If you'd told me years ago that I'd go from writing about Iron Age Britain to crafting a novel involving a misbehaving funeral hat, I would have laughed. Loudly. And yet here we are: proof that the writing path is rarely straight, often surprising, and occasionally downright chaotic. And age has got nothing to do with it. I started my first novel at the age of 70. Regrets? Only that I wish I had started the process of writing a lot earlier.
My first published works were the Cartimandua Trilogy: Wild Brigantia, Fires of Brigantia, and Blood of Brigantia. These books were my apprenticeship, my training ground, my crash course in how to write a novel without losing my mind entirely. They demanded discipline, research, structure and a deep respect for the history I was weaving into fiction.
Historical fiction is a world of its own. You can't simply make things up as you go along. Well, you can, but only within the boundaries of what's historically plausible. Those books taught me how to write. How not to write. How to keep going when the plot wandered off without me.
And then, quite unexpectedly, I found myself writing something entirely different.
The Black Funeral Hat arrived with a spark of humour, a dash of chaos, and a character who refused to wait her turn. Erin Smith walked into my imagination with her grief, her awkwardness, her heart and her hat. A hat that tilts, wobbles, misbehaves and generally refuses to be ignored. A hat that would never, ever be allowed in the Iron Age.
Switching genres felt like stepping into a new room in a house I'd lived in for years. The foundations were familiar: character, emotion, story. But the furniture was different. Lighter. Funnier. More chaotic in the best possible way.
And yet, I brought pieces of my historical-fiction self with me. The discipline. The structure. The love of weaving threads together until they click into place. Even in comedy, there's a puzzle to solve.
People sometimes ask if I'll return to historical fiction, and the answer is yes. I'm already deep into a new story set in Iron Age Britain, this time involving Julius Caesar. Once a history lover, always a history lover.
But I've also discovered the joy of writing humour, of exploring the absurdity of everyday life, of letting characters trip over their own emotions and occasionally their own hats.
After all, stories find us in the most surprising ways. And sometimes, they bring a hat with them.
