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Behind the Scenes
Month by month updates & insights of SJ's World


July 2026 - Reminiscing
July has seen me successfully finish the first draft of the sequel to Finding the Lions! Adding in a scene is tricky, I find, as the story still needs to flow and past experience has taught me that if I stray too it leads to complications and massive rewriting of subsequent chapters. However I'm feeling confident that I essentially wrote what I did before I burnt the notebook by accident. Whilst that was going on I found myself thinking about my previous books particularly
3 days ago2 min read
June 2026 - Consequences
Practically everything we do has some sort of consequence. Sometimes the consequence is amazing, great, fulfilling and makes us feel great. Other times the consequence can mean heart ache, pain, bad feelings or having to redo work. This month I have been dealing with a particularly terminal consequence, burning a notebook as fuel thinking that I had typed it up! Leading up to that point, I was super excited, having converted my handwritten notes to text on my Remarkable p
Jul 12 min read
May 2026 - Conflicted Feelings
There’s something unsettling, yet addictively exciting about wanting something you’re not supposed to… I’m nearing the end of the first draft of the follow-on to Finding the Lions, and this story has taken me somewhere deeper than I expected and introduced a new point of view, Illena, adding to those from Dameria and Karik. This last section is seeing the characters cross the Kazakhstan desert, somewhere I have little knowledge about having never been there; the internet is a
Jun 102 min read
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