It’s being quite an interesting process editing my next but one book ‘Martine’.  This will be the tenth in my ‘Saltbury Chronicles’ series and I have grown to know my main cast of characters very well.  But suddenly I’m in a rather different world: the world of the mid 1970’s, when Rock star Debbie Stewart was just 19 years old and her future wife, Martine Fauld, was 21.  Virtually no-one else we’ve grown used to, be it Hazel, Tina, Annie, Roisin, Carol or anyone else even close to their age, has yet been born.

This was a time with different attitudes and very different technology.  The Internet, mobile phones, email and home computers were barely even dreams as yet.  A telephone answerphone was an exciting innovation, and yet for Debbie, a Stratocaster and a Marshall amp was still the best she could get for Rock guitar, even if her albums were recorded on tape and came out on LP and cassette, rather than as CD’s or downloads. Oh, and almost everyone smoked.

One of my missions in editing is to catch any little anachronisms that got by me when I wrote the first draft and that has meant a lot of research.  When exactly would the particular form of Deb’s beloved classic sports car, her MGB, have been built?  When were synthesisers and sequencers first generally available? And if a world famous, but widowed young Rock star had fallen in love with another woman in 1976, as Debbie does, how might the ever-conservative British press have reacted?