creative writing

Balancing Fact and Fiction

Using Real-Life Experiences in My Novels The Missing Wife is my fourth psychological suspense novel and as its publication day fast approaches I’ve been thinking about what ‘goes in’ to my novels: where the ideas come from, how the characters are developed, how I choose their traits and back stories,… Read More

How characters move a story along in unexpected ways

Authors sometimes talk about how characters can come alive on the pages as they write. Sometimes these people we create take on a life all of their own and it can feel as if they, and not us as writers, are the ones putting words down on a page. In… Read More

A Fling in the Scottish Highlands

20th May 2019 sees the release of my fourth book, Secret Things and Highland Flings. Unlike the previous three books, the theme of this book is more along the lines of ‘crime comedy caper’ with a twist of romance, rather than a traditional ‘rom-com’ formula. I’ve taken a bit of… Read More

When I met DS Josie Masters again

Hello, old friend! It’s been a while…’ Bringing back a main character in series fiction is an odd feeling. Life as writer has moved on, but the protagonist of one’s creation has remained in a sort of limbo world, needed no more after the final page of the previous book. Read More

Taking a Creative Writing Course

I began writing seriously some ten years ago but my development as a writer really began when I secured a place on the Curtis Brown Creative writing course in September 2013. It almost didn’t happen. Earlier that year I’d submitted my first novel, an historical spy story, to Curtis Brown… Read More