Amy Harwell

The tentatively not-so-bleak midwinter

Dec 17th, 2025

Today I wrote some words. One thousand three hundred and forty-six of them to be precise, which is quite a lot when the only thing you’ve written in weeks is a poem about being scared.

A few weeks ago I had a chat with someone I respect about something I have written, and I got some constructive feedback. I forgot when going into this that I take criticism about as well as I take a frying pan to the face, and it hit me extra hard because I couldn’t even say “you’re wrong my work is fine” because I agreed with every damn word.

I treated myself to a bit of a spiral, had three consecutive diseases, and applied for a load of jobs I would rather eat my own socks than attend.

So…that was the rest of my autumn in a nut shell.

And now it’s winter (I think?) and I am sat in a lovely caravan in someone else’s garden with an incredibly effective little heater going, and I am finally getting myself back on track.

I’m not doing goals at the moment – I’m not putting any pressure on myself at all. I am simply showing up and seeing what happens. And today what happened was that I took a weird dream about someone I used to know and I turned it into a few pages of prose that may or may not ever see the light of day.

A start is a start no matter what day of the week, or which month of the year. A start doesn’t have to wait until January and it definitely doesn’t need to wait until you have all the answers – I have precisely none of the answers right now, and am sort of relying on finding them as I go. I’m just out here writing my stories and feeding my soul, and proving to myself that I am the one who shows up even when I’m completely convinced that I’m doing it all wrong.

I’m not going into 2026 with no clue and a blank page. I’m heading for the new year with my brain in the game and my nails very well maintained because having wet nail polish is apparently the key to getting me to sit still and type!
The indoor cat, and the open door

Dec 9th, 2025

Beyond the open door, pristine snow
and at the threshold,
a scared girl
a bucket of hot water
a pail of ash.
Ruin it
purrs the cat at her feet.
Thaw it to mud.
Go back inside,
back to safety,
away from the cacophonous demands of
Freedom.
Who are you?
it begs
again.
What do you want?
The girl recoils
potential a tether from her ankle to
nothing.
She steps back,
a body’s length from the beginning,
waiting for a path to show.
Waiting for life to define itself.
One month down

Oct 25th, 2025
Well. That title did not feel good to type.

Feeling good about my progress over the past month is taking a lot of internal negotiation. I was ill for the first couple of weeks, and honestly, life has just taken some recovering from lately. From dodgy appliances to holes in the roof, to the fact that I am finally beginning to emerge from survival mode after five years of unhealthy work environments.

I met someone last week who spent a good deal of time trying to drill it into my brain that until I find some joy in life, my writing will never be my best work. And honestly, I can see the truth to it when I think about everything I’ve written to date. I write unhappy women becoming happy women, but their journey to becoming happy is long and convoluted and I don’t think I get the balance of realistic versus readable a lot of the time.

My next project is going to challenge that. My next project is about an absolute ray of sunshine coming to the rescue of a character who is having a rough time. It’s going to be a challenge for me, because I have to be that ray of sunshine in order to write them, but it’s an excellent opportunity for growth.

So. Back on topic: what have I achieved in month one of my writing sabbatical?
- I have re-drafted one entire manuscript.
- I went to my first writing festival in Bournemouth, and met to some really great people who had a lot of time for a panicking newbie and her emotional support boyfriend.
- I have learned that when an agent responds to your query saying they liked it but just not strongly enough to represent you, that is a good thing and not a sign that you’re doomed and also awful terrible and bad.
- I started writing something new, something just for me, just to dip my toe back in the water after a long time on land.
- I went to my first book club to learn how readers talk to eachother about books (I’ve never had book friends, I just fangirl away in my head)
- I have walked along beaches and felt the sun on my face and eaten a lot of desserts, and spent a lot of time with the people I love.
Goals for the next month are about consistency and balance. I have two weekends away booked in, I’ve accepted that my schedule is very much not 9-5, and I’m thinking I might give NaNoWriMo a try.

Chapter two, I’m here and I’m ready for you. Let’s go.
Permission slips

Oct 16th, 2025

I, at the age of thirty-three Earth years, asked my mum for permission to stay up late at night because that is when I get the most work done.

This is a pattern I find myself in a lot. I know what works for me personally, but I then don’t do it because it doesn’t match what society in general is doing. I then wonder why I feel inauthentic, and why I am no closer to achieving my goals.

I am a night owl. I am most productive by the light of a few tealight candles and a rocket-shaped lava lamp, while the rest of the world is sleeping peacefully and therefore not messing with my energy…as weird as it sounds, I can feel other people being awake nearby, and it makes me completely unable to relax. I then go to bed at 4am satisfied with what I’ve achieved, yet feeling guilty for having been up all night.

The alternative to this for me is going to bed at 11pm, tossing and turning until 2am anyway because sleeping at night is apparently not what I’m programmed for, and then still feeling guilty for staying up too late.

So now I’m embracing the darkness, I’m embracing the loss of morning, and I am feeing so much more energised.

I am giving myself permission to do things wrong. To do things in the wrong order, with the wrong tools, at the wrong time of day, because I am not everyone else, and the 9-5 world simply doesn’t work for me.

I couldn’t concentrate during the day today, so I didn’t force myself. I took myself down to the beach and collected washed-up bits of plastic from the sand (and got mauled by a very affectionate, very sandy French bulldog), and now I’m about to start a new story that I’m really excited to write.

If you’re reading this and you need permission to live life your own way, this is your permission, and I want to hear all about how much your life improves!

These are called nurdles, and collecting them is really soothing for me.
Check out https://www.nurdlehunt.org.uk/
Why do I write romance?

Oct 10th, 2025

Because I need it. Because I need to know that there’s hope. So I put all the pieces of me I don’t like into some characters, and then write a whole novel to prove to myself they’re still loveable.

I write my scars onto someone else’s skin, I write my insecurities into someone else’s mind. I write my history into someone else’s life and send them on a journey to discover that it doesn’t define them, and that they are free to change the course of their life whenever they want at the cost of only a little courage.

I write romance because it can take me anywhere I want to go, because love is everywhere. Love is in the darkest places and the brightest, it’s in kitchens and boardrooms and warzones, it won’t be contained and it won’t be told it doesn’t belong. Love is an unstoppable force that knows no borders, no boundaries, no legislation.

Writing romance has opened my world. Building stories takes interviews and research and international flights. It takes people watching and odd questions and asking my sister can she please sit next to me on this narrow flight of stairs to see if we both fit, and it makes for a really weird search history. It teaches me something every day, even if it is just how to spell “bureaucracy” (which is a frankly ridiculous word thank you very much France).

Even when the genre is not romance I find myself writing love stories. And I feel absolutely sure that dedicating my life to honouring love, in all its forms and disguises, in its darkness and its light, will be a life well-lived.
Lessons in combustion

Sep 26th, 2025

My job ended on Tuesday. I am not employed. And the fear is grabbing me by the ankle and dragging me underwater every few minutes.

So I’m starting small. I’m forgiving myself for having been ill for three weeks. I am doing basic admin, I am spending time with the people I love, and I am proofreading a chapter here and there.

I know that once I figure out how to ignite this fear and burn it for fuel, I am going to be unstoppable.

I know that this time, this time that I’ve worked so bloody hard to earn, is sacred. And I know that I will do it justice.

So today I am going to hug a lot of people and several dogs, and then my little sister (who has in fact been taller than me since I was two) is coming to show me how to Tiktok.

I’m gonna be okay.

…I just need someone to remind me that every forty seconds for the next six months.
Aaaand flop.

Sep 11th, 2025

I would say I have fallen at the first hurdle, but I haven’t even reached the first hurdle yet (unless you count the fact one of the people who has offered to read my manuscript has a son with the same name as the leading male, and, given that it is a romance novel, now I am resisting the impulse to ghost her for the rest of my life because oh god no).

I have stumbled in a pothole right after the whoever starts races said “go”, and the pothole is one I’m not entirely sure I want to talk about because it is my body. On Monday morning my body said no, and that was that. No to getting out of bed, no to walking to the bathroom, no to sitting in a position which might reasonably support laptop use. I have spent the time since then making poor decisions about how to use my energy and as a result the most productive activity I can cite from this week so far is renewing my travel insurance.

My body has functional neurological disorder. In very simplified terms, my brain has buggy software – it freezes, it crashes, it loads the program next to the one I wanted to open by accident, and god only knows where the hell it saves my files.

So this week, when I wanted to be ramping up and making progress, I have been planting pumpkins and fighting bats with a weaponised femur and silently cursing the 13-year-old who introduced me to Stardew Valley, and reminding myself that time spent resting is not wasted time.
Matching socks are overrated.

Sep 1st, 2025

Next on the list of entirely terrifying tasks in the course of getting a novel published is someone else actually reading it. It’s the goal, obviously. I want the whole world to read it, I want them to laugh and cry and smile at the end hugging it to their chests. But getting to that first reader took years.

The first time I gave a copy of something I wrote to a couple of people to read, I was so relieved when neither of them actually read it and I could just pull it back into my lair to quietly hoard for another two years. I did the same thing again last year – I sent a digital copy to two people, and almost immediately told them not to bother reading it because the brain gremlins insisted that it was illegible crap and needed work.

A year on, after doing almost no work to it in the end, I had a few copies printed and I gave one to a friend. He’s not my target audience at all, but that was better somehow, better because he can’t compare me to other writers of my genre. When he said he’d read 9 chapters already a day later, I panicked. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning re-reading my own work and finding typos and repeated words and dodgy punctuation, and things that Pages decided were excellent autocorrect amendments which made no grammatical sense whatsoever.

I then stayed up even longer trying to figure out how to stealthily get the draft manuscript back without him noticing, in the hope he’d forget it ever existed and would never know the shame of my making half a dozen errors in a beta draft.

And then I remembered: it is a draft, in the hands of its first ever reader. It is allowed to be imperfect, it is allowed to have a comma immediately after a full stop, and it is allowed to make me cringe just a little bit.

I have another three copies of this manuscript, with all the same errors, and I am going to hand them to readers warts and all, and only feel a little bit embarrassed about the fact that I spent so long deciding which colour shirt a character was wearing that I forgot to mention it was a shirt at all.

It’s my beloved child on its first day of school, and its socks don’t match. But I believe its merits are clear enough despite its flaws, and I’m standing by my weird little child. Even if I’m a little bit worried that the teachers will tell me off for teaching it to swear.
Plot Twist

Aug 29th, 2025

In a terrifying turn of events, I quit my job.

This is terrifying mostly because it was brave, and brave things feel scary to people who are not, as a general rule, brave. My place on the bravery scale can be summed up by the fact that I went to the World Bog Snorkelling Championships with my mum last week and literally hid behind her to avoid being splashed with bog water when someone swam by a bit too enthusiastically.

So yeah. Quitting my job with no new job = pretty bloody scary. But thankfully you’re here with me. And now I am going to confide in you the scariest bit of all: I quit my job because I have a dream to chase and I’m fed up of watching it run away. It is a dream so failable that I can hardly bear to admit that I’m bothering to chase it at all, but here we are.

My name is Amy Harwell, and I am a writer.

Now get your running shoes, because we’re chasing the bastard down.