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The scariest part of Ghost of a Marriage was the first word.

It had been roughly three and a half years since my wife had left me before I sat down to write the book, and in that time I’d barely written an original word. I mean, I’d written — written for video games, written for tabletop RPGs, even written some tie-in fiction — but for three years I’d been unable to churn out a single original piece. In the months preceding sitting down to write the novel, I’d managed to squeeze out a single, very short story, but that was it, and I was really questioning my future as a writer.

So I decided to confront the elephant in the room. I would attempt to write a novel drawing on my recent experience, on the heartbreak I’d felt, and see what supernatural elements I could weave into that.

And then I sat there for weeks before I was able to start. I knew that I wanted to write about a disintegrating marriage, about the effects when one partner is ready to move on and the other isn’t. I knew that it would be a ghost story, for what are ghosts but memories, and I was still living in mine far too much at the time. And I knew that my protagonists was in for a rough time, but I was prepared for that. This wasn’t going to be a stroll in the park for me, so why should he get off easy?

As a result, I forced myself to dive back into the emotions I’d experienced at the time. Three and a half years is a long time, plenty of time for emotional scar tissue to build up. Plenty of time for people to move on, in many cases, but there I was, trapped in the amber of my feelings, and the only way to break free would be to live it all again as I wrote the book.

Which left me sifting through my memories for the moments of particular vibrancy, of particular pain. Soft-pedaling things wasn’t going to lead anywhere. Taking it easy wouldn’t lead to creative catharsis. I needed to probe at the heart of things, tear away the scars and poke at the tender, unhealed feelings underneath.

That was when I remembered the moment that, in its own way, had hurt the most. Not the request for a divorce, not the farewell, but a simple bit of a day that in its own way had dug deep. I’d been writing in my office, working feverishly on the tie-in novel I was writing for the Ghost Recon video game, when I heard a sound coming from the bedroom. It was a grotesque noise, ripping and tearing and moaning all at once, and I went to see what it was.

It was shrink wrap, and my ex-wife was neatly wrapping up a pile of her belongings. She looked at me, I looked away and retreated to my office, and the noise started again. If I’d been smart, I would have vacated the house until she was done. But I wasn’t smart, and I thought I was stronger than I was, and so I sat there and typed a few words while listening to the plastic dying screams of my marriage from down the hall.

That was it. That moment, that sound, that feeling of helplessness — that was the key I needed. And so I wrote the first words of Ghost of a Marriage: “Heartbreak is the sound of shrink wrap coming from your bedroom.”

I won’t say the rest of it was easy. I dug deep on a lot of feelings and came to a lot of realizations, not all of them terribly complimentary to me, as I wrote the book. I got stuck 45K words in and had to put it down for a month while my subconscious scrambled for a way to get me out of the corner I’d written myself into. I had to keep going back to that well, to that awful sound and everything it meant, and eventually I emerged with a complete manuscript.

But I won’t lie. Facing that blank page and all of its implications was terrifying. That I was finally able to confront and transcend it was the hardest thing I’ve ever done as a writer, and it scared the hell out of me while I was attempting to do it.

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