My publisher, Piatkus, like my outline for a new novel and will be issuing a contract shortly. Now I can get stuck in, developing the outline into a novel of 100,000 words. An exciting journey lies ahead of me. My working title is Tread Softly, Alice. That of course may change before I submit the final work by the first of February 2015. At the moment, 1900 is the year in which the novel will open and before the final words are written it will have taken me to Yorkshire, Scotland, and South Africa and maybe to other lands if the characters tell me where they want to go. Yes, my characters do talk to me! We have some very interesting conversations. Generally we agree on the direction the story of their lives should take and generally we come to an amicable conclusion. Towards the end of my first Jessica Blair novel, The Red Shawl (1993), I was going to kill my leading female character but she said to me, ‘Don’t do that and I will provide you with a second novel.’ I took her advice and sure enough the fact that she was alive led me to writing, A Distant Harbour (1994)
