Well, the time has passed quickly since Dear Billie was published. It has been an amazing journey and so many wonderful stories have been shared with me. That has been the greatest pleasure of all―hearing from others what the World War experiences of their loved ones were. What is so important is remembering them and the sacrifices they made for us.

In the intervening years, new ideas came to me and I returned to my love of fiction writing. My new novel, A Door in the Middle of Nowhere, was both difficult and rewarding to write. As Maddie Murphy addressed the challenges and traumas in her life, I, in turn, addressed some of my own. For me, that is the purpose of writing.

We humans are an amazing bunch! We move through life never knowing what the future is going to bring or the universe is going to throw at us. For Maddie, she faced challenges to her sanity, her marriage, her sense of self. Not something she chose consciously, but as events unfolded in her fictional town of Lockston Brook and her visit home to Bell Island, Maddie was confronted by an unresolved past and the reasons for her faltering marriage. And the choice of acquiescing as she has often done or challenging her perceptions. In the end, she chose courage in the face of an uncertain future. Better than the certainty of the past.

Sometimes, we need to step out of our comfort zone if we are to know what it is to be a fully active participant in our own lives. As mentioned in the Author’s Note at the end of A Door in the Middle of Nowhere, reliving the emotions I felt on the day I was sexually assaulted was difficult. Having discussed that event with a counselor years ago, I deceived myself into believing that it was safely in the past. While writing A Door in the Middle of Nowhere, the emotions broadsided me at unexpected times and in unexpected ways. I found myself sitting in my kitchen late one afternoon reliving those moments when ‘no’ meant nothing to my attacker and experiencing the devastating emotions of being treated as a ‘thing’. The emotions settled and passed but the memory is clearer now. Pain and suffering were the legacy but not a permanent one.

Publishing this book means I have taken a stand and spoken out about crimes that continue to be committed to this day. On victims like myself and so many others. I hope by making the story fictional, it is more accessible to those who know firsthand what this experience is like. The storyline wasn’t only drawn from my own experience but also from others I have known who were victims as well: an eight-year-old friend who was being molested by her sixteen-yar-old brother when neither of us was old enough to understand what his actions meant; a friend’s daughter who was raped by her uncle and suffered her family wanting to bury it; a man raped as a child by someone he thought he could trust. The victims are many, and many, like me, never report it or ever receive any kind of justice.

But we can move on. It took me years but I did. Going forward Maddie, Gerome and Samantha will be stronger. Because they made a choice. We may need help and support in making that choice and we should seek it because we are worth it. Yet, in the end, it is our own indomitable courage that gets us there. That courage exists in all of us even if we often can’t feel it.