ShortBookandScribes #GuestPost by Linda MacDonald – How Meeting Lydia Came to Be

Posted on 19th January 2026 By Nicola

A rare guest post on my blog today. Linda MacDonald got in touch and asked if I would like to post about How Meeting Lydia Came to Be. Meeting Lydia was her debut book which I reviewed in 2018 followed by A Meeting of a Different Kind and The Alone Alternative and then The Man in the Needlecord Jacket, the fourth book but which I actually reviewed first, in 2017. The books are linked but can be read as standalone stories.

Linda has now made the eBook of Meeting Lydia available again – find it here – hence the post about how the book came to be.

Plans are afoot to make the other books available as eBooks again too, leading up to the release of book five, called The Tango Chain, which will feature Taryn from A Meeting of a Different Kind and Edward’s daughter, Rachel, who pops up in all the books, Edward being one of the main characters in Meeting Lydia.

Linda also wrote one of my most viewed posts about Psychological Abuse: Another Shade of Grey.

Hope you enjoy reading the guest post and maybe decide to read Meeting Lydia for yourself.

How Meeting Lydia came to Be by Linda MacDonald

If it wasn’t for a life changing event in 2009, Meeting Lydia would probably remain unpublished. This is the story of how it came to be.

When I was five, just like Marianne in Meeting Lydia, I was sent to a boys’ prep school. Sometimes I was the only girl in the class and looking back, it is no surprise that I was bullied.

As I grew up, I loved to write and I knew my early experiences could be used to inspire some unique scenes in a novel, but I didn’t have a plot. Instead, I pursued a teaching career, practised my writing skills on many different projects, and all the while in the background, behind a hazy curtain through which I couldn’t quite reach, the bullying theme still whispered.

In 2001, Friends Reunited appeared as the first of the major social networking sites. I found the only boy in the class who never bullied me and decided to write to him. We ended up exchanging emails and suddenly I thought that with a bit of spicing up of reality, and the creation of fictional lives for the adults, I might at last have found a plot for my novel, centred round internet relationships.

I started to write Meeting Lydia: hesitant at first, some emails – often inspired by things I’d heard on Radio 4, odd memories forming the back story about prep school and bullying, and a collection of thoughts about midlife issues. I was teaching psychology by this time and some of my students volunteered to do an extra-curricular session about internet relationships so that I could research their views. With the support of two enthusiastic friends, week by week, month by month, the novel grew. It took five years before it was ready for the world.

Over the next year or so, I pitched to publishers with my covering letter, synopsis and sample chapters, and I collected rejection slips, some with encouraging comments. I still believed in the book, confident that the messages within would resonate with many readers, but I was rapidly losing faith that I, as a non-celebrity and unproven author, would ever attract attention. Meanwhile I started to write a sequel, making it stand alone and slightly more commercial than Meeting Lydia.

Three years on and I had completed a draft. I intended to have it edited and then go through the same submission process as before. However, at the end of 2009 something happened that was to change the course of my life.

It was an ordinary Monday morning in mid-December and I left home in the usual bleary-eyed rush, fully expecting to return again in the darkness of a cold winter’s evening. During the lesson before lunch, my students were in the middle of doing group presentations and the tables and chairs had been arranged in clusters around the room. One of the students asked if she could use our mini whiteboards and I went to the office to get them and then returned to stand at the back of the class. I was making a manoeuvre between the wall and the back of the students’ chairs, trying not to damage some posters that were peeling slightly. A student shuffled her chair, being helpful, and the heel of my shoe caught the leg of the chair and I over-balanced. In a reflex action, I stuck out my arm as I hurtled towards a desk, and in a split second, my hand hit the edge and I collapsed to the floor in a heap. I couldn’t get up; the pain was almost unbearable.

I will spare you the gory details, suffice to say I had dislocated my elbow and smashed my wrist so badly I had to have a metal plate put in it. The whole business reminded me of the fragility of life and while in hospital I decided not to spend any more time chasing traditional publishers.

The independent publishing business was rapidly gaining respectability. After my recovery, I went back to polishing Meeting Lydia and then approached Troubador, whose Matador imprint is marketed at the quality end of self-publishing. They say they don’t accept everything and I remember the anxiety waiting for a decision, thinking that if they said ‘no’, then it might be the end of my dream. When the email came through saying they would be happy to proceed with the project, I was almost as ecstatic as if I had secured a publishing deal. But more hard work ensued. The publishing process is a story in itself; another story for another time.

Some ten years since its inception, Meeting Lydia first hit the shelves in September 2011. Since then, there’s been a second edition and an audiobook and three more novels, each standing alone, but also forming a series. The years since 2018 have had different priorities for me. My partner moved in, then there was Covid. I broke my other wrist and we bought a house near the sea. Two years after the move came the dog and all the time, very much in the background, book number five was slowly and stealthily inching towards completion. The eBooks have come and gone but now, with a fifth book on the way to publication, it’s time to dust off my writerly self and bring them back. And we are starting where we began with Meeting Lydia.

Linda MacDonald is the author of four novels: Meeting Lydia and the stand-alone sequels, A Meeting of a Different Kind, The Alone Alternative and The Man in the Needlecord Jacket. They are all contemporary adult fiction, multi-themed, but with a focus on relationship issues. In November 2016, Meeting Lydia was adapted as an audiobook, narrated by the talented voice actress Harriet Carmichael and published by Essential Music, London. After studying psychology at Goldsmiths’, London, Linda trained as a secondary science and biology teacher. She taught these subjects for several years before moving to a sixth-form college to teach psychology. Linda was born and brought up in the England’s beautiful Lake District and after thirty-six years in leafy Beckenham in south east London, she moved to Weymouth in 2021.