Questions
- How do you get an idea for a book?
- Do you plan out the whole book before you write it?
- Describe a typical writing day.
- What writing rituals do you have?
- What do you do when you have writer's block?
- How do you balance writing and your other full time job?
- Are your books or characters autobiographical?
- What advice can you give to writers starting out?
- How do you go about getting a book published?
- Which living author do you most admire and why?
As far as Stepmothers' Support Group goes, in my day job, as Editor of Red, I started to notice that whenever we did a feature that touched on a modern relationship concern, eg step-parenting, dating a divorcee, it struck a massive chord. We ran one first person feature by a woman who felt her stepchildren hated her (and vice versa) and nearly drowned under the sea of emails. Then, when I wrote about being a stepmother in my Editor's letter, I got loads of requests to go on the radio and TV to talk about my experience. One show I went on they did a phone-in and all these women were calling in asking me for advice. Me! What do I know? But because it's not one of those things you go around saying: 'Hello, my name's Sam, and I'm a stepmother.' I think people take advice where they can. That's where the support group came from. Personally, I'm really interested in female friendship and wanted to combine it with that whole support network that most women have (the way you have some friends you can say anything at all to).
With my next novel it was a bit different, I've stuck with the theme of women's friendship, but there were side issues that arose in the course of writing SSG that I knew I wanted to explore further mulched the story for months. It's no exaggeration to say I literally woke up at 6am one morning in January and thought, 'I have to write that down'. That became the synopsis.