According to his author website, Sam has taught creative writing, he wrote for radio and screen, travelled widely and has even done the odd bit of gold prospecting in British Colombia. All of this experience led up to  becoming a fully fledged kids’ writer, with two brilliant sci-fi thrillers  The Repossession and its sequel The Hunting being published by Hodder last year. The two main protagonists, Genie and Rian weathered many storms together and I’m sure that I’m not the only reader to hope for the ending they deserve in the final volume of their adventure. I was pleased to see that The Repossession has been shortlisted for two book awards, The Leeds Book Awards (May 2013) and the Amazing Book Awards (July 2013).

Sam has gone on to publish a time travel adventure this year, The Repercussions of Tomas D which is as yet only available as an ebook (thus challenging my technological skills). It was worth grappling with the Kindle app, to follow Tomas’ experiences as he inexplicably finds himself in the middle of World War II as Britain struggles to keep going during The Blitz. We may have fantasies about being able to time travel, but what might the consequences be if we could travel in time? Tomas and his not-exactly-girlfriend Gabriella are plunged into a whole new world as a result.

I asked Sam if he would write a piece for The Landing about how he got started writing for teens, how he chooses what to write, what approach he takes to the subjects.

In other words: The ‘Nuts and Bolts’ about writing for a YA audience:

I can say precisely when I decided to write young fiction.  It happened the very day that a friend and I were held up at gunpoint at his apartment in Hollywood.  They tied us up as they robbed everything he had.  I was only visiting, so they had nothing to steal from me.  Remember dial phones?  Try dialling 911 with the tip of your tongue.  A SWAT team arrived real fast but of course the baddies were long gone.   But that very evening I had the sudden inspiration to write The Bears You love – a girl, her robot bear, an evil relative who wanted her money and her flight into a desolate climate changed America.  That was a long time ago.  I wrote it.  Couldn’t find a single publisher who’d read it, let alone reject it.  Lot of heartache in that book, lying in a suitcase somewhere rotting.  Writing for kids wasn’t fashionable back then.  And don’t think I was an amateur just having a go.  At the time I had two adult novels in print and was working on a third.  Just the very idea of writing ‘for kids’ was not really on the radar and a tough story about mega cities of the rich surrounded by scavengers surviving by diving into the city dumpsters wasn’t ‘cute’.  ‘Completely wasting your time writing juvenile fiction.’ Said my then publisher at Sphere.

Every writer has tales like these.  I have a lot of ‘as yet to sell’ novels awaiting daylight.  Who’d be a writer anyway huh?  Yet, once you have the idea, you have to put it down and if you’re going to put it down you have to get the end and then… what stick it on Smashwords?   Hmmm.  After the Bear episode, I was distracted by writing screenplays.  If you think selling kids books is hard, trying getting a script made.  Yes I had a few optioned, but after knocking my head on many walls I finally realised, hell I need a real job.  A salary – a life – before it’s too late.  Nothing like teaching students to put you off writing forever it seems.  I had to begin at the bottom.  No one was interested that I had published anything, especially fiction, (which is sneered at in academic circles I discovered). Real writing was what they did for obscure academic journals peer-reviewed by similar narrow-minded obscurists and the less readable it was the higher the esteem it gained.  Anything remotely accessible was clearly garbage.   When I finally got to run something (Falmouth Post Grad) I brought my enthusiasm for children’s writing to it.

Times had changed.  Someone called J K Rowling was gaining attention.  Philip Pullman was respectable and brilliantly written.  It was OK to talk about literary values in children’s fiction, study it even.  Later I was running courses in Children’s Writing at Portsmouth University and they were massively oversubscribed.  Everyone wanted to write for kids and there was a lot of talent there (if not the necessary staying power).  I took it further into the MA that I ran there.   I decided that here I was discussing all this exciting material, but I wasn’t writing it.  My first attempt was something called Mean Tide set in Greenwich, written under a pseudonym and although it was mentored by Beverley Birch at Hodder, it didn’t get through the hoops there.  I learned something important though; keep it focussed on the kids.  My adults got a lot of equal time in that book, a mistake it seems.  I still have a fondness for it, so I put it out on Lulu as a calling card.  The Repossession and The Hunting came out of my screenwriting days.  I had been working in Vancouver at the time and a number of incidences that my wayward niece and her friends would get up to was kind of shocking to me.  How little they thought of their own safety and just how many kids disappeared and how little their families seemed to care.

The central character Genie is based on someone I know.  In fact I wrote it for her and she would await each chapter and give me quite harsh notes that I had to take on board.  (Yes someone really was forced to live behind bars at home when they came back from school each day – I saw it with my own eyes).  The mother was a teacher! Did it turn out all right?  No.   What happens in those two books and the concerns the kids have follows from observations and talks with Canadian teens.  The schools they go to are huge, it’s hard to stand out.  Kids work to pay bills.  It’s very different to the UK.  My nephew’s best friend was blown away – shot at point-blank range – they were just walking from a coffee shop and wham.  No reason.  Social media is like viral poison.  Huge numbers can gang up on you, destroy lives.  There is no restraint.  I don’t try to adopt their language.  Couldn’t even if I tried. It moves on too swiftly.  But issues such as love, doubt, fear, peer pressure are universal and tapping into that puts me back in my own school days.  It was harsh, yet somehow I survived – and if I could survive, then today’s kids can.  That’s how I see it.  So when I write fiction for teens I put myself in their shoes.  The world doesn’t make sense.  Yet more often than not the kids are good, ambitious, want to be something and usually the opposite of whatever is happening at home.

Is the subject difficult?  Well putting a kid through teleportation experiments isn’t pretty, especially when you know it’s not going to work.  It’s fantastical, but rooted in the tradition of experimental science.  I’m trying to keep my feet on the ground, rather than write something that couldn’t be believed.  In Repercussions of Tomas D, I’m playing with time travel.  In time stories you can spend a lot of time building a machine and all that.  But I rather liked what happened in ‘The Butterfly Effect’ and for my ‘hero’ Tomas D it’s something that happens to him, not a choice.  I like the idea too that in creating a ‘hero’ that stops the war, he automatically becomes the greatest traitor that ever lived.  The fun in writing comes with the consequences of the situations you create.  Tomas D’s girlfriend is left behind and discovers the day after Tomas disappears that she is the only person in her school who remembers that Germany didn’t win the war.

To be honest that’s the fun part of writing, inventing a new present for young Gabriella to live in.  Dealing with the past is about research. But here again I draw upon two personal experiences.  One is the beach I frequent each year in France where the German gun emplacements are still intact. 70 plus years on, there is a visible reminder of war every hundred yards or so along the French coast.  That and finding a picture of my grandfather buried up to his neck in rubble – still alive – from a German air raid on Lincolnshire.  This was the second time he had been bombed.  The first time was in 1914 when a German Zeppelin dropped a bomb on his home killing his brother and parents.  There’s a photo of him in his pyjamas standing in his bedroom with the front of the house blown off.   So for Tomas D to have this nightmare about being buried alive by German bombs  – it comes from a reality.

How will this appeal to teens or young readers?  Hmm.  In doing my talks to schools, I am acutely aware of how little history is taught and how varied.   Increasingly the names Hitler and Churchill mean nothing (unless it is a nodding dog on TV) so the story of a boy going back in time and altering everything really only appeals to a kid who knows something about our Island story. (I should send a copy to Michael Gove).  This is why publishers increasingly are wary of publishing ‘historical fiction’ I guess.  I would argue that history – especially ‘economic’ history should be a much bigger part of curriculum’s to provide a better understanding of how society works and where it is going.  I am but a straw in the wind on this.  I am in progress on a number of works.  All YA fiction.  One survival story set again in Canada, the second in a parallel London at war with the French.  I live in hopes they will see the light of day.

I take the business of writing for kids very seriously.  Some of the best fiction ever written is I would argue for kids.  Incarceron by Catherine Fisher for example. Clever on so many levels and stretches the imagination.  Never dumbed down and it’s inspirational.  Ship Breaker by Paulo Bacigalupi one of the most vivid and yet plausible visions of our future on this planet. Hopefully one day I’ll find a way to do that myself.

Sam Hawksmoor 2013

Sam Hawksmoor … until recently was the Course Leader for the MA in Creative Writing at Portsmouth University and a similar programme in Falmouth, Cornwall. He is the joint-editor of Hackwriters.com. Sam is the author of ‘The Repossession’ and ‘The Hunting’ with Hodder Children’s Books.  Sam currently lives in windswept Lincolnshire but misses Vancouver, the mountains and the coffee bars, the setting for several of his YA novels.

Credits: author photo and bio taken from Leeds Book Awards site; other pictures from author’s own site.

As readers of this blog will know, I love reading letters and diaries so when my other half drew my attention to this collection I was happy to be distracted. In an age of email, Skype and Facebook it is hard to imagine what it must have been like to leave your family behind and travel to a completely new country and just to have to rely on weekly or fortnightly letters for news. The collection begins with letters between Vido and Kamla, as she was the first to leave home, travelling to India to study. In the first letter, Vido describes to Kamla his efforts to organise his university application photographs, not being at all satisfied with the results: ‘I had hoped to send up a striking intellectual pose to the University people, but look what they have got. And I even paid two dollars for a re-touched picture’. 

After this humorous comment, Naipaul goes on to discuss his recent reading material, earning my profound disapproval by being extremely dismissive of Jane Austen’s writing. I had previously come across a reference to a speech that Naipaul made in 2011 in which he claimed that women writers (Austen included) were not the equal of men (and certainly not equal to him). This opinion clearly goes back some years as he seemed to have formed it at the tender age of seventeen and never revised it, saying then, ‘if she had lived in our age she would undoubtedly have been a leading contributor to the women’s papers’.  Rather damming I must say, though I assume he meant that at the very least, Austen would have written for a superior sort of women’s paper since even he admitted that ‘her diction was fine, of course’.

I have read contradictory opinions on Naipaul’s character, beliefs and attitudes as well as references to a whole slew of literary spats. If that’s not enough, you can also become embroiled in the question of his behaviour towards women.Without being familiar with his novels, non-fiction or life story, I’m not yet in a position to offer any comment other than to reflect upon what I have gleaned from the letters. Having reached the point at which Vido is a year or so into his studies, I’ve become much more attracted to Seepersad’s personality, both as a person and as a father offering help and advice. Seepersad at this point is working for the Trinidad Guardian and regularly offers wise advice on writing, studying and coping with life at Oxford, ‘Sometimes in our very loneliness you will produce that which will be something new and which you otherwise could not produce. Spot your drones and microbes among your fellow-creatures, but do not let them put you out of your centre [....] meanwhile be a man and cringe to none’.

I was intending merely to skim this collection of letters, but I have found myself reading on and following Naipaul’s early career as well as Kamla’s experiences in India and those of various family members who regularly pop up in the correspondence. I would like to know more about their mother, Droapatie Capildeo but so far, having reached January 1952 she remains (though clearly loved) very much a secondary figure. In one letter to Kamla in 1951, Vido writes ‘She is worthy of all we can give. We oughtn’t to disappoint her. She is the type who suffers in silence, poor dear! I love her; but who has shaped my live [sic], my views, my tastes? Pa.’ This sentiment seems rather sad, loving with faint praise, as it were. But maybe the picture will change further on. Perhaps the letters will shed also some light upon his views of the opposite sex in general. I will read on.

Meanwhile, as a Naipaul novice I would be interested in your thoughts. Till next time…

Reblogged from Book Shares:

I always thought I received an above-average education from my rural Pennsylvania high school and from the state college just a few miles away. After all, many people I met after college didn't seem to know much or care about literature, music, art, language, or history, not to the extent that I did. Yet, as I made my way in the world, I learned that I was sorely deficient in one area: classical antiquity…

Read more… 798 more words

An Evocative Image..

For those of you who haven’t read My Father’s House, the novel’s plot centres on Robbie Hanright’s return from Dublin to his family home in County Down when he learns of his father’s illness. Robbie turned his back on the family farm, his parents and two sisters to make a new life for himself a few years previously.

As the narrative unfolds we learn more about what he left behind and why he chose to do so. Time has moved on since Robbie fled to Dublin and things and people have changed back home so he has much to absorb and to reflect upon. Robbie meets faces from the past and has to come to terms with his actions. But will he learn from the past?

This is a deceptively quiet novel where the focus is upon relationships with family and friends. The reason I say ‘deceptively’ is because there is a huge depth of emotion conveyed within an ostensibly straightforward series of events. The effect builds throughout the novel to satisfying effect. The layers of the characters are gradually revealed and I found that the more I knew about them, the more I wanted to know. I don’t want to reveal too many of the plot details so I won’t tell you any more.

Bethany Dawson has written a piece especially for The Landing in which she discusses her characters and her readers’ responses to them:

Muddling through: characterisation in My Father’s House

I have found peoples’ response to the characters in My Father’s House very interesting. One reader said she finished the novel feeling sad that there hadn’t been a happier ending. Another said she wished the main character, Robbie, had just ‘grown a set’.

My fascination with people and how they relate to one another is the centre from which my book flows. Several thousand words into my original manuscript I felt as though I knew my characters pretty well. By the end of the three years it took to complete the writing of the novel, I had spent far too much time with them.

Robbie is the kind of man I hoped would be better but always left me feeling slightly disappointed. His relationship with his father, John, is complex, and both their Northern Irish identity and the shadow of sickness intensify the difficulties they have connecting. I found it wonderfully challenging to write scenes with the two of them. The culture of sweeping things under the carpet means so little is actually said and at times I found the tension unbearable.

Robbie’s mother is a refreshing example of someone who took the opportunity to change. A few readers found her transformation from dowdy housewife to a woman with a young lover who keeps ostrich feathers on her dresser quite amusing.

I wanted readers to see their brothers, sisters, fathers, mothers and grandparents reflected in my characters. Although the story is a work of fiction, there are truths reflected in it with which most people can identify. In general, the characters muddle through a very difficult time and try, quite unsuccessfully at times, to work out how to relate to one another. By the final page of the novel some things are resolved but most are not, and in this way I hope I have been true to how the majority of real life stories come to an end.

BIO

Bethany Dawson

Bethany Dawson released her debut novel My Father’s House last month. She completed a Master of Philosophy in Creative Writing at Trinity College, Dublin in 2007. She works as the Assistant Editor of The Zimbabwean, an independent newspaper produced in the UK. She currently lives in Belfast, Northern Ireland with her husband and son, but has spent time living in both Zimbabwe and South Africa.

Bethany blogs at http://www.storiesbybethany.blogspot.ie/ and if you want to take a look at the Liberties Press website, she has recorded a promotional video for My Father’s House.

Many thanks to Bethany Dawson for contributing to The Landing

Photo credit: Carl Whinnery

In Five Dolls in a House, (first published 1953) Elizabeth however, does exactly that. Magically she finds herself walking up the path to the front door and knocking. As she does so, she hears the voices of the dolls within:

And without thinking twice about it, Elizabeth walked into the house. She said nothing (she was too surprised) but followed the red-cheeked person into the house. 

Puffin edition, 1964, reprinted 1978.

If you have never met the dolls in Elizabeth’s dolls’ house then let me briefly introduce you:

Vanessa (she of the red cheeks) is rather bossily in charge of the household and is the daughter of a Duke (allegedly);

Jacqueline is the French paying guest who possesses lovely lace underwear;

Jane is a very sweet-tempered doll who always wears a long green nightdress:

Lupin by contrast is always clad solely in a blue woollen vest with a lot of dropped stitches;

Amanda is the lively, mischievous one who quarrels with Vanessa;

And last, but by no means least, is the monkey living on the roof who has been known to dress up as a duchess on occasion.

They all have lots of adventures with Elizabeth (in the guise of Mrs Small the landlady) including getting measles, acquiring two white mice to pull a trap and spring cleaning in their own inimitable style. I’m sure that Vanessa would have loved Tara’s Palace. She would have thought it ‘most genteel’, coming as she did from a castle (Cranberry Castle in fact).

I think all of the stories are now out of print, but they are well worth tracking down. My mum found the copy we have in Oxfam in Birmingham and we were lucky enough to spot even more adventures at last year’s Trinity College Book Sale.  All of the stories are complemented by Cecil Leslie’s delightful line drawings.

Do you have a favourite dolls’ house story? Let me know…

Progress…

As I am feeling very spring-like this on this lovely sunny morn, I will embark upon a fresh assault on the remaining titles on my Landing Eight challenge list.  Put it down to the sense of anticipation from knowing that the month of May is only hours away around the corner.

Just to recap for those of you not paying attention at the back, here is the original list:

The Daughter of Time Josephine Tey (Orange Penguin)

The Frontenac Mystery François Mauriac (20th Century Classics Penguin)

The Go-Between L P Hartley (Penguin Classics)

In a Free State V S Naipaul (Orange Penguin)

The Periodic Table Primo Levi (Everyman)

The Diary of a Nobody George & Weedon Grossmith (Guild Publishing)

Murderers and Other Friends John Mortimer (Orange Penguin)

The Thirty-Nine Steps John Buchan (Orange Penguin)

I have now reached the exciting final stages of this challenge which dates back to last summer (was it really that long ago?), with only two more books to read. What happens after completion of my task is anyone’s guess at this stage. I will have to come up with a fresh mechanism for tackling the unread books on The Landing I suppose. Though as I have mentioned in a previous post, I do have a plan to defect to The Bedroom Bookshelves during the summer to finish reading Dorothy Dunnett’s Niccolo series.

Next choice…

In the meantime I will be settling down to read  V.S. Naipaul’s In a Free State which we have in an Orange Penguin edition from 1983 (reprint of the 1973 edition). It was originally published in 1971 by Andre Deutsch and won the Booker Prize of that year. In this volume the novella ‘In a Free State’ is preceded by two shorter pieces ‘One out of Many’ and ‘Tell Me Who to Kill’ and all of these pieces are bracketed by a prologue and an epilogue. In a more recent Pan Macmillan edition from 2011, the title piece is published on its own, a decision endorsed by the author as his preface makes clear.

This is not only a so far unread book, but also an as yet unread author for me so will be a first on two counts. It may well be that I should have begun with one of Naipaul’s earlier books such as A House for Mr Biswas (1961) but I have to abide by the terms of my challenge. As you probably know, Naipaul has generated as much sharply critical comment as plaudits for his work but I will talk more about that next time I post.

For now, I will just get on with the book! If anyone out there has read it, you’re welcome to drop a line in the comment box with your thoughts. 

And a ‘Happy May Day’ for tomorrow – dancing around Maypoles is optional! 

Reblogged from e a m harris:

I don't often read books more than once, but lately re-enjoyed one I'd read years ago.

The book is Josephine Tey's Daughter of Time. It was first published in 1951, but in my opinion has aged well and is still relevant and fun.

A detective, Alan Grant, is convalescing in hospital and is bored. A friend suggests that he puts his skills to work on a historical crime.

Read more… 242 more words

Reblogged from interesting literature:

Today, 23 April, is World Book Night (sometimes known, confusingly, as World Book Day). It is also the birthday (according to convention; nobody knows for sure) of William Shakespeare, and also the date on which he died, in 1616. On different calendars, Miguel de Cervantes (author of Don Quixote) and William Wordsworth also died on this day, in 1616 and 1850 respectively. 

Read more… 1,002 more words

Jacqueline Jacques

I hope you enjoyed the first part of the Q and A with writer Jacqueline Jacques, published here yesterday. Follow the link to Part I if you missed it and if you also missed my original introduction of Jacqueline’s historical crime novel on Thursday, then click over to that first to catch up with us! I am working on a piece about the book (which I enjoyed very much) at the moment. I really liked the idea of making the main character an artist who, through his role sketching crime suspects, becomes involved in the events which follow. And of course, Walthamstow was a fascinating character in its own right, at the heart of the novel and all the action.

And now, to the second half of my email interview with Jacqueline…

When you decided to go ‘darker’, did you have any idea in which direction it would take your work?  Did the difficult subjects you chose to deal with in Mary Quinn’s life affect you as you worked?

I’ve tried the paranormal and outgrown it.  Horror wasn’t for me, so I guessed that my next novel would probably be crime fiction of some sort. I didn’t want to be bogged down in police procedurals, clues, clever deductions and red herrings, so I set an artist on a voyage of discovery.  He was the one to find out how ordinary, law-abiding people could become the victims of unscrupulous predators.  I hadn’t, at that point, read any crime fiction apart from Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves, so I fell back on my own studies in sociology, on various news stories, on a story structure recommended by the crime writer, Michelle Spring, and on my imagination.  Eventually, after the third or fourth draft I knew exactly where I was going.  And yes, I was very moved by Mary’s suffering, what she was forced to do to survive. I wanted to make life easier for her, but I couldn’t.  It was horrible but it happened and I had to record it.

I read on your website that you used to be a teacher.  I wondered if you would ever be inspired to write novels for children as other former teachers, such as Roddy Doyle have done.

Possibly, if time allows, but I have a number of adult novels I should like to write first.
I went to a Kate Atkinson interview recently, in which she was asked what minor character in her fiction she would like to revisit and why?  May I ask you the same question?

I’d be interested to see how little Clara grows up, given the trauma I’ve put the poor child through (I feel a little responsible for her.)  I suppose I might get the chance if I write more books about Archie Price.

Just to close with, can I ask you why you decided to move from the short story form to the novel and will you perhaps go back some day?

I find I need the longer form of story-structure in order to explore and develop my characters and plot.  Short stories cannot always contain all I need to say.  If I returned to short-story writing it would be purely as an exercise, I think, to test myself against a word count or the discipline of making a story believable in a few words. I once heard Beryl Bainbridge say, ‘Why waste characters and a good plot on a short story when you can write a book?’

Skin Deep, Honno Press, 2004

Many thanks to Jacqueline for taking the time to answer my questions about her work. As I mentioned yesterday, she is in the running for the fiction award in the People’s Book Prize 2013 in which the voting is open until 20th May. As well as being a successful writer, Jacqueline is also an artist and you can check out her website for more information on her work. You could also look up her author page on Honno Press, for earlier novels such as her science fiction novel Skin Deep (2004).

Thanks for reading and don’t forget to drop a line in the box if you have any comments or suggestions for future posts.

Art plays a large part in your novel.  Can you start by telling us a little about why you decided to make a painter your protagonist?

 I wanted to write a crime novel from the point of view of someone who was neither criminal nor victim, policeman nor private detective.  I don’t know enough about police procedurals to write confidently about them, but I do know a bit about painting and painters.  Listening to Woman’s Hour one day I heard Lois Gibson talking about her work as a forensic artist, drawing the perpetrators of crime from their victims’ descriptions.  I researched further and was astonished at how large a part such artists play, even today, in the solution of crime.  Archie Price, with his extraordinary gift for almost reading a witness’s mind, would have been invaluable to the police, at a time when photography was in its infancy.  Passionate about his painting, he is, at the same time quite naive about the real world and unprepared for the vicious criminals he comes up against.  He has all-too-human frailties, is weak, is charming.  An unreliable hero.  Perfect.

I am a dyed-in-the-wool Brummie, but I still love reading fiction based on London’s many layered past. You said on your blog that Walthamstow features in most of your fiction.  Can you tell us what it is in the place that keeps pulling you back to it in your work?

As a child I felt that it was the best place on earth to grow up in.  It had (still has) an incredible bustle of creativity about it. Easy access to the forest gave me trees to climb, paths to ramble, changing seasonal moods to fire my imagination. There was the wonderful High Street market to explore, the library to feed my soul, the Town Hall grounds to play in, the marshes, the river, Lloyd Park for swings and roundabouts, and London, only half an hour away by train. Why Walthamstow? It was my home and I loved it.

Your engaging and courageous hero, Mary Quinn is an Irish woman whose family had all travelled over to England to find work.  I was wondering if you have any Irish connections yourself.

Probably.  My grandmother spoke of ‘Black Irish’ genes (Spanish Irish) in the family, and of ‘Great Uncle Archie coming over from Ireland,’ but I haven’t done any research on this.  

Jacqueline Jaques

You really evoke a convincing sense of life in this often sordid part of Victorian England.  How did you set about researching the period?  And I was fascinated by the underground passages.  Did they really exist?

 I borrowed books and maps, studied photographs and paintings of the period.  I went for walks on the Walthamstow marshes, through the streets and in Epping Forest.  I trawled the Internet for social history, facts about the police, housing, tile patterns, music hall.  But mostly I relied on my memory. I felt I knew these people; that I’d grown up among them.  I may be a few generations removed from the characters in the book, but we, too, were poor (after the war) and struggled to stay afloat just as they must have done.  My father, who grew up in Walthamstow in the 1920s, once told me about connecting cellars beneath the High Street shops, used by villains on the run from the police.  It may have been a myth for all I know.  My Dad was also a teller of tales. Truth or fiction?  Who knows?  I’m a writer.  I’ll use anything to make a good story.

Following on from the research aspect, I was wondering if, while you plotted the novel you knew early in the process where your characters would be at the end of the story.

 I vaguely knew that Archie would be drawn deeper into the criminal network but I had no idea what would happen to the other characters until the very end.  In fact I wrote several endings, none of which worked to my satisfaction.  As I got to know the characters, their histories, their motivations, they more or less told me how they would behave in any given circumstance and I wrote it down.  Sometimes I would drop a fact into the mix, like Mary’s sweet singing voice, or a sword-stick, or a pair of gold cufflinks, just to see where it would take me.  Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.  It’s a haphazard way of working, but there’s nothing like it for excitement.

I hope you enjoyed that look behind the scenes, more from Jacqueline to follow shortly..