Why I Wrote Landing Home

The first hint came when I was in Year Nine.

My English teacher told me she believed I had a talent for writing and encouraged me to consider doing more of it. I remember the comment staying with me, but at the time I had no idea what to do with it.

So I didn’t do much at all.

Life moved on. Work, family, responsibilities, interests, the usual turns we don’t necessarily see coming. More than thirty years passed before writing found its way back into my awareness.

By then, I’d become increasingly interested in a different kind of question: not simply what I was capable of doing, but what felt genuinely true for me to do.

Through a period of deeper intuitive exploration, writing began to emerge as one of the ways my heart seemed naturally inclined to express itself.

I didn’t know whether I was any good at it.

I knew even less about writing a novel.

But it felt important enough to begin.

A story that kept returning

Landing Home didn’t arrive fully formed.

There wasn’t a morning when I woke with the plot neatly assembled, the characters waiting in line, and some certainty that I was meant to write a book.

It was much quieter than that.

Initially, an overarching theme came into view. Who are we beneath the things we’ve learned to believe about ourselves? What happens when the explanations we’ve relied upon stop being enough? What does it mean to come home—not to a place, necessarily, but to something more fundamental within ourselves?

I found myself increasingly interested in those questions, but not in answering them for anyone.

That distinction became important.

Other than a sense of the main character, it wasn’t until I began writing that the ideas appeared, the characters began taking shape, and certain questions kept returning.

I’ve spent much of my working life around personal development, creativity and conversations about how people understand themselves and the lives they create. But fiction offered something different. It allowed me to explore ideas without turning them into lessons.

A character could make a choice and live with what followed.

Someone could believe something fiercely and later discover they’d been wrong.

A question could remain a question.

That freedom appealed to me.

So did the possibility that a reader might encounter something in the story that meant something entirely different to them than it did to me.

Learning to tell it well

Having a story I wanted to tell turned out to be very different from knowing how to tell it.

That became the real apprenticeship.

I began studying the mechanics of writing more seriously—sentences, dialogue, point of view, pacing, scene construction, paragraph rhythm, what to reveal, what to leave alone.

There were times I’d spend far longer examining a paragraph than it had taken to write the original page.

Not because I wanted the prose to become clever.

Mostly, I was trying to get myself out of its way.

I began noticing how easily explanation could flatten something the scene had already made clear. How a line of dialogue could become more interesting when a character didn’t say precisely what they meant. How an emotional moment often became stronger when I stopped one sentence earlier—sometimes several sentences.

Writing gradually became less about adding and more about listening.

That surprised me.

So did how much I came to love the process.

What began as an attempt to honour an old, persistent sense that writing belonged somewhere in my life slowly became something I wanted to understand more deeply and practise for many years to come.

Why this story?

Of all the things I might have written, I sometimes wonder why Landing Home was the one that stayed.

I think part of the answer is Tyler and Bel.

They enter the story from very different worlds, but both are trying, in their own ways, to understand where they belong.

Tyler senses there is more to life than what he can explain, while carrying fears and beliefs that continually reduce what seems possible for him.

Bel is far more pragmatic. Her world has taught her to survive, pay attention and rely on herself. She doesn’t have much use for ideas that can’t prove themselves in the reality in front of her.

I liked the tension between those ways of being.

I also liked the idea that neither needed to be entirely right.

As the story grew, I found myself less interested in providing answers and more interested in what happens when certainty begins to loosen.

A strange experience.

An unexpected person.

A coincidence that seems a little too precise.

A moment when the world we thought we understood develops a crack.

Not enough to tell us what’s on the other side.

Just enough to make us curious.

That, perhaps more than anything, became the territory I wanted Landing Home to explore.

Finding its way home

The path to finishing the book wasn’t particularly straight.

There were long periods of learning, rewriting and questioning. A publishing path I once expected the book to follow disappeared. At the time, that felt like a considerable setback.

Eventually, it became something else.

I began taking greater ownership of the work—of the book itself, of the publishing process, and of the kind of creative life I wanted to build around it.

Somewhere along the way, the title Landing Home began to feel increasingly appropriate for reasons I hadn’t anticipated when I first chose it.

The book had its own journey home.

And perhaps I did too.

I don’t know that I can reduce why I wrote Landing Home to a single reason.

I wrote it because the story kept returning.

Because Tyler and Bel wouldn’t quite leave me alone.

Because there were questions I wanted to spend time inside without needing to resolve them.

And because, more than thirty years after a teacher first suggested that writing might be something worth pursuing, I finally became curious enough to find out.