Intimate Lines began as a short story challenge that I failed. I challenged myself to write a sexy story involving a young student seducing her art teacher through an art project, but I couldn’t write sexy. It wasn’t me, so I set the story idea aside.

It rolled around in my subconscious until Nadia introduced herself and her problems to me.

Who was she and why did she want me to write her story?

Where were the parallels from her life to mine?

After a while she answered.

I had wanted to be a writer, to go to college and study English. To have a career as an author, but circumstances prevented this from happening.

Nadia wanted to be an artist, to draw people to understand them better, but circumstances were stopping her.

I always felt I was different, didn’t fit anywhere, was maybe an alien – especially as a teenager who preferred to listen to radio plays and make things rather than go to discos and parties. I tried to be what I thought people wanted me to be. I didn’t know about introverts then.

Nadia felt different from her family and the society she lived in. She felt like she’d been born into the wrong family. She had too many unasked or unanswered questions about her family’s religious beliefs.

A tenuous link I told her. Lots of people feel different, especially in their teens. I really wasn’t the right person to tell her story.

My upbringing was based on freedom of choice re religion and beliefs.

Nadia’s upbringing and family was based on religion.

Totally different experiences, Nadia. I shook my head and pushed the story away.

But she kept coming back.

What right did I have to express her story? Why did Nadia choose me?

I could empathise with not being able to do what the heart desired. I could write without judgement of another’s religious choices. Nadia’s story wasn’t about religion, it was about her being true to her inner desire and need to draw, to express herself through art, to explore and understand the world, other people, and herself through art. But I couldn’t write her story.

After a year Nadia was still in my mind.

I gave in and spent hours researching her background, her life, and her family’s beliefs although very little of this would ever appear in the book, but I knew, I understood. I felt her family’s anger and hurt at Nadia’s betrayal and rejection of their life. I understood how her father only wanted what he saw as the best life for his daughter. I cried for her family and for Nadia. I thought about her when I fell asleep at night, when I walked, cycled, prepared a meal.

I empathised with this character as only an empathetic introvert can.

Then I wrote her story as a first draft and set it aside with relief until she haunted me again and I rewrote the story several times, removing sections, expanding other sections, paid for a developmental edit, listened to beta readers, and finally finished the story to be best of my ability.

I know it’s long and slow and a little meandering, and yes, there are probably a few scenes I could remove to speed up the flow, but life meanders, backtracks. I could have given Nadia a few more challenges, she could have worn her bikini in public to express a change as suggested by some readers, but every time I wrote that scene it was false. She wasn’t ready and I wasn’t going to force her.

I’m not sure the title is the right one, Intimate Lines, but it stuck. It was her choice for her art project. Nadia was crossing lines that to her were intimate as well as drawing something viewed as intimate by her family.

The title may give a buyer the impression it’s a romance novel but reading the blurb should prevent this. I hope so. There is a splash of romance, but this is not a romance novel.

I laugh when I write the title into Amazon’s general search and it is listed with woman’s hygiene products, but that’s okay too.

I enjoyed writing Nadia’s story. It was a challenge, although far from the original one but I like the story and I hope many others will too. 

Available as an eBook and Paperback on amazon

https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B099BZQQNQ

The eBook is free from Tuesday 20^th July 2021 – Friday 24^th July 2021

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B098TWD9C5