Seize the day this New Year

My husband and I were living in Glasgow at the time. I was doing a Masters and he was starting out as a screenwriter. I had dreams of writing a novel but it wasn’t making much progress. I was aware that I was frittering away my time. We decided that we needed to move to a different city which might give us a fun, bold experience. But we couldn’t decide where to go. First we thought we should move to London, and put an offer on a flat that neither of us really liked. While that was going through we thought maybe we should give Los Angeles a try. So we went out there instead, and had a great time, but were still unsure. Although I’d grown up in London, our family summers were spent in Dorset. My dream was always that we might eventually be able to afford a weekend house there. One day we were in the car park of Ralphs, a grocery store in Beverly Hills, when my husband turned to me and said: “There is another choice. Why are we waiting until we’re 65 and retired, why don’t we just move to Dorset now?” To me this was a terrifying, exhilarating idea – that we could leap-frog over everything else and get to the end-point straight away. We pulled out of the London flat, found a cottage in Dorset, and moved. That leap of faith was terrifying. I remember thinking, ‘if things go wrong and I don’t write this novel, what will I do? There’s nothing here.’ But somehow it didn’t go wrong. The move triggered a creative surge in both of us. Somehow, going for walks in the fields around my house, I discovered that I think at a walking pace, and I literally paced out the plot for my first novel. And with my latest novel I discovered a funny thing, that the nostalgia of remembering the city life I left behind, that occasional yearning, gives me the detail I need to write about it. ‘The Gallery of Vanished Husbands’ by Natasha Solomons is published by Sceptre, £14.99 For more tips, stories and advice on making 2014 great, read the rest of our New Year, new beginning series, click here.  –