Writing my next but one book ‘Martine’ really is proving to be fascinating.  Yes I know it’s not the book I’m meant to be writing.  ‘History Girls’ will be the next out, so I’ll need to get it to the editor before too long and it is still wholly in first draft, so I’m starting to panic a bit.  But even so, ‘Martine’ seems to have captured my heart.   It’s simply pouring out of me with over 100,000 words so far and still going.  But the strange thing is that I don’t seem to be writing it at all.  It’s more as if I’m doing it from memory so that my only problem is to keep physically writing fast enough to get it down.  And yet I can’t be, because I’ve never written anything like it before and nor, so far as I know, has anyone else.

‘Martine’ is a prequel story.  It tells of how two young friends of 19 and 21 who share a flat and regard themselves as straight, found themselves in love after a particular evening that changed their lives forever.  We know them well: Martine Fauld and Debbie Stewart, the ‘Mums’ of Roisin, Sofie (Monster), Dannie and of course our usual protagonist, Hazel.  But this story takes place long before, in the 1970s.  That in itself is interesting.  I was around at the time in my teens, but it’s still important to remember the differences.  There was no Internet, email, no mobile phones, GPS, home computers and so on.  On the other hand, there were a lot more pay phones, inflation and strikes.  In Britain the pubs were closed for most of the day, cameras used film; records came as vinyl discs or cassettes, and if you wanted to record a TV program, hard luck, you had to wait for the 1980s for that.

I’ve always put a lot of work into the back-story of my characters.  A lot of it never gets into the books, but each person’s past helps shape who they are so I need to know it if I’m to create real breathing people not cardboard cut-outs.  We’ve heard quite a lot about Deb and Marty’s past in the existing Saltbury books.  But before I started to write I produced a story plan longer than a normal chapter.  Anything already in the published books had to be treated as canonical and thus writ in stone, but I thought I knew how the rest would go.  Apparently not.  Deb and Marty have pretty much torn up the plan and now I have no more idea how things are going to work out than anyone else.  It’s quite exciting.