A Crime Update

Grave matter in the Lake District...

Time for an update, though if you follow me on any of my social media you probably won’t need it. It was on 24 September last year that I announced my decision to switch genres and write crime and it was on 18 September this year that I had confirmation that Aria Fiction wanted to publish the first three in my crime series.

What a year that’s been.

I’m not going to repeat the story of how I began to write crime. It’s up on the blog and you can scroll back through if you’re interested. But I wanted to use this blog entry to encourage anyone else never to give up.

The reason I didn’t write crime was that I thought I wasn’t good enough. I thought it was too difficult. I thought the plotting was too complex and it would be impossible to keep readers interested in so many characters, that handling several points of view was beyond my capability.

And here’s the thing. It was almost certainly true.

I’ve been writing for ever. When I first started I almost certainly couldn’t have handled the crime genre. Let’s face it, when I first started writing I couldn’t handle any other genre. I had too much to learn. I did have a couple of stabs at thrillers but they were woeful, so woeful that even in my naive innocence I knew it. So I wrote romance, not because I thought it was easier — anything but —  but because the structure of it is simpler.

I liked writing romance. I still do, and it was the genre in which I was first published. But I couldn’t help myself and I shifted to romantic suspense, which involved a crime alongside a love story. And that’s how I became a crime writer. Without realising it.

But the message is this. It took me years to develop the skills to tackle writing a publishable novel, in any genre. I have a cupboard full of unfinished (or finished but unreadable) manuscripts to prove it, the carcases of good ideas that died on the long march to my dream.

There was no instant revelation, no stepping into crime and suddenly realising that I’d found my genre. The truth is that once I’d assembled my writer’s toolkit I could apply it to anything. Because the fundamentals of writing a good story are the same in any genre. I didn’t become a crime writer overnight. I became a crime writer because I practised and practised and practised. 

My advice to any aspiring writer is to do write and to keep writing. The chances are that most of your early work will fall way short of being publishable (there are exceptions). But writing is a craft. Give it everything. You won’t regret it.

An Update from the Dark Side

Dark deeds among the trees...

It’s been a while since I blogged, although as always my intentions were good. But the regular updates on my crime writing…they didn’t go well, did they?

Still, here I am. It’s eight months since I stared in the mirror and realised that despite what I thought I actually am a crime writer. And believe me, a lot has happened in that time. First up, I’ve validated  myself. I applied for membership of the Crime Writers’ Association and after a review of my published works they decided that, yes, I qualified. So it’s official. Even without having written what I thought of as a crime novel I was a crime writer. 

The next step was to write the book. I chose my setting — Cumbria. I chose my protagonists — DCI Jude Satterthwaite and his-newly-arrived sergeant, Ashleigh O’Halloran. I set up their back stories — he struggling it the balance between his job and his relationships, she still trying to break free from an unhappy marriage. Then came the plot, hinging on the discovery of a child’s body after a wildfire on a Cumbrian fell. 

It was easier than I thought. It’s probably because I still thinking of myself as primarily a romance writer, so that the shackles were off. I had fun. I experimented. I tried things I’d never tried before. I played with many points of view. I made characters do things that romance readers  would never forgive them for. I broke the chains of the romance genre and left a relationship unresolved. 

Book three is set in beautiful Grasmere.

I wrote the next book, about the murder of a centenarian in an old people’s home. I sent the first one off to make its way in the world and (as you may have seen elsewhere) it found itself an agent. I planned the third book, in which a controversial and outspoken US professor outrages all and sundry and doesn’t care who she offends — until it’s too late. I have ideas for books four, five and six.  

Quite where this series will go remains to be seen. I’ve been in the writing game long enough to know that there are no certainties. But I’m enjoying the ride, and at the very least it gives me the excuse to undertake research and to post some photographs of a beautiful part of the world.