It’s been a while, hasn’t it? I left you dangling with the news we were moving to California. That was ten years ago. Can you believe it?

Let’s time travel together back to the era before Americans elected a convicted felon and rapist as President. A time when I was still, or at least still felt, young. A time when John and I had the energy to pack up our lives and move again to a strange place based on a wing and a prayer. A time we were both naive enough to dream that big. Now we’re too tired to even pack a bag for an overnight trip, let alone a new life.

Remember back then? When Alula was a sweet nine-year-old who loved Barbies and Brownies and hated wearing a school uniform and had just recently decided she didn’t like David Cameron after hearing about his dalliance with a farmyard animal. What a quaint sexual peccadillo that now seems. She missed her free-roaming, barefoot Bali days. She wanted a hamster called Apricot. (She got one called George in the end. He’s long dead now. A tragedy involving a fire and a tumor.) Alula was happy to leave the wet weather and concrete playgrounds of England behind but anxious about yet another new start on yet another continent.

John was happy to give up the London commute to make music.

I was happy to stop wearing thermals and to come to America to start my new life as a screenwriter, working on all the top shows, optioning my books, and penning blockbusters in my downtime. I do look back on this older version of me with awe at how completely I lived the ‘if you can dream it, you can be it’ philosophy. Bless my heart.

At the time, this blog had just been published in book form (thanks to all the people who’ve bought a copy at Bali airport), and another Mila Gray novel, and was also kicking off an adult thriller career with the publication of Friends Like These.

When we arrived in California, I put the blog on hold because starting up a new life is a lot of work. You have to find things like a house and health insurance, and figure out American spelling and what spring onions are called, and buy a car without any credit, and take a driving test. On that score by the way – all you need to demonstrate here is that you can drive forwards and backwards in a straight line, but I still only managed to pass by the skin of my teeth. Felicia, my ironically named examiner, asked me where I’d learned to drive because ‘here, we have rules’. I told her in South London the rules don’t apply. It’s kill or be killed. But I fear it’s Bali that really set me up for failure – all those years dodging chickens.

A second reason I put the blog on pause was that, while I had so many amazing, hilarious, mind-boggling stories to tell, I also did not want to get blacklisted in Hollywood. The stakes seemed higher than talking about the priestess of the Goddess Gaia (her own trademark) who lived next door to us in Bali. She could only turn up the volume on her primal screaming, while the studio overlords could blacklist me.

But I do regret not keeping up the blog, because we moved to America in a year that will go down as the most significant year in US, possibly global, history – 2016 – and the blog would have been an interesting historical record. However, it would have definitely led to my being deported, because the land of the free no longer allows freedom of speech. You can no longer criticize (see, US spelling) the dear leader.

But, as you may remember, my philosophy has always been fuck it. I refuse to bend the knee to a demagogue. Also just prior to the 2024 election we got citizenship – not just so we could vote – but because I was worried that if we didn’t do it then, we might have a problem. It was good thinking. But now, not even US citizenship is enough to protect you from ICE.

So what has happened in these last ten years besides a descent into fascism? A quick update:

We got to California and settled within a month in the sweet town of Ojai (pronounced Oh-hi), somewhere we had visited years prior on our first Can We Live Here journey. It’s a place we never imagined we might end up settling – it seemed so outlandish, so absurd. Ojai was a citrus growing, sunshine-soaked idyllic valley, with a famous pink moment each evening when the setting sun hit the mountains turning them a stunning shade of, you guessed it, pink. A place of hot springs and horse ranches and avocado groves. It seemed like a place you might go when you died, but certainly not a place we could ever ascend to.

But we found a little house that came fully furnished thanks to the fact the town had just the week we arrived banned Airbnb. We settled in, bought George the hamster and adopted a dog called Melvin. And then none of my projects moved forward and I failed to get work (and John couldn’t work per the terms of his visa). A whole year went by and none of my projects went anywhere. The hundred general meetings my agent set up yielded no results. At eighteen months in, I was starting to wonder if perhaps we’d bitten off more than we could chew – if our dreams were too big for our stomachs or some such. And then, just like buses, three jobs came along at once. This was it! I had finally made it in Hollywood. I was hired by none other than the Weinstein company to write a movie. More money than I had ever made in my life. Success!

You know where this is going, don’t you? Yes. I was three pages from finishing said script when Harvey W was arrested. The company went bankrupt almost immediately.

At the same time I was also hired as a staff writer on my first ever TV show. I could not believe it. This would be my big break. The show was Viva La Madness – a London-set crime drama. I got to learn the ropes of TV writing from actual writing legends, not just from Save the Cat. We wrote all eight episodes. It was the subject of a bidding war. Netflix and Sky prevailed. Prep started. I was sure my career would be set for life. Emmys surely would follow. HBO would commission every single one of my books and Nicole Kidman would star in all of them. And then Jason Statham, who was the producer of Viva and due to play the lead, pulled out.

It has been eight years since this project crashed and burned and I still yell fuck you every time I see his face on a billboard.

But then I got another job interview – this time to staff on a show called S.W.A.T. – a network procedural cop show set in LA. Obviously, I knew nothing about procedurals, even less about LAPD, or being a cop, but when have I ever let such details stop me? And I did have a whole bookshelf of action thrillers I’d written to point to, several of which featured Marines. I’d become an expert by watching Generation Kill (twice). I got hired by the showrunning legend Shawn Ryan – who I think was just momentarily won over by my English accent (Americans seem to equate it with intelligence – which, to be fair, is fair enough).

I didn’t mean to stay on the show for very long, but cut to seven years later… I was still there when it finally got canceled (it wasn’t me, I swear!).

I kept up the books though – writing one a year in my hiatus between seasons. I ended up writing five Mila Gray novels in total. Come Back To Me – the first of those sold more copies than any of my other books, which is quite funny given I wrote it in ten days on the beach in Goa. I then went and wrote seven adult thrillers, one of which, The Weekend Away, I managed to turn into a movie for Netflix. Hello, Leighton Meester!

I know however, that you’re really only here because you want to know more about Alula. That five year old who swore off shoes, who ran away from home across the rice paddies when we killed a cockroach, and laid daily offerings to Ganesha. The toddler who wore her pink tutu around the world, and didn’t know that poos were meant to be solid until she was about seven… She is now NINETEEN. She is two inches taller than me. She wears shoes and has learned how to tie her laces! She passed her driving test at 16 with much fewer faults than either John or I. She is brilliant and funny and kind and speaks with a California twang, and is still vegetarian (remember the McDonald’s cheeseburger episode?). And this is the funniest part. Remember my penultimate post? The one where the eight year old Alula yelled at me: “Why do you always have to be so loud and shouty about politics and women and religion?’

Well, guess what? She is majoring in POLITICAL SCIENCE and COMMUNICATIONS at STANFORD. Yes, that is a very smug smile I am wearing.

John has had a career about turn and found his real life purpose, and one day I hope to let you in on it.

So that’s your decade update. For now, despite everyone in the UK looking at us as though we’re living in Berlin in 1939 and we should be thinking about packing our bags, we stay. I write. Stay tuned.

I can be found at @sarahaldersonauthor on Instagram and over on Substack too where you can subscribe.