THE STRONGEST PULL

In June 2025 I gave notice at work.

I was a support worker. Had been for years. The day-to-day reality of that role — and I mean the actual reality, not the version that looks good on a job description — was spending my working days and sometimes my nights alongside some of the most vulnerable people you'll encounter. People with housing needs. People in need of housing. Addiction needs. Mental health needs. People quite literally on the street. People in crisis at two in the morning who needed someone steady beside them.

It was important work. It was also exhausting in a way that doesn't clock off when you do.

I was also trying to write my second novel.

I'd finished my debut. It had taught me something I hadn't known before. That I could do it.

That whatever this thing is.

So, I started a second novel. The Barn Door Stayed Closed.

It's written in the first-person voice of a twelve-year-old boy named Alex. He lives on a farm. His world is stone walls, open fields, lambing sheds before dawn, his grandfather teaching him to read frost patterns. It's a world as far from concrete and crisis as it's possible to get.

And I was going home after twelve-hour shifts — sometimes longer, sometimes through the night — sitting down at my desk, and trying to find him. I couldn't. Not properly. Not the way he needed to be found.

The gap between where I'd been all day and where Alex lived was too wide to cross in the space between parking the car and opening the laptop.

I hit a wall. Creatively and in every other sense. So, I made a decision. I couldn't afford the trip really. But I also couldn't afford not to.

The Barn Door Stayed Closed was written across two continents.

It started at my desk in Newport, Wales. Then it continued where ‘those who know’ call ‘the centre of the universe’, which is actually a small village called Wakefield, Quebec. I can’t thank the beautiful people I met and who welcomed me to their very special community.

Some pages were written in hotel rooms in Montreal. Some in Toronto (Oasis were playing so it would have been rude not to attend). Some in Banff, with the Rocky Mountains outside the window.

Then Chicago. Then New York. A few pages written on a roof terrace with the Empire State Building visible and twelve-year-old Alex on a Welsh farm completely occupying my mind.

And then Paxton, Illinois. A small town on flat open land in the middle of America's heartland. A friend's veranda. Then back to Canada. Then home to Wales.

It makes me smile.

The Rocky Mountains. The Empire State Building. The flat infinite land of Central Illinois. Montreal. Toronto. The Gatineau River at dusk.

And through every single mile of it — a twelve-year-old boy on a farm in the United Kingdom who never once left my head.

Not for a day. Not for an hour. Alex was always there. Waiting patiently in his lambing shed while I stood at the top of the Empire State Building. Sitting quietly on his grandfather's tractor while the Rockies did their best to distract me. Pulling on his wellingtons in the dark while I sat on a veranda in Illinois watching the flat land go gold in the evening light.

That's what the strongest pull feels like. It doesn't care where you are. It doesn't care how spectacular the view is. It just waits. And pulls.

The Barn Door Stayed Closed came home with me.

Finished. Complete. A novel that had crossed an ocean and a continent and never once left a British farm.

I've thought a lot since then about what that trip actually was.

It wasn't a holiday. It wasn't running away. It wasn't self-indulgence, though I'm aware it could look that way and I'm aware that not everyone can do what I did. Circumstance matters. Timing matters. I'm not suggesting everyone books a flight when the writing gets hard.

What I'm saying is this.

If there is a thing inside you — if you're a writer, if you're a maker of any kind — that pulls. Quietly at first. Then less quietly. It doesn't care about your shifts or your bank balance or the gap between where you've been all day and where the work needs you to go. It just pulls.

I had spent a few years, painful years, honest years, years that cost me more than I'll write here — not listening to that pull properly. Getting to it when I could. Fitting it in around everything else.

That trip was the first time I said no. This comes first. For these weeks this is the only thing.

That decision changed everything.

Not immediately. Not in any way I could have predicted sitting on a chair on the Gatineau River in the summer of 2025.

But The Barn Door Stayed Closed was finished. And finishing it gave me the confidence to start again. And starting again led to a cemetery in County Cork where a memorial inscription stopped me in my tracks and a novel arrived in twenty-minutes while my mother's legs got tired.

And that novel — Clonfert — is the reason I'm writing this blog. The reason I'm going the long way round this time. The reason I'm sitting here in June 2026 building a submission package for literary agents instead of uploading a file to Amazon KDP.

One decision. Wales to Canada to America and back again.

I couldn't afford it really.

Turns out I couldn't afford not to.

Stephen Jaques is the author of Bonkas, The Barn Door Stayed Closed, and Clonfert — currently seeking traditional publication. Follow the journey at Testing My Patience.