NOW don’t get me wrong, I like a bit of Russian literature — but round the pool? On holiday?
I felt pretentious, sitting there reading Crime and Punishment while others were reading... Well, what were they reading?
I won’t name authors because I don’t want to appear too snobbish here (too late?), but the books were of a certain type. Some were reading stories of groups of women going on holiday, leaving their husbands behind, meeting exotic locals in foreign countries and thinking they would cast aside their everyday lives.
Others were plodding through autobiographies of sports stars or those books in which the author tells you how to survive on your own in the jungle for a month. No thanks.
I thought ‘there’s got to be something inbetween’. Something not too hi-falutin' but not the cliched easy read that people tend to take on their holidays.
Something you can get your teeth into without having to take in a history lesson while you’re at it.
I’d had an idea and I started to write... then I got home and forgot about it.
A couple of years later I read my scribblings and thought ‘it’s not bad this’.
I said to my partner that we needed to go back to Italy so I could carry out some research — it was a good excuse — and so we did.
I took my notebook and my iPad everywhere, writing everything down and transcribing it.
Then, some time later on a Greek island came the lightbulb moment that brought my story to life.
A couple of writing and marketing courses and eight drafts later here comes (well, nearly) The Choreography of Ghosts, a book about searching, finding, losing. A book about life and death. A book about attempting to answer the big questions in life — like Dostoevsky might try but I'm not going in that deep — and finding the solutions are much closer to home —but not like those found in books about groups of women going on holiday together to an exotic island.