Recently I had fun doing an interview for I Heart Sapphic about my novel Dirty Little War. The original idea is almost a decade old now, so it was a fun little jaunt down memory lane.

The rest of this post contains spoilers etc as well as some writing craft talk.

As I wrote in the interview:

…[I found] a grimy pub that didn’t feel entirely safe, but did free coffee refills. I pulled out a notebook – a Field Notes book I can still picture clearly – and, inspired by that place, I came up with the entire plot in about an hour.

Talking about it again made me want to hunt through my notebooks to see if my memory was playing tricks on me. This was no small feat – I have over 60 completed Field Notes. Much to my delight, I was able to find it relatively quickly:

One of the reasons I like Field Notes is they look good a little battered by time. I flipped through the pages and there it was, the original brainstorming. Clearly Taylor Swift must have been in my ears at the time.

This is fairly typical of my process. I’ll noodle around with some random concepts until a character comes to me. Often there will be some kind of musical association, even if it never makes it into the final version. On the following page, Carmen and Evie are there, even if they don’t have names yet.

I didn’t remember this until I went back, but originally Carmen was the main character. I built most things on her personality and background. But when it came to actually writing, it was Evie’s point of view that was more interesting. Carmen was the enigma, the unattainable, best examined from the outside.

Apparently, the title was there from the beginning too. Another thing that is quite unusual in the world of writing.

Next came the rough outline. As I mentioned in the interview, it was all done in one sitting. Flicking through the book, I can see my memory there was also correct. Usually, I have chapters with at least the point of view. Here, instead, it was a stream of consciousness brain dump of the plot, with the key points I needed to get across to keep things moving.

From there, the rest would have taken place in Scrivener. I always plot by hand, but write digitally. Look at that scrawl. 80,000 words of that chicken scratch would be utterly incomprehensible.

I feel like the post it notes were probably added later, once the characters had names and their connections were important. It was probably my way of keeping track of the other characters I was introducing in the story and whose side they were on.

Throughout it all, there is a clear atmosphere of threat and menace. The attraction between the two women has to survive some pretty serious odds. The consequences of choosing each other are logically not worth it, but in my experience, people never take the logical route once desire becomes involved.

Most of my writing isn’t rainbows and kittens. I know that puts a lot of people off when it comes to romance. I put my characters through hell to get them to the end. It makes the payoff sweeter.

That was a fun little wander through how I do what I do and why I love it. Books I write under various pen names follow the same process, but this will remain one that is special to me.

Plenty of people wanted a sequel, but I didn’t have enough of a story for a whole novel. Still, it was nice to give them some closure. If you want to read it, you can grab it here. It’s called Almost Heaven. Jon Denver was in my ear for that one. Quite the departure from Taylor Swift, but full circle in other ways, I suppose.

Thanks for reading! At the time of publishing, Dirty Little War is on sale for $2.99 as part of the I Heart Sapphic Reading Challenge under the category of Forbidden Relationships, so you can grab it here. It’s also part of Kindle Unlimited for those voracious readers amongst you.