Tanya Madsen
Tanya Madsen
Sneak Peeks from the Somewhere Aching Series
A private look into the moments I’m writing, revising, and obsessing over.
Welcome
I update this page whenever inspiration hits — sometimes weekly, sometimes in wild midnight bursts.
These scenes are exclusive to my newsletter readers. Please keep them close to your heart.
Welcome to the quiet corner of my world — the place where unfinished scenes, raw lines, and stolen moments live before they ever reach the page. These are unedited, intimate glimpses into the Somewhere Aching series as I finalize book 4 and write book 5. Thank you for being here.
The Weight of Waking
💔 · ❤️🔥 · 💔 · ❤️🔥 · 💔
Intro:
Nicolas has been home for months, but nothing feels real. Healing isn’t linear, and grief doesn’t follow rules. Every breath without Judith feels like a betrayal of the life he thought they were building.
Excerpt:
"What day was it? Did it even matter? Why had he survived? Why would the universe allow this to happen to him? Was he cursed?
Nicolas lay on the couch, hollowed out by hunger and heartbreak. Chips were the only thing he’d eaten in days. Hadn’t had a glass of water in weeks. His body ached constantly, but the real pain lived deeper — in the place where his soul felt like it inhabited a corpse.
He had no idea how to survive this. Survive without her. He didn’t want to. Didn’t want to draw another breath without Judith at his side."
Context Note:
Nicolas has been home for two months now, out of his coma for four. He can’t accept Judith’s disappearance — not the note she left behind, not the idea that she chose Justin, and not the theory her family clings to. Abduction? Impossible. Betrayal? Unthinkable. The truth sits somewhere in the dark, and he’s terrified to look at it.
💔 · ❤️🔥 · 💔 · ❤️🔥 · 💔
Sneak Peek
I'm 65k into book 5. I started January 1st, so I'm making good progress. I usually write on a Notepad app in my phone. On my lunch break at work or in the middle of the night. I find it easier to let the ideas flow as if I were texting. If I'm at my computer working in MS Word, I might get caught up in editing and formatting and I don't want that.
I'm about to start my final revision of book 4. I wrote it last summer, but I like to step away and let the story percolate before I dig in and change it around!
Writing Progress
Behind-the-Scenes
Some scenes demand to be written before I’m ready. This week, one of those moments showed up — and it changed everything I thought I knew about Book 5.
Some storylines take turns I never see coming. I thought Judith would fight her abusive ex to the bitter end — claw her way back to freedom, back to Nicolas, back to the life she was building. What I didn’t expect was the emotional whiplash of her falling into old patterns, remembering the version of him she loved before everything went wrong.
Now I’m writing a conflict that feels painfully real. Loving someone who has hurt you is a complicated, messy truth many survivors know too well, and exploring that on the page hits closer to home than I anticipated. It’s challenging, uncomfortable, and deeply human — and it’s shaping the heart of this story in ways I never planned.
