COULD YOU TELL US A LITTLE BIT ABOUT YOUR LATEST NOVEL?

Beneath the Shadows is the story of Grace, who returns to the North Yorkshire moors to find out what’s happened to her husband who went missing there a year earlier.  They had gone to the moors to start a new life, and a week later Adam vanished, leaving their young baby Millie on the doorstep.  When Grace returns to the cottage, she’s done her grieving and she’s trying to start moving on, but she still really wants to find out what’s happened. Gradually she’s drawn into the village and all its secrets – the suspicious locals and the folktales and the legends that abound there – and she finds herself caught up in a struggle for the truth against lots of competing forces. 

YOU WRITE A LOT ABOUT THE YORKSHIRE MOORS AND ALL THE FOLKLORE AND SUPERSTITION SURROUNDING THEM.  WHAT INSPIRED THAT?

Basically, when I was looking at a place to set it, I was trying to find somewhere a bit isolated. The Yorkshire moors was a gift to me because my in-laws are from there so I know the area very well anyway.  I’ve been with my husband for about fifteen years and we’ve spent a lot of time there, so I already knew quite a bit of background detail. I knew there was plenty of depth that I could draw on, and descriptively it would be great as it had all these folktales.  Also, there are literary associations in the area that I could use. So there was such a lot to that setting that nowhere else seemed as good.  It just always was the setting. 

WHAT GAVE YOU THE PUSH TO GET SERIOUS ABOUT WRITING AND GETTING A BOOK PUBLISHED?

Turning thirty was a big push for me, because I started realising that I had this dream and I was playing about with it all the time, but unless I really pushed myself it was only ever going to be a dream.  I just wanted to get Come Back to Me finished, have a go – I thought that if this doesn’t work, I’d know that I’d had a go, and that’s the most important thing. This tends to be my philosophy on lots of things.  Have a crack at it, and if it doesn’t work or you make a mess of it, at least you know you’ve given it a good go.

WHERE DO YOU GET YOUR INSPIRATION FROM?

All sorts of places, I get inspiration from different things all the time.  There will be things that I hear day to day, from talking to my friends to what I hear on the news or general meanderings that I have about life, but the bigger inspirations come from certain types of events or character situations that really grab me. I’m always very touched by the struggles my characters are going through, because I think that I’m putting them in very difficult situations, and they are very likeable people in a lot of ways, but people who are also struggling in other ways. So they’re quite dear to my heart for that reason.

WHAT WAS THE RESEARCH LIKE FOR ‘BENEATH THE SHADOWS’?

It wasn’t too bad. I did a lot of research that didn’t end up in the book, because at one stage I had Grace busy with an occupation, she was painting, but that didn’t end up in the book.  I’d gone into bits of research about that, and then her baby got sick at one stage and I’d done a lot of research about that illness. So I did a lot of things that weren’t used, but in terms of the North Yorkshire moors, it was just finding out as much as possible about the folktales, legends, landscape, different bits and pieces like that. So far my books aren’t too research intensive because they’re quite psychologically driven. 

WHAT ADVICE WOULD YOU GIVE TO AN ASPIRING WRITER?

Write first and foremost for yourself, because it’s a long road even once you are published, until you start establishing yourself.  I wouldn’t call myself an established writer at all yet; I think I’m still on that path.  Learn as much as you can about different things from writing structure to how to market your book.  Learn as much as you can about the industry whenever you get the opportunity.  Look critically at your own work, don’t expect other people to do it for you, because if you can do it yourself you’ll be streets ahead of the competition, and it is such a fiercely competitive field that if you can learn to be a good editor of your own work you will have so much more opportunity and, potentially, success. 

IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE THAT YOU THINK OUR READERS SHOULD KNOW ABOUT YOU?

I always like to mention that I wrote extras for Beneath the Shadows.  You can go to the Random House website and see Annabel’s finished article, and also an extra chapter which is a short story from Annabel’s point of view (www.randomhouse.com.au/beneaththeshadows).