The two questions I have most often been asked since Tell Me No Secrets came into print are - Where did you get the idea for the story and how long did it take you to write it?

The story didn’t come fully formed – do they ever?! - It grew out of a writing class exercise. I was taking a course at the University of Sussex called Autobiography and the Imagination. Our second assignment was to write an autobiographical piece and add in three lies. The flashback in Chapter One was that piece.

I filed it away in my writing folder and it was about seven months later, when I was going through my work, that I had a What if? moment. What if something happened at the camp? What if Orla and Grace had a fight? What if that fight led to a death? And they kept it a secret? And now they’re grown up? ... and so on.

I used several sheets of A3 paper to plan story and character arcs and then began to write the first draft of the novel. My goal was not publication, but simply to get to the end. I’d started three novels before TMNS, got as far as thirty thousand words and then, when it seemed like I was hanging on to the reins of half a dozen horses about to bolt off in all different directions, I gave up.

This time I made it. With perseverance and sheer bloody-mindedness, I wrote 95,000 words. It was a story. It had a beginning, a middle and an end. It had taken me nine months to write and another three months of polishing and finally, I had a finished product.
With hope rather than expectation, I wrote to an agent. I was both delighted and anxious when he said he liked the set-up of the novel but not the way the plot developed. After a chat with him, I could see that he was right. I hadn’t fulfilled on the ‘promise’. The development of the plot was unsatisfying.

Simultaneously scared that I wouldn’t be able to do it and optimistic that I would, I plunged back in and rewrote it, pushing both Grace and Orla to act decisively so that a showdown was inevitable.

Six months later we had the final draft.