my books

My most vivid memory of being an avid reader is of when I was in the region of eight or nine years old. I had just acquired a new reading lamp and, even though it was during the summer and being in the Northern Hemisphere still quite light out even at 10:30 at night, I asked my mother, who was going out to a church meeting that evening, if I could go to my room after the evening meal to read and test my new lamp. She of course said yes and off I went with a pile of books and my new lamp shining brightly even in a room bathed in early evening sunlight. It wasn’t until a few hours later when I realised I had unwittingly nearly sent my father into cardiac failure. He had spent the last hour or so looking everywhere for me, even recruiting several neighbours, my two older brothers and my younger sister to join in the hunt until finally, in despair, he had gone to the church hall to break the devastating news to my mother that I was missing. He couldn’t understand why she burst into laughter and asked him had he checked my bedroom, that I had retired there after dinner to read. I remember most vividly my bedroom door being flung open and seeing my poor distraught, but very relieved father looking at me in almost disbelief. I didn’t even get into trouble because I really hadn’t done anything wrong!

 

Growing up in the 70's and 80’s, I was influenced by such police television series as Starsky and Hutch, Charlie’s Angels, Streets of San Francisco and the British series The Professionals. I had already decided before I left school that I wanted to be a police officer but in the United Kingdom back then, there were height restrictions for both men and women and I fell short by 2 inches of the women’s requirement of 5’4”. Given my love for reading, and watching those police series, disheartened but undeterred at my failure to grow as tall as I needed to be, I quickly came to understand that I could put the two together and write about police detectives. I utilised the handsomeness of the television male stars with the beauty of the female stars to create my own detectives, two male and two female.

 

Writing very quickly became my passion. Even working fulltime as a medical secretary, I devoted much of my spare time to honing my characters and my first storyline. In fairness, even though I thought the first draft of Book One was a masterpiece in the making, it was actually very amateurish. My lengthy experience as a reader taught me how to develop not only the characters, but also how important it is to add detail and substance and draw the reader into the story as it develops. The finished product I have today is largely due to input from my few but faithful readers, my dearest friends and family members, who advised me that I shouldn’t have included a certain part or I should take a certain part out and it is thanks to them I have the full sized, and completely finished to my satisfaction, novel that I do today. The storyline itself had never been an issue.  I had, although not necessarily in order, a beginning, a middle and an end. I made adjustments through the years but the storyline stayed essentially the same. I found I enjoyed my characters very much and, despite not holding back on giving them trials and tribulations through everyday life, I ultimately wanted what was best for them.

 

I deliberately made each main character as different from the others as possible. I gave each of them completely different backgrounds and upbringings but also wanted them to have the same professional capabilities to ensure an easy working life together. I thought it was inevitable they would meet and fall in love, so that was deliberately why I brought romance into the story.

 

Before the first book was even completed, I had come to realize I wasn’t done with my characters just yet. I had already thought up the idea of a second book in the series, to take up about six months or so where the first book left off. Although the second book holds a lot of dark content,  and even a few pages of extremely violent content, the story itself could have brought my characters to the end of their literal lives. But still, I wasn’t done with them and a third book came along, then a fourth, and so on until I now have 6 books completed and I'm now writing book 7. Is there an eighth book in the making? Stay tuned….