It starts with a buzzing into my brain of something I’d like to write about, explore… a fragment. Sometimes the first germ of an idea concerns a relationship, at other times I want to write about a particular place or time. The first spark can be inspired by a line of verse or an article […]
Read moreBetween the ages of five and fifteen I lived in a house on the edge of a large area of woodland in Hampshire. It had once been a gamekeeper’s cottage belonging to the ‘big house’, an eighteenth century grand manor, set in parkland, that was by that time deserted and used to store furniture. Our […]
Read moreRed towers over tall green trees: our first sight of the Golden Gate bridge this morning. Blue skies above, the Bay beneath, and as we drive over the span, we pass walkers, runners and cyclists. I’m travelling with my husband Iain, my son and daughter-in-law and six year-old grandson. They’ve been living in San Francisco […]
Read moreTitles. Oh dear. I so rarely get it right first time. Or even second, or third. It seems a while since the working title became the title eventually displayed on the book-jacket. There I am, the novel finished near as dammit, heading off to the copy-editor perhaps, and I still haven’t settled on a title, […]
Read moreMy first novel, Reynardine, published in 1989, has recently been reissued as an e-book, along with other titles. The original jacket featured a painting of the heroine in a glowering, overcast landscape with a darkly-handsome hero on horseback staring moodily at her. It is very obviously a romantic novel. Cut now to the 2015 e-book […]
Read moreThe story dictates the setting and the setting shapes the story. I knew long before I started to write The Turning Point that it must be set in the flat lands of Cambridgeshire, with its featureless landscapes and chill winds. One Last Dance required the brightness of sea and cove, but also the deep, secretive […]
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