What I love to write
One of the things I love about writing is the chance to indulge all the other things I’m interested in. Here’s a few of the topics you might encounter in my work. By the time I’ve finished writing I’ll probably have added some new ones.
Crime
I write a lot in the crime, thriller and adventure genres. I like stories where there’s a lot happening and a lot at stake.
Museums
I have a degree in archaeology (from York) and have worked for the National Maritime Museum and Royal Observatory Greenwich. This means a lot of thinking about the meaning of even the smallest, most insignificant objects in my work. And sometimes I just put things in because they’re cool. Antiquities smuggling was the subject of my MA screenwriting graduation script, LOOT.
Landscapes
I love to have adventures and write as an excuse to go to interesting places, run up and down hills and jump into cold water. If I write a heist movie where someone has to carry ten grand in loose change up the spiral staircase at Covent Garden tube, (FLOAT, shortlisted for the BBC writers’ Room) I’ve obviously gone and climbed those stairs for real. Mostly a city girl, I also set my stories in the woods, fields and coastlines of the British Isles, littered as they are with ancient barrows, forts, castles and mysterious boundaries and hollows.
Folklore and myth
I’m a huge fan of traditional tales and storytelling, campfires, stories told for centuries under the stars. River gods, fairies, dryads, they’re all milling about in there somewhere.
Science
For many years my day job has been in scientific and academic publishing, I’m fascinated by the forefront of knowledge and how we construct it. For three years I was at the Royal Society, working on the world’s longest continually published academic journal, founded before Britain’s adoption of the Gregorian calendar. It’s older than dates! The history of exploration and discovery is reflected in a few ideas in my little magic notebook of things I’ll eventually write.
Politics
I was raised on political satire like Private Eye and Radio 4’s the News Quiz. I don’t often write about party politics but the power dynamics of a society do fascinate me. I do have one idea in the little notebook that includes a dastardly MP, but more often the political sits beneath the story.
Humanity
It all comes together, I think, to form a preoccupation with humans at the edge of what they think is possible, or managing times in of crisis, and their relationship with the society that created them and history that came before them.
