Today January 27th, my novel The Accident is being released to the world in ebook, paperback, hardback, large print, and audio.
With this release, I felt that I should look at how I created Kate Duggan, the heroine of The Accident.
What happened to Kate before the story began?
Kate is a young woman, with a painful past. We meet Kate at a time in her life when she’s already overcome many obstacles, most of which would have been her worst nightmare. Little did she know that our story begins at a point in her life when times are about to get worse.
Shortly after moving back to Yorkshire, Kate is involved in a car crash. A car crash that she will always feel forever guilty for, because everyone said that she was the one to walk away. Her twin sister, Eve was crippled and her brother, James was killed. And even though people were right, she did walk away, she was left with a bright red, puckered facial scar that now depicted everything she did in her whole life.
During the time after the accident, Kate spent every moment she could at the hospital with her sister, Eve trying to do everything she could to help. It was at this time that Kate meets Rob, a personal trainer.
Rob is good-looking. He’s enigmatic, self-assured and fell into Kate’s life in a way that became all-encompassing. But, following late-night suspicious phone calls, Kate soon realises that things are not quite what she’d thought, and it suddenly occurs to her that she’s made a big mistake… and this is where our story begins….!!
What makes a good heroine?
A good heroine is always someone the reader can relate to and identify with. I always give my heroine a history, a life and a family, after all, we all have parents, siblings and distant aunties, don’t we? So, the characters within a novel need to have that too. I feel that, by doing this, it gives them depth of character and a personality that can’t be ignored. They don’t necessarily have to be sexy, they don’t all have to be tall, blonde, and straight out of a fashion magazine. But, I do feel that they need to be a good person with dreams, hopes and wishes. They need to have a goal in life, something to achieve, something to aspire to and the novel needs to take them on a journey to achieve this.
But most importantly, the reader needs to feel that they are taking the journey with our heroine, no matter how perilous that might be and that by the end of the novel, they’ve reached a good and satisfactory conclusion to the story.
