I'm a writer and mixed-media artist based in France. But before that, I was someone who kept hearing my own voice loudly tell me things before they happened. It hasn't gone away, it's just a lot quieter and I've simply learned to listen differently.

At fifteen, it said, "Don't go." I went anyway.

At twenty-four, it said, "He's going to leave you tonight." I walked through the front door to find my husband with his bags packed. He told me he was leaving.

In 2006, a new solicitor started where I worked. He was taking over my old office and my old job. As he walked past my new office on his first day, I heard it again. "You're going to marry him." I turned to my colleague and said, "Apparently I'm going to marry him." She laughed and said, "I'd throw a leg over him." We got married the following year.

Those weren't the only times. I've had many more experiences like these throughout my life.

In the middle of the fallout from my first marriage, I had a vivid vision of myself speaking to large audiences (of mainly women) about a book I had written. It made absolutely no sense. I was suddenly a single mother of two babies with no credentials. Why on earth would anyone want to read anything I'd written? So I did what made sense. I became a lawyer. And for about a decade, I tried to write "that book".

Then, during lockdown in 2020, I gave up trying to write it. I finally admitted defeat. My husband suggested I "write something just for fun." The idea for Since You've Been Gone arrived instantly: two lifelong best friends writing letters to each other. The names of the main characters came just as quickly, and I wrote the first draft in just two months.

Eventually, I pitched it to agents. Three requested the full manuscript. All three passed. Surprisingly, I was okay with that. Something about the book had never felt right to me. Not the story itself, but something I couldn't quite put my finger on. I knew I had to protect it, and especially the main character, Belle. I wasn't willing to tone her down to make her more acceptable.

I self-published the first edition under a pen name in 2023. Then in 2024, when the physical copies finally arrived, my best friend of forty-eight years, Shelley, had been diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, and my dad was losing his own battle with cancer. The book took a back seat.

In 2025, I lost my dad, Shelley, and my aunt within five months of each other.

About a month after Shelley died, I went to the cemetery before leaving Australia and asked her for a sign. As I drove out, Cher's "I Found Someone" came on the radio. Cher was one of Shelley's all-time favourite artists. Immediately afterwards came John Waite's "Missing You." Two completely different songs. One after the other. Both containing the same four words. "Since you've been gone." The title of my book. The one she never got to read.

It wasn't until about five months after Shelley died, when the signs and synchronicities became impossible for me to ignore, that I picked the book up again. Reading it after everything that had happened, I finally understood the feeling I'd had all along. I had to live the very experiences the story explores before I could understand why I'd been called to write it.

So now I'm releasing it under my own name. For Dad. For Shelley and for all of our loved ones who have crossed over and are still trying to get our attention. And for everyone who is still talking to someone who died.