Ideas hit me with the regularity of my alarm clock. I start them and I drop them. With every change in the season, I have joined Salsa dancing lessons at the local community centre, only to drop out of them after five weeks. I have enrolled in more French classes than Woody Allen has made films. Yet, for all of my falling in and out of grand ideas, I have seen one or two of them to their full completion. This happened with writing my memoir.

Many of us think about writing the grand tome, the one that will jostle for shelf space with J.K. Rowling at the bookshop. I had images of the front cover even before I had plotted out the story line. Writing my ‘book’ had sat in the back conscious of my mind for many years. One morning, while I was muddling through another mini-crisis that had interrupted my autistic daughter’s home programme, I thought that my time had come to write it all down. I had a story to tell.

So off I went with the speed of a wombat crawling through the snow. The words lingered slowly in my thoughts; the sentences had the twisted and tangled resonance of a cracked window screen. The first chapter took three months to write and, even then, it was re-written a year later in the matter of two hours. The first lesson I learnt in writing my memoir is to have a clear structure of the story line.

In this puzzle of writing, just as mysterious as understanding my daughter’s autism, I kept going. Sometimes the words came naturally, whizzing and zipping in abundance, and then the ideas came to a screeching halt.

I started to talk about writing my memoir. The disarming part is that when you are unpublished, many people don’t believe that you will ever get published. I was treated with a listless curiosity, as if I was stepping out on a treacherous journey of no return. ‘Another wannabe writer,’ I could almost hear them whisper to themselves with a wearisome voice.

The next lesson I learnt was to engage an editor. We had moved to Pittwater in Sydney, renting a house overlooking Refuge Bay. I had written a good chunk of my memoir by now but I wasn’t sure if it was worthy of publication. I was so embroiled in my own tunnel of thoughts that I couldn’t see the good sentences for the bad ones. And I was getting stuck on the bad ones. My editor didn’t use a red pen but I could almost see her red markings on the computer screen when she returned my manuscript by email. Her feedback was unobtrusive, poignant, and had the effect of liberating my thoughts. Within six months, I had finished the book.

Most of my published book was written while living in Pittwater. Much of my earlier work, jotted down while living in the Middle East, was discarded. I wonder if the magical qualities of the Pittwater life helped with my progress or whether I had sorted out my writer’s angst by the time we had moved back home.

Our rented bungalow, typical of the plantation homes in Pittwater, poked out of the hills that line Refuge Bay. Save for the decks, it was mostly hidden under a wild, bushy undergrowth. Across my computer screen, I looked onto sailing boats bobbing with the tides. I enjoyed these distractions. The cockatoos, basking in the knowledge that they had found an audience in me, would sway like pendulums in the gully below our house. They watched me as much as I watched them. There is no beauty in the call of the cockatoo but it had an edifying effect on my writing. My ideas and sentences rolled in with the surge of their screeches. Writing in this environment was safe and secure, a refuge from the swings and tides of caring for a severely autistic girl. I was no longer muddling about in my own inertia.

We left Pittwater at the end of last year and my book was published in May this year. I miss Pittwater with the longing of a paradise found and lost. We return on weekend breaks, having moved closer to the city of Sydney, but I often dream when we will return again for good.