Thursday 14 January 2016

News on UPCOMING RELEASE & Why I've Been Away So Long

You probably read the title of this post and thought, What? Book three of the Soulmates Saga is about to be launched and yet we haven’t heard from Neha in the last seven or eight months, how come? 

I know, I know. I’m sorry.

I haven’t been on Twitter, Facebook or active on this blog for the better half of 2015, and in the first post of 2016, which I posted on Thursday, January 14, I hinted that I may have exciting book-related news to share with you. Poor form on my part, so I apologise.

If you’re wondering whether I’ve been cooped up in my study for the past several months, writing away, so I could announce a new book release in the New Year, you’re wrong. I wish I’d spent the majority of 2015 working on my books. Hell, if I had to I spend last year sitting around watching paint dry, I’d take it, because 2015 was one of the hardest years of my life.

Well, the last five years have been really tough.

If you read my posts in May 2013, When Life Becomes Stranger Than Fiction, Part I and II, you’ll know that my mum suffered a life-threatening brain injury in December 2012, a fortnight before my wedding day, which left her paralysed and wheelchair-bound. She was never able to regain use of her limbs and though she managed a little speech, she had lost most of who she was. She suffered a great deal during the year she spent in hospital and even when she went home. Chest infections, pneumonia, problems with her weak heart and all sorts meant that she was always in-and-out of hospital. Always in pain. It hurt so much to see her go through this, it really did.

In May 2015, she was diagnosed with kidney cancer, and I was diagnosed with a couple of serious illnesses myself, which forced me to quit my job in the financial services sector, at a point in my career when I was truly flying high. I didn’t tell my mum about my condition, or my siblings; they had enough to deal with. We’d all seen what cancer can do to a person, from when my 30-year-old sister-in-law died of pancreatic cancer in August 2012. Right before our very eyes, in our very home, the cancer had taken a young, healthy-looking mother of two beautiful little girls and turned her into someone unrecognisable, stick-thin and shrivelled up. Before the cancer in mum’s kidney could spread and shrivel her up, she died of heart failure in November 2015. Words can’t describe just how devastating that was, how much I miss her, how alone I feel because she’s gone.

The strange thing is, a couple of months before my mum passed away, I got this urge to continue writing the third book in the Soulmates Saga. Up until then, I’d been too sad, too sick, too worried and too busy to write anything, let alone finish a novel that I’d - luckily - written 75% of before my mum first got sick in Winter 2012. And so, I tackled the last section of the book, despite how much it hurt me physically to sit down and write. I was extremely close to finishing the first draft - probably five or six chapters to the end - when my mum died. I expected the pain and grief to dissolve my new-found keenness to finish the book and I awaited the return of the writer’s block which I suffered from when she first became ill.

But it never came.

I think it was because I didn’t want to say that my mum’s death caused me a setback. I didn’t want to attribute anything negative to her, for she had been the most pure of heart and innocent person I ever knew. I was determined to finish what I started, finish it for her.

And I have.

The Soulmates Saga, Book 3 is in pre-publication mode and I am very excited to let you know that it will be released this summer. Yay! It's called Someone Like You and it's the epic third instalment in this contemporary romance series set in London and New York. The series follows the life and loves of young artist Mukti Khan