The Strange Moment When a Book Leaves Your Laptop

Today a slightly strange thing has happened.

A story that has spent months living quietly on my laptop has officially left the building.

Van Life with Benefits is out in the world.

This part of publishing always feels a bit surreal. For months it’s just you and the characters.

They exist in your head, on your screen, in notes scribbled in the margins of notebooks. You spend your days thinking about them, writing scenes, rewriting scenes, deleting scenes, and occasionally staring at the ceiling wondering why a fictional person refuses to cooperate with the plot you carefully planned.

Then one day… the book is finished.

And suddenly those characters don’t belong only to you anymore.

Readers start meeting them, laughing with them, and slowly becoming friends with them.

This book in particular was a joy to write, largely because the characters turned up fully formed and immediately started causing trouble.

Lara arrived first. Very organised, slightly burnt out, and determined to take three weeks off in a campervan with a beautifully planned itinerary.

Then Jesse appeared. Barefoot. Relaxed. And clearly not someone who believes very strongly in planning.

Unsurprisingly, putting those two people in a campervan together created exactly the kind of chaos I hoped it would.

The story takes them on a road trip up the Western Australian coast, a part of the world I love writing about. Long roads, big skies, small coastal towns, and the kind of journeys where things rarely go exactly the way you planned.

Which, in Lara’s case, turns out to be the whole point.

Of course, road trips aren’t just about the people in the van. They’re about the people you meet along the way. The café owner who knows everyone’s business, the friend who delivers slightly blunt advice, the stranger who appears at exactly the right moment with a story or a laugh.

Those characters were some of my favourite to write, because they’re the ones who make a journey feel real.

So today I’m doing the slightly strange thing writers do when a book is finished: letting them all go off and have their adventures in other people’s imaginations. After spending so much time with them, it’s a bit like waving goodbye as they head off on their own journey, and hoping readers enjoy meeting them as much as I enjoyed writing them.

With gratitude,

Sarah

Van Life with Benefits is now available wherever you buy your e-books.

*UPDATE: Van Life with Benefits is also now available as paperback on Amazon!

Grab your copy here

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