Readalong 3

Sorry it was a long section today! But at least you have Cara’s backstory, now, and some more complications! You also got to meet the most fun character in the book, who is of course Javi’s precocious daughter Bea. She gets all the best lines!

Permanent injuries – physical and psychological – weren’t a party starter.

I’ve found it interesting, during the re-read so far, that there are little things I would tweak, if I could go back (‘…picking at the strings with his fingers’ – what else would he use to pick at the strings? It could have just been ‘picking at the strings’), but the characters and their backstories just live as they are, now. It’s especially interesting because that’s not the case during the drafting process. Cara’s backstory with the accident and her prosthesis actually grew as I drafted and I had to go back and weave it in from the beginning (although her anxiety was one of the starting points for developing her character). I don’t know at what point the characters just become themselves.

You just wanted to try my papaya.

• I liked making Javi keep his shirts unbuttoned all the time. His full dress sense will be revealed soon.
• Ah, this is before I broke my ‘lip pursing’ habit…..
• The ‘hurricane of a man’ I always thought described Javi well.
• Javi really likes hugs LOL
• The fingers touching on the table is still one of my favourite moments in the whole book
• Papaya is a nostalgic food for me, too, except we call it pawpaw in Australia. My parents have always had pawpaw trees in their garden and we had lots when I was growing up.

Jetlag is not my friend

I did have a vague idea of what the song was about as I was writing the first draft, but the specific lyrics I developed later, in response to how the story had grown. But the title of the song, ‘Nostalgia’ was always the same and was the starting point for many of the themes in the book. I thought to myself, what is it about Christmas that is so powerful, and these ideas of continuity, our own history, the threads of our lives, punctuated each year by traditions, were the things that came out of that brainstorming and led to a song called ‘Nostalgia’. But wait and see where that leads later…

If she could survive hell with that kind of dignity, the least he could do was keep his hands off her.

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