SHELF LIFE

The saga author provides a timeline of her writing career via five significant books

I’ve devoured books ever since I was five and could read whole sentences. When in primary school, I wrote a weekly adventure serial which the teacher pinned on the notice board. Pride surged through me as I watched the children cluster round and read it, flipping over the pages, then turning to me.

‘What’s going to happen next?’ they’d ask.

Truth was, I had no idea.

Unfortunately, this is the way I write my novels. I never make a plan and just let the characters and events develop under my fingers as I type. I don’t recommend this method to other writers because in every book in progress, I manage to write myself into a dead-end, and it’s agony trying to get myself on track again. Luckily, I can rely on my fantastic writerly friends to come up with the perfect solution. Every writer needs this kind of support.

I sold my thriving six-branch estate agency 20 years ago to see if I could write a novel. But unwittingly, I sold the business to a pair of conmen and ended up writing a nonfiction called Seller Beware: How Not To Sell Your Business. Although it was immediately picked up by a mainstream publisher, it wasn’t the novel I’d dreamed of. I was now on the second novel of a trilogy but was continually rejected. So I self-published them.

By an amazing stroke of luck at a Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) Conference, an unknown (to me) author introduced me to dear Helen Huthwaite, the (then) senior editor of Avon HarperCollins (AHC) and my third Second World War family saga led me to a three-book deal! But when she wanted all three set in Liverpool in a Dr Barnardo’s home, I baulked. I’d never been to Liverpool and don’t have children. How on earth could I write three novels about it?