There’s something very special about typing the words ‘The End’, or even ‘To be continued’ at the end of a book. Well at least there is if you’re not me. Unfortunately as I can’t seem to write a book in the right order, and usually have more than one going at once (four at present), writing ‘The End’ usually just means that I’ve written the ending, so all there is to do now is work out how the story got there and, if possible, where it started.

So, today I typed ‘The End’ for ‘Martine’, but the story is less than half written and there are at least three other books to come before it will be published. It’s just a book which has been floating about in my head for a couple of years and I wanted to get the ideas recorded before I forgot them. It is a prequel to the main Saltbury series which looks at how a most unlikely couple: Rock star Debbie Stewart and fashion student Martine Fauld, met and fell in love. We know them a quarter century later, of course, as a devoted lesbian couple and the mothers of Roisin, Hazel, Sofie and Danielle. But getting together wasn’t easy, because as Debbie puts it:

“They say, ‘Never, ever fall for the straight girl, it always ends in tears.’ But both of us had, because we were both the straight girl, at least so we’d thought, and yet here we were, deeply in love.”