my writing

I’m currently writing my second novel. I started writing my first, A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head, when I was studying for my Creative Writing MA. I was very confident that it would only take my a year or so to finish. Ha!
My second, Nights in Paris, is much easier and much more fun to write; it’s speeding along nicely!

CURRENT NOVEL IN PROGRESS: NIGHTS IN PARIS
Nights in Paris is a fictional exploration of the lives of the French writers Anaïs Nin and Colette. The novel is set in the early 1900s (Colette) and 1930 (Anaïs), and is based on detailed research to ensure historical accuracy. I love the sensuality of the early 1900s — the world was opening up, travel was becoming more possible. There was such an interest in new, exotic experiences, tastes and smells: turkish cigarettes, Oriental art, jewels and feathers in women’s hair. There was also the more decadent side of the desire to have new and interesting experiences: women started smoking in public and using opium, ether, laudanum and absinthe… as well as mixtures of “Jezebel” champagne cocktail parties.

The novel is inspired by real events in the women’s lives, and uses fiction to tell the possible stories behind these events. I’m interested in the scandalous love-lives of these married, bourgeois, seemingly eminently respectable women. Each chapter explores a development in their relationships, and draws together the similarities and contrasts in their lives. I want people to read these stories and be seduced by Colette and Anaïs, to fall in love with them like I have.

FIRST NOVEL: A PRAWN’S HEART IS IN ITS HEAD
What started life as Chapter One of “A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head” won first prize for prose in a national UK fiction competition, and was then published as a short story in the Spinifex anthology “Car Maintenance, Explosives and Love”. The anthology was published in NZ and Australia, and I also saw it on displayed in the Libertas bookshop in York (UK), which was very exciting. The Libertas bookshop has now physically gone, but they are still in business online. That was a great bookshop, on a par with Silver Moon in London (very sadly missed).

The novel took a long time (nine years) to write, mostly because I had no idea how to go about it. The story refused to be created in a linear narrative, and when I tried to force it into a ‘normal’ storyline, it just didn’t work. It also took so long because during that time I emigrated twice (I’ve now done it three times), which is always disruptive. Eventually I gave up trying to control the story, and allowed myself simply to write whatever was in my head, trusting that somehow the novel would work itself out. It worked! After about a year of ‘growing’ the novel like this, it suddenly all made sense, and two years later it was finished. I just had to let it flow, and believe in myself.

A Prawn’s Heart is in its Head looks at the hidden ways in which history affects and enslaves us. The novel explores ethnicity, sexuality and immigration, and the process of becoming drawn into, experiencing and leaving a violent relationship. A Prawn’s Heart is based on my own experiences, as well as the stories of my grandparents from the second world war. The novel is set in Eastern Europe, the UK and New Zealand.