Why I wrote my first book, Follow the Dove.
It took me a long time to
write Follow the Dove, as I started when I was working from nine till five and also
had three
children to care for. I was really interested in crime, but I was pushed by my
fellow members of the Talking Volumes Writer's Circle to write something about
the island of my birth, Stroma, now deserted. I
couldn’t write a factual book because that has already been done. Since it’s a very small island and I couldn’t risk offending anyone, I didn’t want to write about Stroma by name, so I decided
on fictional island, with fictional people. I tried to use surnames that were never
common on Stroma. I toyed with all sorts
of ideas for a long time. An island
lends itself to a family saga. But they
say you should write the kind of thing you read. I don’t read family sagas. I read murder mysteries.
While desperately looking for
an idea for this story, a woman from Canada, Isabella Moorland,
got in touch with me through a local forum. She was doing her genealogy and
couldn’t find a death certificate for her grandfather, a Stroma man. And, although I tried to help, we were never
able to discover the whereabouts of her grandfather’s grave.
But she told me what she knew.
Her grandfather married a girl from Orkney, and had four of a family. The eldest son joined the navy. The youngest was lost at sea. And with her two daughters, his wife packed
up and went to Canada to join her parents, and it appeared, she did this
without her man.
I got to thinking, what could
have happened to Isabella's grandfather?
Suddenly, I had my
characters. I started to write. And as I
wrote, the characters became real. This is not a murder mystery, but it is nonetheless a mystery. The
story is mainly about Isa and Davie.
I’ve given Isa a job with the Floating shops of Orkney, and I’ve made
Davie, a whisky runner.
And as the characters revealed
their story to me, all I had to do, was write it. I hope you enjoy.
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