Never the Twain is finally published! It has been a long, but enjoyable journey. It is two years since I started writing the book and it came about as a sort of by product of another book I had started to write.

A couple of years ago I gave up teaching to deal in antiques and collectables and to try my hand at writing; the writing quickly took over and after two years I gave up the shop too. My Constant Lady was my first attempt at writing a book, my first born as it were. What I hadn’t realised when I started writing was that the editing process took a lot more time than the actual story writing. As light relief from editing I began to write a story I called The Trouble with Twins. As I have mentioned in another blog post, twins run in my family so I wanted to write about twins. I came up with the idea of setting the book in late Victorian times as My Constant Lady is set in the 1760’s and I thought I would confuse myself if I wrote in the same time period. And besides, one of the things I love about writing is the research process; writing about a different time period gave me the chance to do more research, again it was another distraction from editing. It also meant several trips to Whitby which is never a bad thing.

As Never the Twain began to develop it quickly became apparent that although it was a romance it was also a story with a crime at the heart of it. Not a ‘Whodunit’ more of a ‘Whydunit’. Some writers are plotters but I’m what’s known in the book world as a ‘pantser’ which means someone who writes by the seat of their pants. As I write the story revels itself and I just follow it.

I never know when I start writing where my characters will take me. I just keep writing and let them take me wherever they want. I find this exciting as I never know what’s going to happen. I hope my characterisations are strong so when I get inside one of my characters heads I know what they will and won’t do, what they might say or not say. Then I just follow them. As the book developed I thought the original title The Trouble with Twins, sounded too lightweight and trivial as the book had taken a darker, grittier tone so I changed it to Never the Twain.

The biggest step for me in the early days of my writing was letting another person read my work. It was so hard to hand over the manuscript knowing no one but me had read it before. Self doubt does not come close to describing the feeling I had at the time. I first gave My Constant Lady to someone who although is a friend, I knew she would be brutally honest. She was, but she was constructive too and when she said she cried at the end I could have burst with pride. This spurred me on to finish Never the Twain.

I am a member of the Romantic Novelists Association and was lucky enough to be on their New Writers Scheme. This means they appoint a reader to critique your manuscript. Although it was hard to pass the story over, again any criticism was constructive. I realise this is how I will learn and grow and hopefully become a better writer. In time my ambition is to become someone’s favourite author!

I have a friend who lives in the next village to where I live in the Yorkshire Dales who is an author. She has published over twenty books successfully. With her encouragement I decided to publish Never the Twain. After a lot of deliberation I decided to self publish but as I had never attempted anything like this before it was very daunting. I am barely computer literate – when I was teaching if something went wrong with the computers I either shouted for the “techy” guy or asked an eleven year old to sort the problem. Suddenly I was making decisions about font styles, marketing, cover designs and all manner of things I had never even heard of such as Meta tags and blog tours! Without my friend Jill, laughably known as my “EPA”, this book would still be languishing in a file marked Book 2!

My Constant Lady is being edited as we speak and my designer Charlotte Mouncey, who also did the cover for Never the Twain, is working on it now. The cover design was one of my favourite aspects of the publishing process; no matter what we think we do judge a book by its cover. I was pleased when Charlotte found the painting, ‘A Whitby Terrace’ which is used in the background of the cover. As the book has a theatrical touch I asked her to find theatre masks and add a touch of blood. I love the end result and I hope you do too.

My Constant Lady is completely different to Never the Twain in that it is the first in a three book saga. It is set in the North East of England and is the story of Gabriel Reynolds a shipping magnate and an independently minded red head, Eleanor Barker. Think Poldark with shipping not mines and Whitby and Alnmouth not Cornwall. It is an historical romance and will be released early in 2020. The second book in the series, The Turning Tides will follow in the summer of 2020 and I am about to start writing the third and last in the series.

Although I have an idea for the opening of the story who knows where it will take me? Watch this space!

Never the Twain: A twin tale of jealousy and betrayal, love and murder.

The year is 1890. The port of Whitby is heaving with sailors and where there are sailors there are brothels doing a roaring trade. Beautiful identical twins April and May are in desperate straits. They have been abandoned by their actress mother and are about to have their virginity auctioned off to the highest bidder by a notorious brothel madam.

Their fate is hanging in the balance when Captain Edward Driscoll a handsome, wealthy shipping tycoon from Glasgow saves them before they can be deflowered.

But have they exchanged one form of slavery for another?

April, reluctantly swept up in her twin’s secrets and lies unwittingly becomes embroiled in a murderous conspiracy. Is May’s jealousy stronger than the twin bond which has always connected them?

Click here to purchase Never the Twain

Never the Twain: A dark blend of Gothic romance and murder.