Why I Took Such a Long Break From Carrero

I’ve been thinking a lot about Carrero lately. Not just about where the series is going next, but about where it came from, what it meant to me when I first started writing it, and why, after nine books, I needed to walk away from it for a while. I never really explained why or what my plan was for the future of Carrero. The truth is, I originally wrote Carrero as therapy.

I had always written when I was younger. Stories came naturally to me, and I had even written a romance novel before I was fourteen. Somewhere along the way, life happened, and I veered away from that path. Writing stopped being something I did, and for a long time I didn’t really think about going back to it. When I eventually did, it was for entirely selfish reasons.

I am a survivor of abuse, and at that point in my life I was still carrying a lot of scars from my past. I have PTSD; I had spent years in therapy that never seemed to get me where I needed to be, and there were things inside my head that I simply didn’t know what to do with. Around that time, I was inspired by Fifty Shades of Grey, particularly the idea of focusing on a broken, abused character and exploring how their past shaped the person they became. It wasn’t simply the abuse itself that interested me. It was everything that came afterward. How does it affect the way you love? How you trust? Even your sexual preference and control. How you react when someone gets too close? How you see yourself? How much of the person you become is built around surviving what somebody else did to you? That struck something very personal in me, and I went back to writing.

Somewhere in the back of my head, I could hear my therapist saying, ‘I told you so many times that writing can help in ways you will never understand until you try it.’ I had always rebuffed it as ‘too laborious…too boring.’ I think I was merely hiding from writing a diary that could wound me and expose it all. So falling into a fake version of truths I could jumble up, hide and blend was the safer option.

Carrero became a place where I could put it all. I poured my scars into those books. I took pieces of people who had hurt me and turned them into villains. I took memories, fears, behaviours and emotions that I hadn’t known how to process and handed them to characters who could scream, cry, fight, make terrible decisions, fall apart, fall in love and eventually find their way through them. Sometimes a character who swallowed them down and gave the world an emotionless facade…like I had done for years. My scars exist not just in the women of Carrero. But the men too. And I am closer to Alexi than you could ever know. For nine books, I unpacked things I had carried for years.

By the time I reached the end of those original books, something in me had changed. I felt as though I had finally closed chapters of my own life that had stayed open for far too long. In a strange way, Carrero had managed to do something that years of therapy hadn’t quite been able to do. Writing those books gave me somewhere safe to look at things I had spent years trying not to look at, and somewhere along the way, I healed. The problem was that once I had healed, I didn’t really know how to keep writing Carrero. And I had no desire to at that point. Because closing a door on something that has fully consumed your entire life is not that easy to open again. To readers, they are books and stories…to me, they are parts of my past and public wounds.

The series was so closely connected to those wounds that continuing with it felt as though I would have to keep digging them back up. I didn’t want to live there anymore. I had finally managed to move forward, and I think part of me believed Carrero belonged to the version of myself I had left behind. So I stepped away. I explored standalone stories. I wrote about other things and gradually moved towards subjects that weren’t so heavily rooted in abuse. I gave myself permission to write characters whose problems came from somewhere else, and I think I needed that distance more than I understood at the time.

Now I’m coming back to Carrero with a very different heart and in a much better place mentally than the woman who originally sat down and started writing those books. For a long time, I think that was exactly what made returning so difficult. I still wanted Carrero to live, but I didn’t want to become that woman again just so I could write it. Then I realised I don’t have to.

Carrero gave me something when I desperately needed it. It became my balm, my therapy and eventually part of my healing. It also brought readers into my life who recognised some of those scars because they carried their own versions of them. That connection has always meant more to me than I can properly put into words. Your emails are still, to this day, my most precious keepsakes. I never want to erase what Carrero was or where it came from, but I also don’t think I need to keep hurting my characters in the same ways just to make something feel like Carrero.

The original books were heavily shaped by childhood abuse and by women living with the consequences of what had been done to them. That will always be part of the foundations of this series. Emma, Sophie, and Cam were shaped by their experiences, and when I wrote them, pieces of me were scattered through all three. I was probably a strange mishmash of those women at the time because I was writing from where I was emotionally then. I was also a little bit of Alexi…okay, maybe a whole lot of Alexi. Those versions of me are long in the past now.

Women struggle for a million different reasons, and not every scar comes from abuse. We have insecurities, grief, complicated families, expectations, ambitions, mistakes, fears, relationship baggage, identity struggles, and all the ridiculous things life throws at us. We can be strong and still be a mess about something. We can be happy and still have things we need to work through. We can be healed without suddenly becoming perfectly functioning human beings. That is where I want Carrero to go now.

Actually, I think Rachel is probably the closest I have ever come to writing a woman who resembles the person I am today. She isn’t me, obviously, but her personality, humour and outlook on life feel very familiar. She’s a Saggy, she’s fiery, she’s funny, and there are definitely moments when I’m writing her that I know exactly where THAT came from. I am all of the above. She’s a fiery Texan, and I’m a fiery Scots girl, so honestly, how different can we really be? 😂 I think we share quite a lot.

Even the dynamic with her man makes me laugh because he’s a Capricorn. So is mine. That whole cold meets hot thing is very real in my life. The fire meeting the cooler, more controlled personality, the differences in how you react to things, the push and pull and the humour that comes from being wired completely differently is something I don’t have to reach very far to understand. There are parts of our past relationship where I truly felt like I hated him. he too has a tendency to close up, use distance to avoid sharing problems, and like Rachel, I had to learn to change that.

Rachel feels like a reflection of where I am now in a way the original women reflected where I was then. Emma, Sophie, and Cam carried pieces of the woman who was still trying to understand and heal from her past. Rachel has little flashes of the woman who came out the other side of it. And I think that was the piece I had been missing.

Carrero doesn’t have to stay where it started just because that is where it was born. The women who come next don’t all need the same histories or the same scars. Their battles can look completely different while still giving me all the emotion, chaos, romance, family, loyalty, heartbreak, humour and ridiculously infuriating Carrero men that made me love this world in the first place. Carrero can grow with me.

I’m not the woman I was when I wrote Book One, and I don’t want to pretend that I am. I’m not stuck in that part of my past anymore, so the series that helped me get out of it shouldn’t be stuck there either. Carrero began with scars, and those scars will always be part of its history. I will always be grateful for what writing those stories gave me and for every reader who saw something of themselves in those women. But healing means moving forward, and maybe Carrero coming back was never supposed to be about returning to the past.

Maybe it was about finally taking Carrero with me.

So here we are with a fresh new trilogy now fully released and, in a way, a breath of fresh air for me. Rachel helped me step out of Carrero of the past and start Carrero of the future. I have many new trilogies planned and would love for you all to keep coming with me.