Diane Saxon's Blog
October 25, 2024
My Mother's Lies - The Reason for the Delay
You may have noticed the release date of My Mother’s Lies wasa little behind this time, and for that I apologise. There is good reason. Someof you may have seen through my Facebook page where I post mostly fun and oftencandid photos of my furred and feathered friends. Very rarely do I ever sayanything negative, but once in a while even I post about tough realities thathit our household.
One of the hardest things to cope with is the death of aloved one. Never more so than when it is fast and unexpected. Such was the case with Beau, my adorableblack Labrador who was taken all too young and far too fast.
It was a tragedy beginning with Beau falling ill withinhours of him having his annual booster. At the same time, Skye, my Dalmatianalso fell ill after her booster and spent two weeks on and off a drip at thevets while we were on holiday. We were totally convinced that Skye at the ageof thirteen with all her allergies and being epileptic, would succumb and hadmentally prepared ourselves for this. Our holiday, as you can imagine isn’teven a memory. What we were assured of was that all our animals were in goodhands as our daughters come and live at our house whenever we are away. Ouranimals are theirs, too.
On our arrival home, Skye was still very frail and needed togo back to the vets for another round of infusions.
Beau had developed a limp, and his right elbow was hot andswollen. I rushed him to the vets.
At the age of eight months, Beau had undergone twooperations on his forelegs as we discovered he had elbow dysplasia. We havealways been aware of the need to balance his life between being careful that hedoesn’t hurt himself and living a fulfilled dog’s life. At this stage, I wasconcerned that whatever had made him ill had caused inflammation in that leg.
We arranged for him to have a CT scan the following Monday,but before we could get him there, he collapsed on the Friday morning. The vetbelieved he may have damaged his cruciate ligament. I was not convinced.
We dosed him up and Monday couldn’t come soon enough. Don’task why, but in order to get the CT scan done, I had a four hour round trip.Not only that, but they told me to leave him and return later that evening. Itwas a very long day. The vet there was incredible. By the Tuesday evening, thevet phoned me. ‘Prepare for the worst.’ Were his words. He had never known suchaggressive and widespread cancer in a dog that had remained completely stoicthroughout. Never once did Beau growl, or whimper.
On that Thursday, a few weeks before Christmas, our familygathered, leaving their own pets behind for a few precious hours while theyspent it with Beau. We held a dinner party for him. We took an imprint of hispaw. He ate whatever he wanted and was thoroughly spoiled. There were no tears.I had banned them. There would be time enough for those afterwards. That nightwas for him.
The following morning, I had him put to sleep while Icradled him in my arms. I opened the window to let his soul fly free.
I took his death very hard as none of my animals have everdied from anything but old age, and for the first time ever my imaginationfaltered, and I found I was unable to continue with this book which is why thepublication was pushed back. Although it was four months late in its writing,Boldwood Books and my editor Caroline Ridding were incredibly understanding andmanaged to pull it back to just two months late by ramping up the editingprocess for me.
When you read the story, you will understand the strangeconnection. I had already written the first part of the book in which not onlywas Beau featured, but in real life my boy was diagnosed with the same rarecondition as one of the main characters I was writing about. It floored me. Ihad studied in great detail bone cancer. I already knew so much about it whenhe was diagnosed. Truth is often stranger than fiction as they say…
My darling Skye made a remarkable recovery and we truly wonderedat the peculiarity of it all. Was she so ill because she knew he was dying?When he was gone, was she relieved?
Speaking to a lady, a stranger I met while walking Skye, Itold her about Beau, and she told me about the recent loss of her husband. Iwas mortified. How could I feel the loss of my dog as deeply as she felt theloss of her husband?
Her words were a comfort, and maybe a turning point.
Grief is a full bucket of water. One more drip, and itoverflows. It does not matter what source that drip of water comes from.
I debated for some time whether to continue that storylineand I realized that was the stumbling block. My head told me not to, but myheart needed to continue.
So, Beau, my beautiful boy, features quite prominently in MyMother’s Lies and I have made him immortal by including him in this book.
I hope you enjoy My Mother's Lies and perhaps this insightinto my world will make you look a little closer at the characters and feel thereal heart that went into writing it.
Until the next time…
I hope life is kind.
Diane
She’s been lying my whole life...
As if my mum breaking her hip andbeing rushed to hospital isn't shocking enough for one day, now in herpost-operative delirium, she's just told me I'm not her daughter. That she hasnever been able to have children.
The nurse reassures me thatpeople are often confused after a trauma. But I know this woman so well and Ican tell there's a grain of truth in what she says. Which begs the questions:Who am I? Where did I come from?
When I dig into the truth, Isuddenly stir up a hornet's nest of secrets, lies – and possibly a crime sounfathomable – that stretches back decades.
What has my mum done?
Can I trust her?
Or has my digging put us both inperil of our lives?
But, she loves her animals...
January 29, 2023
WRITING CHARACTERS AND FAMILY RELATIONSHIPS
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 emotions as feelings are hurt, or revelations come to light. They love each other, but they don’t necessarily understand the reasoning behind every decision each of them make. Their love for each member of their family can never be the same, but it can be equal. We are human with opinions and idiosyncrasies, but no matter how close, there is always something left unsaid.
I have a brother fourteen years older than me, and two older sisters and the revelation that I didn’t know every single thing about them, even though we are all so close came about when my dad died. Events that happened before I was born. Why would they be spoken about? They weren’t necessarily secrets, but events that had nothing to do with me. Conversations my brother had with our dad, places my older siblings lived before I was born, attached to memories I can’t share.
The shock of finding something out that the others all casually nod and say, ‘yeah, of course we knew.’
This is the familial atmosphere I wanted to create in My Sister’s Secret.
A close family isn’t necessarily pulled apart by secrets. Sometimes they’re held together.
January 16, 2021
July 15, 2020
DS Jenna Morgan Series - Inspiration, Writing & Research
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, Charlie 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 firearms and special operations. Amazing and inciteful, his imagination made mine run riot. I think he needs to write his own stories.
At the time of lockdown I had conducted all the research I needed to throw myself wholeheartedly into What She Saw.
But Covid-19 came along and so did my brother’s cancer and my aunty’s stroke all during a time when they couldn’t get treated.
So all the research in the world was poured into this book for three months until the day I woke up to the discovery that as it stood, this was not my story. It was dry. It was research, it was police procedure and backstory.
With a deadline looming, and I do mean beating at my door, Jenna Morgan strode back into my head with her faithful and fascinating team players, Mason and Ryan, and together we stripped back 30,000 words of police procedure and let the story make a run for it.
The pure unadulterated rush of freedom poured into What She Saw making it come alive and I couldn’t happier with how it’s turned out.
Research is essential, but the story is the reason people pick up the book.
Book 4 is well under way and the characters are talking…
Amazon UK https://amzn.to/3efP5wn
Amazon.com https://amzn.to/2ZeAGfK
July 11, 2020
DS Jenna Morgan Series - Inspiration, Writing & Research
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 in a unit in Northern Africa where it was his job to race to any downed aeroplane, fix it and get it back in the air again, all under enemy fire.
Anyway, when dad left the RAF, in his wisdom he thought it may be a great idea to run a country pub. Unfortunately, this idea never quite worked out. Working 100 hours a week each, mum and dad ran The Bull’s Head with a degree of success for a total of three years.
During that time, dad was asked to also manage The Fish another pub a short distance from ours while the manager there was in hospital.
Dad agreed and each evening he would open the pub at 6:00pm and close at 10:30pm arriving home shortly after.
One Friday evening, he locked up as usual and as he was getting the takings out of the till to bring back with him, he heard a muffled noise. I don’t think the prospect of investigating even phased him. Hiding in the ladies’ toilets were two men, we assume waiting for dad to leave so they could steal the takings, the alcohol or whatever else.
Unfortunately for them, dad wasn’t of the same mind. Once he’d half killed them, (I always imagine him just using the thumb of his left hand in a casual James Bond fashion) he called the police and had the men arrested, then he ambled home with the takings.
It was nonchalantly mentioned at breakfast the next morning, and there was really no fuss made. He didn’t make the newspapers, nothing further was mentioned, he wasn’t hailed a hero, and life went on.
But that encounter, the idea that someone could already be in your house when you’re totally unaware of their presence must have fermented in my imagination over all these years. Not everyone would be brave enough to investigate. Some would run. Some would freeze. Some would stand and fight. Someone’s There touches on the psyche of each one of these.
Fight or flight.
What would you do?
For the second book in the DS Jenna Morgan series, I did another on-line University course on body decomposition. Such and interesting and engaging course which, after six weeks of information and research I felt quite comfortable inserting those few sentences in my story that would relate to rigor mortis.
As before, my poor husband – a retired police officer - often had a sharp elbow in his rib at 3 o’clock in the morning when I needed a police procedure to fit in with my story.
Amazon UK https://amzn.to/2T3JK2z
Amazon.com https://amzn.to/2SYbd6Z
July 10, 2020
DS Jenna Morgan Series - Inspiration, Writing & Research
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 above me and my gaze clashed with another being’s. Not just one, it turned out, but several. In fact an entire herd of the most stunning Fallow deer, so close I only needed to take half a dozen steps to be able to reach out and touch them. The lead deer, a large doe caught my gaze and held me mesmerised for several minutes as everything except her eyes faded into the background.
Eventually, I blinked and broke the spell, then moved on with the feeling I’d been touched by magic that day.
It was some time later that my imagination wound that incident into the story that now is Find Her Alive.
What if that hadn’t been a deer watching me? What if it had been a human? Someone who shouldn’t have been there. Someone who didn’t want to be seen.
The idea for Find Her Alive was born and I ran with it, throwing words down, my fingers flying across the keyboard until the story was done.
For this book, character driven by Fliss and her sister Jenna, both equal partners in the creation of Find Her Alive, research came secondary - after the first draft.
My entire family background is steeped in uniform and the law. To me investigations, research, prodding, poking is second nature. I’m nosey and I love to know and understand the detail. I studied Law at A level.
While writing Find Her Alive, I took an on-line university course in forensics and loved it.I’d like to feel that it’s worth all the huge amount of research I do, just to write one sentence that is factually correct. To have ex-police officers tell me that they could actually smell the halls of the police station I write about is a thrill beyond words.
Find Her Alive is the first in the DS Jenna Morgan Series.
Available in all formats : Ebook, Kindle, Audio, CD, Paperback
Amazon UK https://amzn.to/3ebo8Kg Amazon https://amzn.to/2ZcOcjJ Kobo https://bit.ly/38NS2TO Waterstones https://bit.ly/3gEpizq
May 14, 2020
Life in Lockdown - The Chicken Diairies
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.
February 25, 2020
Copycat - My Inspiration and Celebration of 100 years
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 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…
Copycat is dedicated to my dad who would have been 100 years old today.
Here's the sentimental bit first. I was only 28, my eldest daughter just one, when we lost him and I still miss him every day.
To my dad, William John Saxon, who would have been 100 on 26th February 2020, the month Copycat is released. A master storyteller himself, it was only in the years after his death we discovered his tales were mainly true recollections of his time in World War II and later as he continued his career in the RAF. Thank you for never putting the brakes on my imagination.
I owe much of my passion for books to him. I can always remember a book on the coffee table beside his chair in the lounge and the first book I sneaked from under his nose at the age of 14 was Wilbur Smith, When the Lion Feeds. Dad thought I was too young to read it, but mum said if it was too much for me, I would put it down. I never did.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 in a unit in Northern Africa where it was his job to race to any downed aeroplane, fix it and get it back in the air again, all under enemy fire.
Anyway, when dad left the RAF, in his wisdom he thought it may be a great idea to run a country pub. Unfortunately, this idea never quite worked out. Working 100 hours a week each, mum and dad ran The Bull’s Head with a degree of success for a total of three years.During that time, dad was asked to also manage The Fish another pub a short distance from ours while the manager there was in hospital.
Dad agreed and each evening he would open the pub at 6:00pm and close at 10:30pm arriving home shortly after.
One Friday evening, he locked up as usual and as he was getting the takings out of the till to bring back with him, he heard a muffled noise. I don’t think it phased him to go an investigate and hiding in the ladies’ toilets were two men, we assume waiting for dad to leave so they could steal the takings, the alcohol or whatever else.Unfortunately for them, dad wasn’t of the same mind. Once he’d half killed them, (I always imagine just using the thumb of his left hand in a casual manner a little like the old James Bond) he called the police and had them arrested, then he ambled home with the takings.
It was casually mentioned at breakfast the next morning, and there was really no fuss made. He didn’t make the newspapers, nothing further was mentioned, he wasn’t hailed a hero, and life went on.
But that encounter, the idea that someone could already be in your house when you’re totally unaware of their presence must have fermented in my imagination over all these years. Not everyone would be brave enough to investigate. Some would run. Some would freeze. Some would stand and fight. Copycat touches on the psyche of each one of these.
Fight or flight.
What would you do?
Amazon UK https://amzn.to/2T3JK2zAmazon.com https://amzn.to/2SYbd6ZKobo https://bit.ly/39Zw6Es
February 24, 2020
January 23, 2020
A Walk in the Fog
The fog this morning was really thick and the dogs and I took our normal lonely route alongside woodland and farmers' fields. Maybe this is why I'm an author, because not only do I have a wild imagination, but I think I also have good instincts.Skye is allowed to be off lead almost all of our walk because a) She's well trained and really obedient. b) If we see other dogs, she'll circumnavigate them so they don't come into conflict. c) She doesn't stray any further than 10 paces away.Beau on the other hand, although 90% obedient, he will if he sees another dog a) act as though he's never been trained in his life b) charge over to say hello, even if its a mile in front c) forget all recall.So this morning on the walk where we never meet anyone and where Beau would normally be allowed free range, my instinct with the poor visibility was to put him on lead.First we met a man in the thick fog walking in the same direction as us with three dogs. Luckily uneventful.Second, we crossed paths with a woman with two colllies, which was also uneventful as I had Beau right next to me.It was the third encounter which reminded me of my writing.Skye had paused behind me when I heard the deepest growl ever. There is no sound like a Dalmatian growl, it truly is menacing, especially when they're serious! I turned and peered through the fog initially at nothing, and suddenly a man appeared, charging towards us and Skye's growl hit another level of threat. The poor jogger froze (he may have pooped his pants) and only when I called Skye to my side, gave her the command to sit, telling him it was okay did the man move again.I didn't apologise for her behaviour, she was impeccable. Her instinct told her to protect me and that was what she did. But she was instantly obedient when I gave her a command. I expect it of her and she didn't disappoint.I've only known Skye react that way once before when my youngest and I were walking in Ironbridge Gorge and two men slid down the hillside in front of us and it was that reaction, that instinct I witnessed then that forged the basis of the storyline for The Keeper.Who knows where this story line will lead...
Amazon.co.uk https://amzn.to/2vhQ5iH
Amazon.com https://amzn.to/36dWrMQ
