New book: Shattered Roses. "There are enough stories with male characters"
My Beauty and the Beast retelling is available here My most recent book has been four years in the making. It was at the start of my PhD in 2012 when I moved to Warwick University that I wrote a few pages about Rose (initially the central character of the book, who later became Lady). I had the idea of playing with a fragmented story to see if it would work. Sarah Moss (my mentor’s) first comments about the story in progress was that it was too fragmented to work. I could see that something was missing. Yet, I couldn’t give up the story. Something about it made me scribble a few more lines now and then, and ponder where to go with it. I knew I needed a third character to pull the fragments together. In this way, the story could be fragmented, but it would also create a sense of order. Megan came into being. Though I took a long time to choose her name. She originally also had a brother. Then later I decided after a discussion with my friend Hei...