Do you like reading psychological thrillers? I hope so, because this past year I have been busy switching writing genres!
OMG it is SUCH fun writing psychological thrillers! Perhaps it’s slightly worrying that I like killing off my fictional characters… But please don’t hold that against me! Last weekend I attended the Killer Women Festival in London and it was chock full of female authors who write crime novels. They were a surprisingly normal bunch of people…
Back to the reason I’ve fallen silent during the past year. I’ve written three psychological thrillers and have just started the fourth. Book one is a stand-alone called The Obituary. It’s being released soon. The next books are part of a series and I’ll reveal more shortly.
One of the things we discussed at the Killer Women Festival was plotters and pansters. For those of you not in the know, writers are divided up into said plotters and pantsters. As the name suggests, plotters work it all out before putting pen to paper, or fingers to keyboard. Pantsters write the book as they go along. I liken both methods to creating a massive jigsaw puzzle. I hoped I would be a plotter, creating flow charts and post-it notes and lists. How much easier it is to write, when you’ve got a structure and know (vaguely) what’s going to happen when. Sadly, I’m a panster. At the start of the book, I know the premise, I know approximately what’s going to happen at the beginning and at the end, but the eighty thousand or so words in-between reveal themselves as we go along.
So this is the start of The Obituary: Laura Swallow’s death is reported in the newspaper. But Laura isn’t dead. She was an obituary writer herself many years ago. Today she’s an estate agent (realtor for my American friends) and she’s alive and well…