Which of your novels did you get most enjoyment from?
My published books are: The Last Dance, Walking Alone, Runaways (three titles that make up The Iniquities Trilogy) and Highly Unsuitable Girl but the one that gives me most enjoyment, at any time, is always the one that is currently in progress on the screen in front of me! Once it has gone from me into the wide world I’m not sure I would be able to read them. By the time a book is published I’ve probably read it completely through at least 5 times, that’s on top of all the re-reads and re-assessments made while the first, second and third drafts are in process. After all that, I’m happy to move on!
Which genre do you most like to write in?
My books are fiction, aimed at a mature, reasonably articulate person, male or female.
I find it interesting that some of the readers who have been most complimentary about my first three books were men. The fourth (Highly Unsuitable Girl) is more of a ‘female fiction’ book but men who have read it have said how much they learned from it!
They are generally set in the present day but all have detailed (historically accurate) back-stories.
Can you tell us about life as a writer?
This is very difficult to answer as I am really only a part-time writer. My husband and I, though nearing retirement, still have clients to support so some days I am tied to the computer 9 – 10 hours a day meeting their requirements and doing the administration that comes with running a business. But when the business is in a quiet period my day will vary depending on the stage of the current book. If it is in the planning stage I will potter, do some gardening, some housework, some lazing around, some reading, some checking of details or suddenly heading for the computer to write something for permanent record. Once the process of writing is underway I will sit at the computer and write for similar hours until the ‘day job’ interrupts again. I am incredibly lucky to work for myself from home so I can be totally flexible.
My husband would probably say ‘living with a writer’ isn’t easy as sometimes my mood is completely driven by what is going on in the lives of the people I am writing about rather than anything he has or hasn’t done! I am sure most books are dedicated to partners for a similar reason. They have to be incredibly tolerant at times!
Where did the idea for Anya Caves' character come from?
Anya Cave is completely a figment of my imagination! In fact all the characters portrayed are from my imagination but, having said that, everyone must to some extent write from their own experiences of life and people so I cannot deny there are elements of me and people I have known in Anya, Geoff, Tim and Peter. The overall themes of Anya’s life, firstly of dealing with differences in class and background and secondly the struggle she has to understand herself and others, are not unique to me though I would accept they have been important in my life. Since I wanted, in this novel, to write about places and times I know, Anya’s life has overlapped mine geographically (born on the Wirral, Liverpool University, Kent, London suburbs, love of Barbados) and in time (I was also born in 1950) but similarities and overlaps stop there. Anything other than that is purely coincidental.
Where did the idea for the novel come from?
I was in Barbados on business but had a free morning. This would be Christmas 2009. Colin, my husband had gone out shopping and I was sitting with the laptop waiting to receive some documents over the e-mail but the broadband was down. I looked at the shelves of books left for guests’ consumption in the villa and didn’t like the look of any of them so I went back to the laptop, opened Word and started to type. Within an hour I had a single page of the ‘plot’ outline and a rough idea of the main characters. By the end of the weekend I had the title, the first three chapters (well the first draft of them anyway).
Highly Unsuitable Girl started life as a simple ‘Boy meets girl, girl leaves boy because of his mother, girl finds other boys but not happiness, boy sees the light, girl goes back to original boy, they live happily ever after despite everyone and everything’ but it didn’t work out that way. What started out as a straightforward story of a relationship grew, as the characters made their own decisions about their lives, into something more substantial and, hopefully, more satisfying and enjoyable.
Highly Unsuitable Girl is now avaliable in all good book shops and as an e-book for the kindle and the i-pad.
Lucy Walton