Behind the Scenes

As the leaves change colour and we shift into autumn, it has made me slightly whimsical and I have something rather special to celebrate. Sixteen years since my first book! It's strange to think how much time has passed and how much my writing journey has changed along the way. When I first published Mr Right I Presume, I honestly wasn't thinking that this would be the start of a career in writing. I did it for very personal reasons because I was spiralling due to [not deali

There is a particular sort of confidence that comes with being absolutely certain you've written something correctly. You look at the sentence, you read it and it makes sense. You know what you mean and so you move on. And then, sometimes much later, you look at it again or someone mentions it and you look again and realise: **Oh [insert profanity]! That wasn't what I meant, or, in my case, when I’m being particularly harsh on myself; "Apparently, I don't know how to spel

This month has been a one of editing — although perhaps not quite in the way you might imagine. Some of it happened at home. Some happened in those odd pockets of time squeezed between my day job and everything else life throws at me. And quite a bit happened while travelling back from ten days in Italy, where again I found odd pockets of time, usually in the time after saying good night to my daughter and my own bedtime. In June 2026 I spoke of investing in a Remarkable Pa

July has seen me successfully finish the first draft of the sequel to Finding the Lions! Adding in a scene is tricky, I find, as the story still needs to flow and past experience has taught me that if I stray too it leads to complications and massive rewriting of subsequent chapters. However I'm feeling confident that I essentially wrote what I did before I burnt the notebook by accident. Whilst that was going on I found myself thinking about my previous books particularly

Practically everything we do has some sort of consequence. Sometimes the consequence is amazing, great, fulfilling and makes us feel great. Other times the consequence can mean heart ache, pain, bad feelings or having to redo work. This month I have been dealing with a particularly terminal consequence, burning a notebook as fuel thinking that I had typed it up! Leading up to that point, I was super excited, having converted my handwritten notes to text on my Remarkable p

There’s something unsettling, yet addictively exciting about wanting something you’re not supposed to… I’m nearing the end of the first draft of the follow-on to Finding the Lions, and this story has taken me somewhere deeper than I expected and introduced a new point of view, Illena, adding to those from Dameria and Karik. This last section is seeing the characters cross the Kazakhstan desert, somewhere I have little knowledge about having never been there; the internet is a