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My Mother's Lies - The Reason for the Delay

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You may have noticed the release date of My Mother’s Lies was a little behind this time, and for that I apologise. There is good reason. Some of you may have seen through my Facebook page where I post mostly fun and often candid photos of my furred and feathered friends. Very rarely do I ever say anything negative, but once in a while even I post about tough realities that hit our household. One of the hardest things to cope with is the death of a loved one. Never more so than when it is fast and unexpected.   Such was the case with Beau, my adorable black Labrador who was taken all too young and far too fast. It was a tragedy beginning with Beau falling ill within hours of him having his annual booster. At the same time, Skye, my Dalmatian also fell ill after her booster and spent two weeks on and off a drip at the vets while we were on holiday. We were totally convinced that Skye at the age of thirteen with all her allergies and being epileptic, would succumb and had mentally pre
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WRITING CHARACTERS AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS

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    Stepping back in time as I did when I wrote My Little Brother, I discovered a whole head full of memories of my own childhood. Events that happened which I’d tucked into the recesses of my mind. When I was a little girl, an event happened which I have magnified for the sake of My Sister’s Secret and made so much more of it than it was at the time. It was a fleeting brush with something that could have turned out so much worse than it did. I was never traumatised then. Years later when I was writing about children, this memory emerged to nag at me. Did I do the right thing? Should I have done more? What if my silence had cost someone else? If you’ve read any of my books already, you’ll realise that I write character based largely. Yes, the plots are thick with twists and turns, but the characters create them. My Sister’s Secret is heavy on people because I wanted that complex relationship of a large family, with different personalities kicking in. The ebb and flow of emoti
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The Ex

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DS Jenna Morgan Series - Inspiration, Writing & Research

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    What comes first when I create a story? – Part 3 What She Saw was for me a different approach initially.  For some unknown reason, the unrest in the world must have affected me. Call it luck, call it intuition, but unusually for this story I plunged heart and soul into the research and background of a subject matter which fascinated me, but I never had enough information on to write in great depths before.  This time the story needed my research to centre around fires, the fire service, arson and the legal side of these together with a depth of knowledge regarding firearms that I’d never previously indulged in. To my utter good luck, I happened upon a fire officer, Charl ie Cartwright, through mutual connections and we met up, messaged, talked on the phone and I prised each and every morbid detail from him regarding fires, heat, the effect on bodies at different stages I also met up with Peter Wright, a retired police officer with a wealth of knowledge about all things firear
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DS Jenna Morgan Series - Inspiration, Writing & Research

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What comes first when I create a story? – Part 2   It’s a strange thing but when I write romance, no one ever asks me what my inspiration for writing the story is. I’m not sure if that’s because they’re frightened of the answer because it might involve … shhh … sex, but I can tell you far more people are interested in your desire to kill. So I gave some thought to my inspiration to write Someone’s There (originally titled Copycat) and I can honestly say that killing off nurses has absolutely no connection to the fact that my youngest daughter is in her final year of her nursing degree. No connection at all… Someone’s There is dedicated to my dad who would have been 100 years old in February 2020, the same month as the book’s release. My dad was a quiet hero. He fought in World War II and we grew up believing the stories he told us were just that. Stories of battles and hand to hand combat. Rescues in the dead of night. But it turned out they were all true. He’d actually been
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DS Jenna Morgan Series - Inspiration, Writing & Research

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What comes first when I create a story? – Part 1 Find Her Alive (originally titled The Keeper) Book One in my DS Jenna Morgan series started with a long, lonely walk in woodland at twilight at the beginning of autumn with my beautiful Dalmatian, Skye. As we wound our way up the hillside with thick trees above and below us, I slipped and skidded along the narrow pathway, barely wide enough for me to pass through let alone move over if someone came in the opposite direction. A low mist had settled over the River Severn and the acoustics of the gorge below me had voices carrying up the hillside to swirl with ghostly echoes. With a vivid imagination, I believed at first it was only that that had my hackles on the back of my neck tingling with awareness, but three steps forward and I stopped while Skye snuffled in the autumn leaves with a delight only a dog would understand. Aware that I was being watched, I turned my head to stare up at the darkening woodland
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Life in Lockdown - The Chicken Diairies

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Over the past few weeks we've had a wonderful event happen and we thought you'd like to share in our journey. I'll post a daily update in our chicken diaries each day. Blondie is my little silkie, we hatched her a couple of years ago ourselves and she's been hand reared. She's supremely friendly and our little darling. But she has an issue... she loves to brood. So a couple of months ago we decided that next time she started to brood, we would let her hatch her own babies. She laid two of her own and stole eggs from the other girls - eight in total. I marked eggs laid on day one and day two and removed all the rest that she continued to steal throughout her brooding period. She's a little tinker! And this is what happened. Tune in tomorrow to find out what happened next.
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