She was imagining that a First World War was quite thick and bristly and it would be forever coming off and you would be forever having to press around his lips to put it back on again.
So she gave me funny tips like that.
Otherwise I did quite a lot online and looked at various make-up schools going on and I read quite a lot of books about film and stage make-up. But the best stuff all came from this day.
They had all these bottles of different types of blood gooey blood, sticky blood, runny blood, fresh blood and old blood; old blood looks very different to new blood and a gunshot wound looks very different to a stab.
- And how did you get into writing in the first place?
Well I started off as a secretary in a literary agents but knew that I wanted to work in publishing. So I moved across after a couple of years into Random House Publishers, stayed there for about four years where I became a commissioning editor.
I was buying commercial fiction, young romantic comedies and that sort of thing, and. maybe it's inevitable, but there came a point when I just thought I really want a go and try to be on the other side.
It took me a few more years after I left there but it got to the point where I was sat in front of the computer and I just thought I'm not leaving until I have written chapter one (laughs).
And then I just got really lucky because it was a good time to be writing the sort of thing that I was writing because there were a lot of urban books about London girls and I wrote a very rural book about girls growing up in a farming community and I think it came at the right time. I wasn't expecting it to work really I was just getting it out of my system.
- How does the writing process work for you?
I think it's seeing a scene and hoping that it moves into a narrative and becomes a book, quite often they don't and you have this great scene and you can't use it, but certainly with the first one I wrote I just had this image of these two girls walking up a high street in a Welsh town in the pouring rain, seemingly in the middle of nowhere, and then these four incredibly gorgeous boys were walking towards them. I didn't know who they were or what they were doing there but it just moved from that.
And this one, again, I wanted to do something about the film industry and the balance between this cameraman and modern day Hollywood and it just grew from that.
- And what do you get out of writing on a personal level?
I get a real sense of achievement when I finish them. I get a sense of 'why can't I be more disciplined?' (laughs), I get a 'Why am I so disorganised feeling quite a lot. It's a lovely moment when you see it completed and you see the finished copy, if you like your cover.
And I do really enjoy living though my characters that are all setting out on their first big love. It's a decision that you have to make, especially in this market, whether you grow up with your readers or whether you keep re-inventing.
Some writers like Catherine Elliott started with her single girl but now writes about women who are married and having children whereas someone like Jill Mansell keeps re-inventing and her characters stay in their twenties, generally, as have mine.
And I have to admit that I still enjoy writing about a big romance that's happening to someone for the very first time.
- Finally what's next for you?
Early stages at the moment but I am working on a novel set on a local newspaper, but it's at the very beginnings.
FemaleFirst Helen Earnshaw