Mortal Insight – Why would you write that?
What For? Since the release of ‘Mortal Insight’ I have often been asked the question: ‘Why did you write under a different name?’ My simple answer to that was because ‘Mortal Insight’ as a piece of fiction is NOTHING like any other story that I have written. In my eighteen years of having published fiction in the market, I have meddled with other genres – time travel adventure; murder mystery; religious allegory; contemporary drama – and of course my bread and butter genre, period drama romance. Everything I have put out til now has made reasonable use of the element of romance. ‘Mortal Insight’ has a very vague hint of romance, but could never be classified as a romance. It is a crime drama, political intrigue, some supernatural elements. The next question: ‘Why...
Interview – Mortal Insight
Recently I caught up with Jayne and Sharon at Life FM, and we chatted for a while about ‘Mortal Insight’ and other things about writing and reading. Life FM is an Adelaide radio station, but you can listen to it live streaming on-line. Here is the interview:
Shooting Cover Images
Over the years as each new title came out, I was also part of the process of cover design. For the Green Valley series and a number of other titles I actually spoke to young people of my acquaintance who I thought might represent my characters, then organised costume fittings, hairdressers, locations and on occasion babies and animals. It was actually all a huge amount of fun. Then I got the crazy idea that while I had these young people all dressed up in the fashion of a long gone era, I might get a video camera in action as well, and see if we couldn’t get some moving images for promotion. From there was a reasonably small step to deciding to have a try at filming a promo trailer featuring the characters from the book cover. The Cora Villa trailer was...
The Progression of “The Manse”
I had been toying with writing for about three or four years, and had hand written about six novels, that, despite a huge effort to interest publishers remained mouldering in the filing drawer at home. Then, one cold winter’s day, my husband and I travelled out to a small church in the Victorian countryside, to conduct a wedding. I played the piano and sang for the wedding, but as soon as my job was done, I’m afraid my mind and imagination was taken up by the little blue-stone church whose very walls seemed to call out to me. It was as if some romantic and dramatic story had taken place, and I needed to know what it was. Of course, that was just my imagination working over time. But from the day of that wedding onwards, I could not get that little church out...
