From 'Hey Baby' to 'The Other Side'

It’s been 20 years since my first book was published, and I wanted to reflect on the long journey of being an author, as well as working in the world of stories.

My first book, Hey Baby, was a runaway riot of fun. I was 28 and the book was commissioned. I was a working journalist, and I just loved the process of writing it. In retrospect, I think I had my first psychiatric breakdown meeting that deadline. It could also have been too much coffee. But the book came out and I attended book talks, baby shows and did so much publicity. I was young and had a lot less to lose. The book was pretty hilarious, embarrassingly confessional and it flew. It was the early days of the ‘confessional memoir’ style of writing.

Then came Romance 101: Can your Relationship survive your kids (and other passion killers). I leaned back into my job as a journalist for this one and ‘researched it’.  It was well written, less funny and didn’t do as well.

Nonetheless, there were two books out there in the world carrying my name and I was in the world of books.

My journey again moved into journalism, magazines and radio news. But the world of books was always tugging me back. I edited a whole load of books, I taught romance writing workshops for a wonderful company in Johannesburg and then bought the franchise to teach courses in Cape Town. I started to mentor authors while still working as a journalist.  I wrote my first book for someone else (ghostwriting). That book was never released due to legal issues, but by then I had written three full length books, and I was getting a bit better at it.  It is the hardest work.

For the next decade, I moved deeper into working in books and with authors, with a parallel career as a journalist. Journalism was my first love, as you could move forward all the time, with a deep dive into a story and you file it and move onto the next one, and the next one. A jack of all trades and a seeker of truth.

Books were longer and slower.  Over those years, I ghostwrote a few more books, mostly for thought leaders or spiritual leaders. Some bombed. Others were so much fun and magic happened.

All the while my life was taking a different journey – a strange and winding path through my husband’s brain cancer, my own month-long near-death experience, fighting for my life, raising small kids, the death of my husband, then my own cancer diagnosis.  Still the wheels of writing turned. Authors came to my retreats and wanted to work with me. Stories surrounded me. I wrote them down.

In 2020 at the height of Covid I released my 3rd book Write your Book in 100 Days. This one was self-published.  Why? I used it for all my events and retreats, and my co-author Kate Emmerson and I knew we didn’t need a publisher to sell this one. We did re-print after re-print. Amazon was doing a fantastic job of getting it to all corners of the world.  And yes, it seems it was even big in Japan.

Finally, in 2022, I wrote another book about the madness and magic of my journey through near-death.  This one I put my own name on again. I cried the entire time I wrote it. The pain came rushing back into my body as I went through my diaries and journals, visited my old doctors, and got medical records.

Love and Above: A Journey into Shamanism, Coma and Joy came out in 2023. It was a wild ride, and still is. It flew across South Africa and then is slowly moved into other territories. I spoke at near-death experience conference, on podcasts and on radio shows around the world. It was hard as hell to talk about myself all the time, and about mystical experiences.  But as a result, so many stories came my way – people who too had died and come back, people who could talk to ‘the other side’, or travel there. These stories were too good to leave just hanging in the air, and so I wrote them down. The journalist again gathering people and stories.

Two years later, in late 2024, my latest book, The Other Side: Journeys into Mysticism, Magic, and Near-Death, came out. In the last six months since it was released, I have done well over 50 hours of radio interviews or podcasts. Some days, I do two daily interviews (and more recently in Dubai and India).  Authors are not great speakers, but we learn.

I think I have got a bit better at sharing my story and my life, both in person, on a stage and in writing. Despite being public, I am also very private, and you will see I only share a small and tight portion of my life journey in all these books and in public.

‘Share more on social media,’ people say. I do try, but it doesn’t thrill me.  I think writing a book is enough. I feel I have gathered my stories, made sense of them, taken the delicate time to tend to them, and then share them in a careful way.

Most of my time is spent supporting authors in writing their own stories and writing them well.

Anyway, thanks for following me along this long road, and reading this long post.

Have I made money from my books? I am so often asked this. Not yet.  But it has opened doors lined with gold, taken me on adventures and brought me the most incredible connections and love. I wouldn’t trade all the money for the hugs I get after a talk, or the messages I get from people who needed to hear my small story.

Somewhere, snuck in between all of this, I wrote a hot and steamy paranormal romance under another name. It has, as we say in the romance business, ‘ very high heat level’. This book has sold the best of all my books (so far).