My books are lesbian romances, which also try to look at often difficult real world (usually gender or LGBTQ) issues.  I have to say though, I love writing comedy, so my stories always have a good dose of humour, however dark the main events might sometimes get.

In fact, I have characters who were deliberately introduced purely to provide comic moments.  The first was main character, Tina’s, childhood friend Katie Ralstrick, who’s grown up to be an outrageous little imp who loves to shock her more staid friend, mostly with tales from what she claims is her extremely adventurous love life.

There’s Dame Evadne in ‘History Girls’, the hugely wealthy Upper Class dowager, who stomps about her estate in tatty old clothes, gets told off by her housekeeper for bringing her motorbike into the kitchen and likes nothing better than getting covered in oil maintaining her cars.

In ‘Gold’ which will come out next year, we’ll also meet an old school friend of Tina’s, who is now a less than brilliantly competent police-woman.

Perhaps my most loved comic character though, is Sofie, the baby sister of my other central character, Hazel Fauld.  The family call her Monster and at four years old, she’s a precocious little bundle of mischief.  Although on the quiet, she’s also fearsomely intelligent and surprisingly caring, at least when she remembers to be.

Mind you, things can sometimes go into reverse, and I have a book in first draft which picks up Sofie Fauld fifteen years on, aged 19.  Katie looms large in that one too, by now aged 35, and we’ll see a very different, more serious side to both their natures.

My more serious characters have their funny side too.  Remember the moment in ‘Annie’ when Martine takes a sledge-hammer to her wife, Rock star Debbie Stewart’s car.  There’s the time Tina and her lawyer father go for a meeting at the home of a millionaire couple who are amongst their most important clients, to find the two naturists, stark naked on their lawn, but with files and laptops all ready for business.  I personally love the many and varied idiosyncrasies of the Sappho’s ‘Dockers’.  But another thing you haven’t met yet, but will do in ‘Gold’ is the beautiful way fierce Carol Baxter can still be wound up by her impossible ex-girlfriend, Loren.

My absolute favourite though, is Hazel.  We see her grow a good deal over the course of the Saltbury series.  When we meet her, she’s sixteen, and the series starts with her scathing description of her quite revolting school uniform.  But even as an adult she always has an irreverent way of looking at things, and her beloved Annie, however sophisticated she may seem, eggs her on.  At the moment I’m getting near the end of the first draft of my next book, ‘Debbie’s Gift’ (due out before Christmas) and I’ve just had fun with a scene in which the couple manage to turn each other on in the course of humiliating an arrogant student who has a distinct sense of entitlement towards Annie.  As the woman herself says: “Bad Hazel!”