I often find that it’s when I take a break from writing that the ideas start to flow, and that’s definitely what happened with The Many Futures of Maddy Hart. A few years ago, I’d taken a couple of days off and gone to Nottingham alone to relax and read and do some Christmas shopping. It was the first day of the trip and I’d gone to the cinema, and while I was watching the film, which had nothing to do with time travel or romance, I thought ‘what if you could see your future with a person when you slept with them?’ It seemed to come from absolutely nowhere, and I was instantly obsessed with it, but I didn’t write it for quite a while.
This is often the case with new ideas – I like to let them percolate a bit while I work on other things. Over time, different parts of the story started to fill themselves in. Maddy’s relationship with her best friend Priya, which is quite central to the novel. Her brother Henry’s accident. Oliver, the man she falls in love with, and what she will see when she sleeps with him. Before Oliver, Maddy has never slept with anyone more than once, so it’s with him that she first experiences the time jump happening over and over. That’s when the second ‘what if?’ came. What if you saw something in your future that meant you had to sabotage your present?
This is one of those books that could have been an absolute nightmare to write, but wasn’t. I loved Maddy and Oliver, I loved the concept, and it was pure joy to create (ok, maybe not ‘pure’ joy – I’m sure I had sluggish days but I don’t remember them). I hope that reading it will be joyful too. I’m a bit sad to let these characters go, but I’m also happy to pass them on to you.