I am working on two further projects at the moment.

 

Interquel to The Keeping of Secrets

 

An interquel is what I call the story in between, in the same way that a prequel is the story before the story and a sequel is the story after the story.  

 

While The Keeping of Secrets is essentially the story of Pat’s journey through the Second World War, in the Epilogue we meet Pat again at the end of her life, learn of Jon’s death nearly twenty-five years before and meet her children Emily and Alistair as nearly-retired adults. Jon came from a large family of aunts and cousins and I want to explore this family further and in particular the daughter of Jon’s cousin Alan, Leonora, nicknamed Leo for short. The first part of the story is told from the point of view of the man she marries, Daniel, a subtly controlling personality, and is also about the family secret he stumbles on early in their relationship and the repercussions from his knowledge of that secret years later.  In this story we meet Jon and Pat again, celebrating their 25th Wedding Anniversary, and other characters from The Keeping of Secrets. The interquel both slots into and overlaps The Keeping of Secrets, taking the reader through to the secret’s revelation. 

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The Free Trilogy

 

I am also researching the seventeenth century for a trilogy centring on the life of Frideswide, known as Free, the daughter of an officer of the Continental wars and the great-granddaughter of a merchant and entrepreneur of his day who moved the family up into the ranks of the landed gentry.  Betrothed to her horror at the age of eight to the son of her father’s friend and neighbour, she meets him again when her world caves in courtesy of the Civil War, and falls in love with him despite being on the opposing side in the conflict. Free’s own family is divided by the conflict where principles and deeply held views run deep. A modern parallel might be the divisions within families and friendships arising from the UK’s 2016 Brexit Referendum. Free’s story will arch over three turbulent decades of history and an era when women were chattels of first their father and then their husband. I want to explore the effect on family and friends of the conflicts of the Civil War, the Commonwealth and the Restoration and understand these changes through the eyes of a new strong, passionate and resilient character to the literary scene.