Greetings & Fun!

Hi guys,

Hope you are having a lovely week. If you’re in the UK, hope you’re enjoying the mini-heatwave too! I have been working hard to put together my website greetings and the first two are ready.

The German welcome is quite an exciting one for me because I’ve only been learning German since the summer. It’s a wonderful language and I’m really enjoying having a go at communicating. I really love learning about the country and the culture. It’s all research too because one of my favourite characters has German roots.

Yup, Ursula Frei. To me, she has strength, class, efficiency and acute intelligence and her voice feels strong like her when I’m writing. (I hope it comes across that way too.) Hindsight is a book that shows her character and her courage and I was really pleased at how her story developed as I wrote the book. It’s been fun to spend more time with her on the page in both Untrained Eye and Hindsight because I’d hinted at parts of her story in the first two books.

When I decided on narratives for my series using first person for Aeron and third person (i.e. Renee strode over, a grin on her face.) for her friends, I had to really work on my third person technique. As authors, I think we all have a natural strength in some Points of View. Mine, I felt was in first person. I could move in close to her and zoom out more easily. Yet, I found it best for the story to break from that to third person when I we were with Renee, Frei or any of the other wonderful characters. It took time to learn how to make that as smooth as possible.

With each book, I’ve challenged myself to do new things. In Blind Trust it was to use second person narrative. It took a lot of studying to get it right and make it feel the way I wanted it to. With Untrained Eye, it was to use more of Renee and Frei’s POVs and to create that bond between adults and the kids working together. I knew it was going to be tough for some readers to understand Renee in Untrained Eye so that was a challenge in itself to hint at her story and not show too much.

In Hindsight, my challenge was to do something different again. I won’t say too much but it was to fuse two ways of telling the story into one while keeping the pace up and the emotion high. The hardest part for me, I think, is to find ways to ease new readers into the series while keeping Aeron’s current friends up to date. That’s why I chose to have her introduce herself in each book because I still think that she says it better.

So, I hope that you enjoy the German greeting… (PS – that’s my Marozan shirt on the video *smiles*)

As for the French. Well, I thought it would be fitting as I’ve finished writing Best Maid Plans. I have studied French but I can’t say that I’m all that confident. As you probably know, I love tennis, so much of the time while studying, I listened to Amélie, Marie Pierce and co. chatting away to each other. I love the country and it’s hard to capture the energy they pour into their beautiful language. I had a go and hope you enjoy! (Oh, and I had a hair cut between videos!)