Six months from daydreams to second place

Six months ago, I began writing because I thought capturing my daydreams might help me unwind alongside an intense career and life as a mum of three. The plan was simply to give the ideas somewhere to go. Instead, writing became another special interest.

I began devouring books, podcasts and courses on storytelling, experimenting with every new technique that caught my attention. Somewhere within all that curiosity, I completed my first manuscript. Now, its opening chapter has placed second in a First Chapter competition.

I submitted the novel as Fate of Desire and Decay, although it has since acquired the new title The Haze Between Us. The story grew from my fascination with fungi, another special interest that has spread throughout both my imagination and our home with suitably fungal persistence.

The Haze Between Us' protagonist, Avery, has epilepsy. Her seizures were informed partly by how my son’s manifest, although Avery’s experience and the wider story remain entirely fictional. Writing her allowed me to explore how frightening it would feel to mistrust your own perception while discovering that other people have been relying upon that uncertainty.

I have always loved conspiracies, particularly those that make a character question whether the world around them has been deliberately constructed. The Haze Between Us follows a hidden fae society that survives by conditioning humans against seeing it. In my head, it brings the reality-questioning conspiracy of The Matrix into the world of dangerous fae politics, with fungi threaded through the world beneath both.

You can read the chapter of The Haze Between Us here.

Much of the pleasure of writing lies in the craft itself. I love exploring how structure alters a story and am currently experimenting with spiral structure in a separate horror project. Research sends me down endless trails, from detailed character creation to trying unfamiliar hobbies because I want to understand how something feels before I write it.

Dialogue has become a particular obsession. My husband reads scenes aloud with me so I can hear when an exchange feels natural and when the writing begins showing its workings. I want dialogue to carry more than conversation: shifting the pressure within a scene, revealing what a character would rather conceal and exploring potential to foreshadow.

That approach shaped the opening of The Haze Between Us. When writing a first chapter, I consider what the reader needs to understand alongside the questions I want forming in their mind. Once the full chapter exists, I cut backwards until the story begins as close to the action as possible while retaining enough context for the reader to care.

Every exchange should change something, however subtly. By the final line, I want the reader to feel an urgent question taking hold and drawing them deeper into the story.

Coming second has meant a great deal so early in my writing journey. The daydreams I began recording as an escape have become a manuscript, an evolving understanding of craft and far more ideas than I could possibly write at once. My scrap pads are already full of sparks waiting for their turn.

You can follow my journey on Instagram at @openlybeth, where I share my life as an unpublished author, the inspirations behind my stories and my attempts to acquire new hobbies in the name of research. I especially love receiving book recommendations or discovering another research trail I can disappear down.