Alas, it was all a dream… It’s a tired cliché when it appears in a story, and not very reliable as a source of inspiration. Many’s the time I’ve woken in the night and tried to cram the details of a vivid dream into my memory, only to discover the next morning that it makes no sense whatsoever.
But on this occasion – ironically, on the night after a very enjoyable office Christmas party – I fell asleep and dreamed about a young woman who stumbles upon a killing spree in a tiny Sussex village. Every detail was there, from the moment she spots what appears to be a body lying in the road, through a terrifying chase with the gunman on her heels, and culminating in a shocking discovery: the killer isn’t working alone.
I knew immediately that I could develop a novel from this, though it took quite a while to decide who was trying to kill my protagonist, and even longer to work out why. But when it was done, SKIN AND BONES was the book that transformed my career. After years of pitching to literary agents without success, I sent the opening extract to ten agents and ended up getting offers of representation from four of them. The sheer delight of feeling like I had written a “hot property” is something I will always treasure.
Fast forward more years than I want to contemplate, and SKIN AND BONES is being given a new lease of life by my publishers, Boldwood. I loved having the chance to revisit it, and the rewrite I did for this was hugely satisfying. Perhaps it’s a consequence of how smartphones have eroded our attention spans, but a story that so many readers had described as fast-paced actually struck me as a little sluggish at times; now, having trimmed the word count by about 15%, I feel it moves a lot faster.
This is also the book that many readers and reviewers described as ‘cinematic’, and it’s probably the one I’d most like to see made into a film. Now that really would be going beyond my wildest dreams!
Pick up your copy of Skin and Bones today: https://mybook.to/SkinandBones