that strength can push you forward.

But that gives the power to the trauma, or the abuser, not the person. And something about that feels uneasy.

We are all made of what happens to us and what we make happen. We are riding waves and we sink or swim. But in the story of our lives, do we really want to give power to the worst things?

I don’t have an answer to this, I just recognised that in fiction, in order to transition, often some bad shit has to happen. From frothy, joyful romantic comedies that start with being broken up with or cheated on, through to thrillers where mistreatment, alcohol abuse or physical attack occur, women are put through the ringer. We see this as character-building, fighting from victim to hero.

In my upcoming book, Before We Part, each woman is dealing with their own trauma. Loll is dealing with the husband who left her just before Christmas, her best friend Cass is still recovering from the biggest mistake she made years before, the one that left her with her daughter, Veronica. Vee’s trauma is yet to come, losing her mother to cancer.

Are we defined by our trauma? Does how we deal with trauma say something about us? What if you don’t have grace under pressure, what if you respond to pain with cruelty or harshness? I think the best characters, like people, are imperfect.

Characters are going to have to go through awfulness to learn a lesson or grow. That’s just narrative storytelling. But like real people, we need to avoid labelling characters by the shit they’ve gone through. We have to let them grow and be and move beyond what we’ve known them as. In a series like Game of Thrones, where years and years have passed with these characters, it’s natural to put them in boxes, the same way your parent always remembers that disgusting thing you liked to eat as a child.

The important thing to me is that each character doesn’t have to be symbolic of an entire group or a whole situation. They’re just one person.

What do you think? How do you write and read female trauma? Does it ever put you off?

I know, I know, I’ve spent the last five years talking about the health benefits of writing. And I stand by that.

Getting to write, express your feelings, explore ideas and taking the time to create instead of consuming can have huge benefits.

But the actual job of writing a book can have a negative impact on your body and your mind, sometimes.

Here are a few, and the things I’ve found that help!

Aches and pains

I work all day at a computer, and then I write my books in the evenings, at the weekends, even on my lunch breaks! So RSI (repetitive strain injury) is a big one. I also have weak, clicky wrists, so typing can be a pain sometimes.

As with other office/screen workers, sore eyes from the screen, and neck and back pain can be problems.

When you’re on a deadline, sometimes you’ve just got to power on through, despite the pain. A few ways around it are switching to audio, using something like Dragon software to dictate your book. Sadly, my brain doesn’t work that way, I’m better on paper – I just don’t think out loud.

The fix? Taking deadlines into account, lots of stretching, standing up and something like yoga or foam rolling to lengthen those muscles back out again.

‘Writer seeking waistline’

If there is a worse job for weight gain, I have not yet found it. Sedentary, irregular hours and a culture of biscuits, chocolate and alcohol. When you’re on a deadline, you don’t get up unless your bum goes numb. Cooking real dinners goes out the window, along with exercise and seeing the outside world.

The author world is full of ‘just one more bag of chocolate buttons because edit are hard’ or ‘one more glass of wine because I finished the first draft’. There’s also so much tea/coffee that I wonder if I’m ever truly hydrated when I’m working on a book.

I’ve always struggled with my weight, and that’s because my two favourite things (reading books and writing them) are usually done sitting down. I try to walk more, get a workout in or get outside. Thirty minutes out of your day doesn’t take a huge amount from your writing, and I usually find getting out of my own head helps iron out any storyline kinks, or produces some new dialogue when I’m least expecting it.

But a week before submission? Forget it. The best time to exercise is when you’re absolutely procrastinating over starting those line edits!

Vulnerability

You know what’s more terrifying than putting your heart and soul into something and releasing it out into the world?

The number of people who will rip the absolute shit out of it for no reason at all.

I’m not just talking about negative reviews (which can be devastating, let’s be honest) but friends and family who dismiss what you do, people on twitter who tag you into negative comments, weird private messages from people who want something from you – the endless stream of feedback on something that is an extension of yourself.

It’s exhausting, being that vulnerable. And in our online world, we open ourselves to that every time we publish a book.

Going offline, avoiding reviews and reminding readers and bloggers to please not tag us in negative reviews where they tell the world that the thing we spent months creating is a completely derivative shit show are ways to balance that vulnerability.

Losing yourself in the story

You know that saying, ‘no surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader?’ We have to feel and discover things as we create the story in order for the reader to feel the same. So if you’re shedding a tear for a dead character, think how painful it was for us to kill them off.

Then think about how it feels having to be inside the mind of a psychopath, or a terrified person tortured by them, or a character dealing with trauma…most of us disappear into the world we create. We need to, to make it convincing. We need to inhabit a world, become part of it and the people within it, in order to do our jobs well.

But that can lead to all sorts of depressive moods, irritability, feelings of helplessness and a loss of perspective. We lose connection with our own lives because we’ve reconnected in a new one.

I’m making it sound like psychosis, and that’s not what I mean. But if you think about how much a book can affect your mood when you read it, I’d triple it for the experience of writing it. Especially if you’re on a deadline, and you’ve been through it over and over again, making subtle changes.

In my upcoming book, Before We Part, one of the main characters is very anxious. She always has been – in some ways, it’s more a personality trait than a diagnosis. Writing about her life was a good way to express my own anxious feelings and my experiences of panic attacks. But on the other hand, the more I submerged myself into that world, the more I started having panic attacks again in my own life. Because I was stuck in that character’s mindset, I was carrying around her baggage with me, on top of my own.

The best way out of this for me was exercise (yay, more of that) and writing things about my own life as a sort of ‘fiction palate cleanser’. I’d write about my own (positive) memories, or write gratitude lists. Anything that brought me back to the here-and-now and grounded me.

Negative emotions

I mean, we all have these, but whilst I’m going for it, here are the ugly emotions/experiences that I have as an author:

• Comparisonitus
• Jealousy (huge marketing budget/huge advance/huge 5 way auction for book/new very exciting deal)
• Unrelenting self criticism
• Fear of being misunderstood
• Sour grapes at the odd bestseller I didn’t think was that good
• An unpleasant amount of ambition
• Moving the goal posts just before you achieve something
• Belittling any achievement

So why do it, right? You add in the poor sleep schedule because of all the coffee and the characters who wake you up with an idea just before you pass out, only to wake up and find a note on your bedstand that says ‘blind-murder-mice-cheese’, and you’re on your way to some serious problems.

We do it because we love it. I do it literally because I can’t not do it. It’s part of who I am, it’s how I feel most comfortable expressing myself, and if I wasn’t writing stories, my whole flimsy personality would collapse into dust, revealing that I have very few hobbies or interesting things in my life.

So whilst being an author might be unhealthy, there are loads of great things about it:

Being creative, expressing yourself, exploring, playing, completing something, finishing hard things, patching together edits like surgery, rewriting from scratch, getting wonderful messages, seeing positive reviews, feeling like you’ve reached someone.

Writing brings an immense feeling of satisfaction, and if you’ve got a book burning away inside you, then write it.

Just make sure you book into that yoga class, though, okay?

No one wants to think of themselves as not being a priority. No one wants to think they’re not as good as someone else, or worse, that they’re just as good as someone else but not being recognised.

There’s been some interesting chats on social over the weekend about the value of marketing in an author’s arsenal, even when you’re traditionally published.

I did an MA in Creative Entrepreneurship before my first book was published – I was prepared to put the work in. But really, I didn’t know how. My first publishers even said to me that they’d expected my big Greek family would have bought more books (everyone I knew bought one at the launch – my family isn’t that big). I chatted on Twitter, I had merch made, I ran competitions, tried to get an Instagram thing going.

But the truth was this – I was a newbie and really, no one cared. Why should they? I didn’t know how to market myself.

When I moved into romantic comedies, taken on by a big publisher, I’ll admit, I expected them to do the heavy lifting when it came to promotion. I’ve been published by companies of different sizes, with different priorities and goals.

I’ve had blog tours that I’ve organised, and one’s that have been organised for me, I’ve done launch parties, events, workshops, festivals. I’ve had promo images created. I’ve done Facebook Ads, video chats, regular blogging, blog swaps, blog jumps. Anything I knew how to do, or I saw someone else doing, I’ve tried it.

Most of the time, I expected to do things for myself (and sometimes I preferred it – more control) but whenever I received a really lovely promotion or idea (looking at you, lovely Canelo team) I was always pleasantly surprised. I never expected it.

This is because I’m probably never going to be an A-lister.

I know that. I don’t have an angle, I never have. I don’t have an interesting job or life. There is no backstory here. I’m incredibly boring. Literally the only interesting thing about me is that I write. Which isn’t particularly interesting for a writer!

Without an interesting backstory or a killer ‘blow it out of the water’ concept-driven book, you’re not going to make A-list. That’s just the way it is.

I’m bottom of the middle. I’ve been around a while, knocking out books pretty consistently for the last 8 years. That means I’m not expecting ads on the tube or book trailer videos I haven’t made myself (stay tuned though, because I’m definitely going to give it a go). I was thrilled when I got to go to the HC Summer Party this year, because I was never high up enough on an author list to go before.

We say not to fall into comparisonitus, but we do. We look at what everyone else is getting and doing and writing.

This view is also skewed, because we only see the good stuff. We see the unpacking boxes of books, and shelfies, and talking on the radio and famous people recording the audio. Of course we only see the good stuff! No one’s sharing that thirtieth rejection. No one’s talking about the years they spent failing to sell their books.

Is there anything wrong with being a mid-list author? Absolutely not. You have a fanbase, you get to keep writing, you have editors who are excited by your books. You still get deals and you get that gentle, delicate little fluttering of hope that says maybe this book will be the one. Mid-listers tend to have to focus on getting those books out consistently, coming up with new ideas and writing quickly to make sure we’re not forgotten and to capitalise on popularity of one book with another.

But here’s the thing: sometimes mid-listers become A-listers. Sometimes they switch genre. Sometimes after writing for ten years, they suddenly have that book that just takes off. Not even sometimes because it’s better than all their others, but because of the news or the politics or something someone else has written. Zeitgeist can make an A-lister.

And I’d hazard a bet that most mid-listers are living in hope that one day it’ll happen to them. But probably not enough to turn down another 2/3/4 book deal with the same publisher. They’re being practical.

The problem when it comes to marketing is that the mid-lister marketing tends to be invisible – it’s there, it’s just not explicit. It’s Facebook Ads and newsletter pitches, and Bookbub deals and a hundred other small things that push the book, but not necessarily you. A-list marketing is loud – it’s Reese Witherspoon’s book club, top of the chart positions, chatting on TV, huge poster kind of marketing. It’s about the author more than the book, most of the time. Because you take a bet on what you know.

Now, some debuts become A-listers immediately (and yet another movie/tv exec becomes justified in their ridiculous representations of how perfect getting a book deal is) and they’ll never know any different. They’ll think: ‘well surely everyone gets this? Isn’t this normal?‘ If they stay A-list, perhaps they’ll think, ‘well perhaps they’re not as good as I am.’

It’s the mid-listers who become A-list who intrigue me, because they probably know, better than most, the difference when someone truly invests in you as an author (rather than just your book, at that moment in time). The books are finite, the author is the commodity. Or at least, they should be.

Both authors and publishers have their ends of the deal to live up to when a book is brought into the world, it’s like giving birth. Everyone has a role to play in that room. The problem is that every author thinks their baby is amazing. And the publisher knows that not every baby is capable of going the distance. So they’ll do what they can to support your book, give it what it needs to reach its potential. But your potential might not be the same as someone else’s.

And it might suck, but it’s true. You may have written a kick-arse book. But it might not be a best seller. Because of the time of year, the subject matter, the other books that are out there, similar books that have more budget, better known authors who’ve written about similar things, the fact that no one’s writing about what you’ve written…

There is so much luck and chance involved in this game, and I think that’s why so many writers say they’re addicted to writing. When you’ve never been published, you think it’s going to change you’re life, but once you have been, you keep rolling the dice, thinking you’re going to win big. Sometimes you do. Sometimes you win small but it’s still brilliant. Sometimes you worked on what you were sure was the best book you’ve ever written and it sinks into oblivion.

As a writer, all you can keep doing is writing. Be tenacious, be curious, be fierce. Work hard as hell but acknowledge that luck and timing has a helluva big part to play.

So what do you think? Do you notice a difference between ‘list’ writers? Do you care? Are there books you loved which you wish were marketed more widely?