It's the first Wednesday in June, so it's time for the Insecure Writers Support Group.
This month's question is: Writers have secrets! What are one or two of yours, something readers would never know from your work?
Well, that would be telling, wouldn't it? But okay... A couple of things you might not guess from my work... Hmmm.
I have a sister, but we barely ever speak to one another. We're certainly not close like the siblings tend to be in my books. That's partly because we live on opposite sides of the world, but with modern technology, that isn't really the barrier it used to be. We basically just have very little in common other than our parents and have few shared experiences to draw on because we stopped living in the same house when she was thirteen and I was fifteen.
I live in New Zealand. My books are generally not set in New Zealand or Australia or France or America or the UK or anywhere instantly recognizable. My characters all live in or around a city called Milton which is as big or small as I need it to be for each book, and has whatever geographical features each book needs. For example, the book I'm working on now, needs a lake a couple of hours away, so there is a lake, while another book I've written needed mountains on the outskirts, so there are mountains.
The nice thing about having created this city is that characters from one book can pop up again in another. Sacha from The Sidewalk Regrets makes a cameo in the first scene of the book I'm working on now, and her boyfriend, Dylan, is referred to in My Murder Year. I'm just waiting for the right time for Ozzy from Stumped to show up again somewhere...
What's something people wouldn't know about you, from your work?
That's true, it's not much of a secret if you're telling people. That's such a cool idea to have the same "city" in all your books. I love that.
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