About Me — Heather McLeod. Ex-farmer, mom, widow & mystery writer
By: Heather Mcleod
Tags: About Me, Widow, Writer, Introduction, Grief

About Me — Heather McLeod

Ex-farmer, mom, widow & mystery writer

I’m raising my son in the small mountain town where I grew up.

I wanted to write a novel, but 92,000 words is an intimidating goal. My husband, Brock, did the math and asked if I could write 252 words per day for a year. “Of course I can,” I said. “Easy peasy.”

So I made myself write at least 252 words every day, not allowing myself to go to bed until I’d met my quota. That’s how I finished my first mystery novel, One for the Raven.

Brock was living with stage four (terminal) kidney cancer at the time. Loving and taking care of a man who is dying, who is declining physically and mentally, is not an experience I expected to have at age 36.

We were supposed to be farming. We’d just signed a lease for 65 more acres of land: we were poised to become Whole Foods’ largest supplier of certified organic vegetables on Vancouver Island. We had 24 employees, two tractors, and a year-old son.

Brock and our son, with 65 acres of potential.

But Brock started having afternoon naps and a mysterious gut pain. Within a year, we’d sold the farm and tractors and “retired” to a rented duplex downtown.

My husband had researched and saved for years to buy customized farming machines, but he never got to use them. The day I watched them being loaded onto a buyer’s trailer was when it hit me: our planned life was over.

We lived in limbo for two more years, making the most of every day. We road-tripped across Canada with our 2.5-year-old son, from the Pacific Ocean to across Newfoundland and back. We had driftwood campfires on the beaches of Tofino, Brock’s favourite place, and spent time with family and friends.

One of many West Coast beach holidays.

There was much for me to write about. These stories began as brief diary entries on an anonymous blog: they are now personal essays on Medium.

Brock died on September 20, 2017. Two months later, my son and I moved to my hometown in the Rocky mountains of British Columbia. I was a zombie on autopilot.

On the one-year anniversary of Brock’s death, something snapped and I didn’t stop moving for months: in a single day I would go to the gym, climb a mountain, then sweat through a kickboxing class. I’d put my son to bed and then run around the block. I couldn’t get enough adrenaline. A coach told me: “You’re stronger than you think you are.”

Me, on the top of yet another mountain.

That winter, I made friends with a man who is now my boyfriend. We’ll celebrate two years together in February. We live a five minute drive apart, each with our own children, but have family camping adventures and dinners and spend time together as much as we can.

In 2020, I started to write my second mystery novel. I get two to three hours every weekday to write. It’s a better book than my first. I’ve studied hard: plot, suspense, pacing, tension. I started a Patreon community of “aiders and abetters” with a book club on Facebook, where I share draft chapters with my patrons and they critique them. We brainstorm how to kidnap characters. They find my typos.

I’m grateful to Medium, and its readers: living in a small town of 3,900 people, it’s hard to feel heard. Here, my stories have reached tens of thousands: people who are caregiving or grieving for their own loved ones. People with their own stories to tell.

My most-read Medium story, “How Brains Process the Death of a Loved One,” was published by Human Parts and has been read by over 26,000 people.

The story I’d like parents to read is “Dads of Boys Age 6-13: Your Time Has Come,” which was published by P.S. I Love You.

I will always have stories to tell. If you’d like to share this adventure with me, you can join me on Instagram, subscribe to my monthly newsletter, follow me on Medium and subscribe to my stories, or even become my patron on Patreon and join our book club.

Thank you for reading.