THE diagnosis of Motor Neurone Disease is a devastating blow for any family.

One Warrington author, Suzanne Ewart, was inspired by her father-in-law’s diagnosis and helped it transform her life into a potential writing career, following the scare of the disease potentially being passed on.

Suzanne – a Culcheth resident - entered EHarmony’s Write Your Own Love Story competition in 2018 and won the £10,000 publishing contract for ‘One Month of You’, released today, Thurday.

“I was scrolling on Facebook as you do and I saw the advert for it. It was just perfect timing really I’d written a few other novels and not got anywhere with them,” Suzanne said.

“I’ve had this idea for a love story, hadn’t got around to starting it, hadn’t quite got the courage begin and it was just the push I needed.

“The right time and the right competition.

“It came from personal experience. My father-in-law, he passed away with MND in 2013 and when he was first diagnosed, as a family we just knew nothing about the illness,” she continued.

“We found out with MND there’s about a 5 to 10 er cent chance of it passing on from parent to child, and there was quite a brief but scary time where we didn’t know it that was going to affect my husband and I was pregnant at the time."

After being shortlisted in November 2018, she won the contract in February 2019 and prize was publication.

“It was a real life-changing moment,” Suzanne added.

“It was incredible. I knew that even if I didn’t win I was going to finish writing this story because I knew it was the right story for me to be telling.

“To actually have the judges in the competition and for them to say they that they believed in the story was just incredible.

This story is not about MND though, instead about woman who has another neurological illness called Huntington’s disease.

She has inherited it from her mum and she is her carer, so the woman knows what it does and that her future is most likely going to look the same.

So, she decides she is going to make a list of rules about how she lives her life. Number one is not falling in love as she doesn’t want to bring anyone else under the shadow of disease.

The other main character, Alec, makes her reconsider her rules.

“The disease passing on turned out not to be the case in my family, it was a one-off but that time really did stick with me because a few months later I read about Huntington’s disease and the chance of a parent passing it onto the child is 50 per cent, so it’s talked about as a toss of a coin.

Suzanne became fixated on this disease and the affect it could have, hence the choice of topic for the book.

She added: “It was really that statistic, the 50 per cent, that started off the novel because I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What would you do if it was your family?"

She continued: “Not only did your parent have it, but you knew you were also going to have this really cruel, fatal illness and the stories about how that would affect your life and the decisions that you make for your life.

“Hopefully this book will lead onto another book and another book and it will be the start of a career writing love stories and working with publishers.

“It’s my dream come true to be able to do it and I’d just like to be able to keep doing it."