Category: Blog

WICKER: Misogyny, Motherhood, Consent and the Uncomfortable Truth About HEA

When a woman falls in love with a man made of wicker, the real monsters might be the people around her.

By Hannah Baller

Content warning: This article contains major spoilers for Wicker (2026), alongside discussions of misogyny, child abandonment, consent and the possibility of sexual exploitation.

I walked out of the cinema after watching Wicker feeling two completely conflicting emotions: sadness and triumph.

Triumph because, quite frankly, the villagers got exactly what was coming to them, and sadness because beneath the wonderfully bizarre, kinky and unexpectedly tender romance was something much darker. Something about human nature, misogyny, motherhood and the deeply uncomfortable question of whether love can truly exist without free will.

As a romance author, I was immediately fascinated by the premise. A woman commissions a husband made entirely from wicker, and he’s attentive, affectionate, sexually enthusiastic and completely devoted to making her happy? Well, hello, monster romance!

However, the more I thought about the film, the more uncomfortable I became, because what initially appeared to be a rather outrageous romantic fantasy gradually revealed itself as a story about society’s treatment of women, the value we place on others and our willingness to destroy happiness that challenges our understanding of the world, and I think that’s why Wicker has stayed with me and will continue to do so for many years, I’m sure!

One of the first things that struck me was that none of the characters had personal names. We have the Fisherwoman, the Basketmaker, the Tailor, the Butcher and their respective wives, nobody is introduced as an individual in the way we might ordinarily expect.

At first, I wondered whether this was simply an artistic decision to create a traditional fairy-tale atmosphere, but then I started thinking about the importance of names. Aname represents identity, individuality and personhood. When we know someone’s name, we acknowledge their existence beyond the function they perform, so what happens when we remove that?

Interestingly, directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson discussed this decision in an interview with AwardsWatch.

They explained that the convention originated in Ursula Wills-Jones’s short story The Wicker Husband. They retained it because it reinforced the film’s fairy-tale quality and helped create a world separate from any particular historical time or place, but the absence of names also reinforces the film’s social commentary:

The men are defined by what they do. The women are defined by whom they belong to.

Think about that.

The Tailor has an occupation. The Basketmaker has a skill. The Butcher has a trade. Their identities are connected to their contributions to society. Their wives, however, are identified through marriage, marriage being a running theme of ownership over women.

A woman who was once the Doctor’s Daughter becomes the Tailor’s Wife, her identity changes according to the man to whom she’s attached, and who is the exception?

The Fisherwoman.

She’s identified by her own occupation, she works, earns money and lives independently, and is also the woman the village treats with the greatest contempt.

Olivia Colman herself highlighted this distinction in an interview with The Playlist, explaining that the Fisherwoman’s occupational identity represents her independence and agency, which I find fascinating! Because the Fisherwoman possesses something many of the supposedly respectable wives lack: autonomy.

She’s not necessarily wealthy, beautiful by conventional standards or socially accepted, but she belongs to herself, and the village can’t stand it.

I also wondered whether the naming convention could also represent something else: class separation.

lass separation.

The Fisherwoman supplies food to the community. The Basketmaker possesses extraordinary craftsmanship, both contribute something valuable, yet neither appears to enjoy the respect their labour deserves. Society benefits from their existence while simultaneously treating them as inferior. And I wonder whether reducing someone to a role rather than acknowledging their individuality makes that treatment easier. It’s much simpler to ridicule the smelly Fisherwoman than to consider the feelings, experiences and humanity of a woman who has spent her life being rejected.

Perhaps that’s the cruelest part, he villagers don’t need to see her as a person, they only need to see her as the woman who smells of fish.

I don’t believe the directors have explicitly identified class-based dehumanisation as the purpose behind the missing names, this is my own interpretation, but I also think the absence of names serves a wider purpose as it makes these characters universal.

The cruelty doesn’t belong to one particular person in one particular village, it’s something we could recognise anywhere, and suddenly, the question becomes rather uncomfortable.

Would we recognise ourselves among the villagers?

The Misogyny That Hides Behind Marriage

I expected Wicker to explore misogyny, especially from the adverts which glorified a horny, sexy exterior where men were horrified and women were drawn in. After all, the villagers literally place metal collars around women’s necks during marriage ceremonies, it’s hardly subtle symbolism.

What interested me most wasn’t the obvious oppression but rather t was the casual, almost invisible misogyny woven through everyday relationships. In particular the husbands’ reactions to the Wicker Husband. They genuinely cannot understand why he wants to make the Fisherwoman happy.

  • Why would he listen to her?
  • Why would he care about her pleasure?
  • Why would he actively try to make her life better?

It’s treated as though he’s fundamentally misunderstood what marriage is supposed to involve, and that bothered me enormously, because his behaviour isn’t particularly extraordinary – it’s the BARE MINIMUM.

He demonstrates affection, contributes to domestic life and considers his wife’s desires, he treats her like someone whose happiness matters, and somehow, that makes him a threat for the men.

In her review for The Independent, Clarisse Loughrey explores the way patriarchal expectations have undermined the possibility of genuine romance within the village, and I think she’s right.

The husbands seem to have accepted a version of marriage in which women’s happiness is neither their concern nor their responsibility, is that attitude entirely confined to fiction?

We still hear about women carrying disproportionate responsibility for domestic tasks, childcare and emotional labour. Women who are expected to manage family appointments, household responsibilities and everyone else’s needs, whilst ignoring their own.

Women whose partners are praised for carrying out ordinary parenting duties that mothers are simply expected to perform. Even within sexual relationships, women’s pleasure can still be treated as less important, which is why the Wicker Husband’s tenderness feels unexpectedly radical. He’s not challenging the institution of marriage through rebellion or violence but he’s simply being a considerate partner, and the men around him feel threatened. That says rather more about them than it does about him. Mind boggling… right?

The marriage collars were another visual detail that carried with me. As somebody who reads and writes romance, including stories exploring dominance, submission and unconventional desire, I recognise that a collar doesn’t automatically represent oppression. Within a consensual relationship, it can symbolise trust, intimacy or an agreed power dynamic, but consent changes everything.

The women in Wicker aren’t participating in an individually negotiated arrangement, they’re adhering to a social convention that represents their subordination. There’s an enormous difference between choosing submission and having submission imposed upon you. I think the Fisherwoman rejecting the social convention of the collar is one of the most meaningful gestures in their relationship.

She is her own person, she is her own Dominant, and she rules herself and holds agency alone. Yet the village seems incapable of understanding this.

When Women Become the Enforcers of Misogyny

The Tailor’s Wife was perhaps the most interesting human character for me, she’s cruel, manipulative, unpleasant and also deeply unhappy. She’s followed the rules, she’s beautiful, married and occupies a desirable position within the community and by the village’s standards, she’s achieved everything a woman should want. Except she isn’t free.

She wants to contribute to her husband’s business and have a greater say in her own life. Instead, she’s expected to remain within the limitations of her role, and then along comes the Fisherwoman: a woman she’s spent years ridiculing, who has no social standing, no conventional beauty and very little material wealth.

Yet she’s loved, and she’s retained her independence, which I think the Tailor’s Wife finds unbearable. The directors explored this directly in their AwardsWatch interview.

They explained that the Tailor’s Wife’s jealousy isn’t primarily about wanting a better husband, it’s about wanting freedom. She sees another woman living outside the limitations she’s accepted for herself, and rather than challenging those limitations, she seeks to destroy the woman who represents an alternative. It’s an incredibly uncomfortable portrayal of internalised misogyny, because women can perpetuate the same restrictive expectations that harm them.

We see echoes of this in modern conversations surrounding motherhood, sexuality, relationships and women’s independence. Women judging other women for choosing careers, criticising mothers who remain at home, condemning those who don’t want children, policing how other women dress, express their sexuality or conduct their relationships. It’s almost as though the rules are designed to ensure that somebody is always doing womanhood incorrectly. And instead of questioning the rules, people sometimes become invested in enforcing them.

The Tailor’s wife is so deeply embedded within the system that she cannot imagine happiness outside it, when confronted with proof that another life is possible, she responds with resentment, which make sher character tragic, because she’s ultimately helping to preserve the very system that denies her what she wants.

The Perfect Wicker Husband: Is Love Still Love Without Choice?

Now, let’s talk about the rather gorgeous wicker gentleman himself, because I have questions LOTS of questions!

From a monster romance perspective, he’s wonderful: he’s physically unusual, emotionally attentive and seemingly devoted to his partner. There’s something undeniably erotic about a creature who exists beyond conventional human expectations, and Alexander Skarsgård certainly doesn’t make the fantasy difficult to appreciate.

However, the romantic appeal of the Wicker Husband becomes complicated when you examine how he came into existence: he was created for one woman, designed to love her, constructed specifically to fulfil her desire for companionship and I couldn’t stop wondering:

Can somebody truly consent to a relationship if they were created for the purpose of loving one particular person? It’s a fascinating ethical problem. If the Wicker Husband has the capacity to choose, then perhaps his love is entirely genuine, but what if he doesn’t? What if loving the Fisherwoman is simply an inseparable part of his creation? Could he ever decide to leave, fall in love with somebody else, or reject the very purpose for which he exists?

The film attempts to address these questions by establishing that the Basketmaker’s creations have their own souls and autonomy, but I wasn’t entirely satisfied.

In his review for RogerEbert.com, Robert Daniels similarly questions whether the film resolves the issue of the Wicker Husband’s free will too conveniently and I can understand that criticism. As a romance author, I believe choice is fundamental to a satisfying love story. There’s something incredibly powerful about two individuals choosing to love each other.

However, I don’t think being created for a purpose necessarily proves that the Wicker Husband is incapable of independent thought. Perhaps he was brought into existence with the capacity to love, rather than an obligation to love, or the Fisherwoman simply happens to be the person he chooses. I’d like to believe that, because otherwise, what appears to be an extraordinarily romantic relationship becomes something considerably more disturbing. And that question becomes even more important when we meet the Wicker Wife.

But first, there’s another creation we need to discuss.

The Wicker Baby

For all the film’s grotesque imagery, sexuality and cruelty, the abandoned Wicker Baby affected me more than anything else, and initially, I couldn’t understand why. I’ve seen films exploring abandonment before and I’ve read stories involving grief, motherhood and the complexities of caring for children, but something about this particular storyline made me feel genuinely uneasy. I think I’ve finally worked out why.

The baby was deliberately created, yet its existence didn’t guarantee that anybody would protect it.

Following her husband’s death, the Bottlewasher’s Widow is grieving, she approaches the Basketmaker and requests a child which was profoundly saddening. She’s lost the person she loved and wants something, perhaps someone, to help fill the emptiness left behind.

I can understand the desire for comfort during grief, and wanting to hold onto the possibility of family after losing a partner, but I also think the situation raises some deeply uncomfortable questions. A child cannot replace a husband, or repair grief, and a child cannot be expected to carry responsibility for an adult’s emotional wellbeing.

The baby is requested, brought into existence and eventually abandoned. The exact motivations behind that abandonment aren’t fully explored, and I don’t want to pretend we understand everything about the widow’s emotional state. Grief can be overwhelming, and being unable to cope does not automatically make someone cruel or unloving, but none of that changes the baby’s vulnerability.

As a mother, I found the situation horrifying, because babies are completely dependent on the people responsible for them. Their wellbeing relies upon another person recognising that responsibility, and in Wicker, a living being can apparently be commissioned from a craftsman with very little consideration for what happens afterwards.

It’s almost as though the baby is treated as an object, something to obtain and fulfil a desire and when circumstances change, something that can be discarded. That thought made my stomach turn. Perhaps because parenthood has taught me something I couldn’t have fully understood before having children.

A baby isn’t simply something you have. A baby is somebody you’re responsible for, a responsibility doesn’t disappear when life becomes difficult.

Of course, real-world situations involving parents who cannot care for children are enormously complicated. Poverty, trauma, bereavement, illness and the absence of support can all contribute to families reaching crisis point. I don’t believe we should automatically condemn struggling parents.Sometimes protecting a child means recognising that somebody else can provide the care you currently cannot, but that requires the child’s needs to remain central, and what disturbed me in Wicker was how easily those needs were overshadowed.

The baby becomes embroiled in the Tailor’s Wife’s manipulation, its existence is used to suggest that the Wicker Husband has been unfaithful and suddenly, this vulnerable little being isn’t treated as a child: it’s evidence, gossip, a weapon in somebody else’s conflict.

Children should never become instruments through which adults punish one another. The storyline made me think about the emotional responsibilities we take on when we bring another life into the world. Someone whose existence has value beyond the comfort they might provide us.

There’s also something particularly poignant about the Wicker Baby’s unusual nature, the film has established that wicker creations possess souls. So why should this child’s material composition make its abandonment any less serious? It shouldn’t. In fact, the baby’s vulnerability might be even greater because nobody fully understands how its existence works.

  • Will it develop?
  • Will it remain physically small forever?
  • Will it eventually possess the emotional and intellectual understanding of an adult while remaining trapped in an infant’s body?

We don’t know, and the uncertainty adds another layer to the responsibility of caring for it. What I found beautiful, however, was the Fisherwoman and her husband’s eventual decision to take the child with them. They didn’t commission the baby or had even planned to become parents, but they recognised that it needed a home.

For me, that was one of the most meaningful acts of love in the entire film, it challenged the idea that parenthood is defined solely by biology or creation. Sometimes family begins with the simple decision that another person deserves to be loved, and I think that’s why the abandoned baby affected me so profoundly. The baby’s story exposed how easily a child can become secondary to adult desires.

Yet its eventual inclusion in the Fisherwoman’s family offered something hopeful: the possibility that love can be chosen, even when it wasn’t planned.

The Wicker Wife

The film’s ending was enormously satisfying, watching the villagers reveal their greed, jealousy and hypocrisy was delicious, these are the same people who spent so long ridiculing the Fisherwoman for marrying a wicker creation. Yet when the opportunity arises to obtain a creation of their own, they’re suddenly desperate. How convenient, but there’s something deeply disturbing beneath the comedy: the Wicker Wife.

She’s offered as the Basketmaker’s final creation, and the villagers compete to obtain her, ultimately, the greedy Butcher wins. Except this particular creation isn’t made from the same gentle material as the Wicker Husband, he’s woven with thorns. Her embrace becomes dangerous, and I absolutely loved the symbolism.

The man who expects to acquire a compliant wife discovers that she isn’t going to behave like a possession.

But, of course, my thoughts wandered to what ifs:

  • What if the Wicker Wife hadn’t possessed those thorns?
  • What if she’d been made from ordinary wicker?
  • Would the Butcher have treated her with kindness? Doubt it, he was a pig!
  • Would he have respected her autonomy?
  • Would he have recognised her ability to refuse him?
  • Might she have become a woman manufactured for domestic labour, sexual gratification and obedience, not just by her new husband, but by others across the village?

The possibility of sexual exploitation or abuse is deeply troubling.

To be clear, the film doesn’t show that this would inevitably have happened, this is the possibility I found myself considering, because the village has already demonstrated its belief that women should be subordinate to men. Marriage involves a symbolic act of ownership, the women’s sexual satisfaction is largely disregarded and their identities are defined through their husbands. So what happens when somebody acquires a wife who has been physically constructed for them?

This is where the Wicker Wife and Wicker Husband become fascinating parallels, both are created for somebody else’s desire, and appear capable of independent existence. Yet society’s expectations of husbands and wives are profoundly different. The Wicker Husband is celebrated by his partner for his tenderness, the Wicker Wife risks becoming a possession, and her thorns become a physical manifestation of resistance, which I found that incredibly powerful, but also sad. Because a woman shouldn’t need to be dangerous to be respected. She shouldn’t need thorns to make somebody understand that her body belongs to her.

The Basketmaker

Another character I found unexpectedly moving was the Basketmaker. He’s talented beyond anything the villagers can properly comprehend, he creates objects of extraordinary beauty, eventually demonstrating an ability to bring life itself into existence, yet he’s treated as an eccentric outsider.

His craftsmanship is useful, but his individuality and talent seem to command relatively little respect, until someone wants something from him and then he’s the most sought-after man in the village. I loved the way he turned that desperation to his advantage.

The villagers compete for his final creation, offering what they believe will secure something extraordinary, their behaviour reveals their greed, entitlement and their willingness to treat another living being as something that can be purchased.

And the Basketmaker finally gains the means to retire. I found that intruiging. Particularly because his success doesn’t depend on becoming part of the village’s social hierarchy, he’s able to leave it behind.

The parallel between him and the Fisherwoman stands as: they are outsiders, both contribute something meaningful and they are underestimated, and both eventually find a form of freedom that the supposedly respectable villagers have denied themselves. Perhaps the Basketmaker understood the village better than anyone: he knew what people wanted and he knew what their desires revealed about them. His final creation became a rather spectacular way of exposing their true nature.

The Villagers’ Comeuppance

I found the villagers’ eventual humiliation enjoyable! But there’s sadness beneath that satisfaction. The willingness to destroy something beautiful simply because it challenged their expectations. It’s easy to dismiss the villagers as exaggerated fairy-tale characters, but are they really so different from people we encounter today?

We still see people ridiculed for their appearance, relationships, sexuality, social standing or unwillingness to conform. Individuals become targets because their happiness doesn’t align with what somebody else considers acceptable, and we still see communities turn against those who challenge established traditions.

Not everyone behaves this way, of course, there are extraordinary examples of compassion, solidarity and kindness throughout society, but Wicker asks us to confront a more uncomfortable possibility: that cruelty doesn’t always begin with hatred, sometimes it begins with insecurity, jealousy and believing that others receive things they don’t deserve. And when those feelings are reinforced by an entire community, they can become extraordinarily destructive.

The villagers don’t initially need to understand the Fisherwoman’s marriage, her happiness challenges the way they’ve organised their own lives, and rather than examining their dissatisfaction, they attempt to destroy hers.

That is what I found so heartbreaking.

Is Wicker a Feminist Film?

Something else I found interesting while researching the film was that critics don’t entirely agree about its feminist message. Some have celebrated its exploration of women’s pleasure, independence and equal relationships. For example, ABC Arts highlights the film’s portrayal of mutual respect and the absurdly low expectations placed upon husbands, But others have been less convinced.

In the San Francisco Chronicle, Carla Meyer argues that the film’s feminist ideas are undermined by inconsistencies in how oppression is depicted, And I think there’s merit in questioning whether Wicker fully explores the complicated issues it introduces.

The question of the Wicker Husband’s autonomy isn’t investigated as deeply as it could be. The Wicker Wife’s potential vulnerability remains largely unexplored, And the abandoned baby raises ethical questions that the film doesn’t completely answer. But I’m not sure those unresolved questions necessarily weaken the experience.

For me, they made the film more interesting.

Because I left the cinema questioning the characters’ motivations, examining the symbolism and wondering about the ethical implications of what I’d watched, and perhaps a film doesn’t need to provide a definitive answer to every question it raises.

Sometimes the most valuable stories are the ones that make us uncomfortable enough to continue the conversation afterwards.

A HEA, Even When the Future Is Uncertain

As a romance author, I couldn’t finish this discussion without talking about the ending, because despite everything, I loved it.

The Fisherwoman and her husband leave the village taking the abandoned baby with them. The Basketmaker obtains his retirement, and the villagers receive a thoroughly deserved lesson in the consequences of their behaviour.

However, the Fisherwoman’s future isn’t necessarily straightforward, her husband has been damaged by fire – symbolic of her anger towards him in that moment. His body is vulnerable to deterioration, and their time together may be limited. Then there’s the baby.

  • Will it ever grow?
  • Will the Fisherwoman spend the rest of her life caring for a child who never physically matures?
  • What happens when she becomes elderly?

Those questions are particularly poignant to me as a mother.

Parenthood involves watching our children change, develop their independence and gradually become people capable of navigating the world without us. The possibility of caring for a permanently dependent child brings its own practical, emotional and existential questions, but interestingly, the actors themselves have considered this.

In a CinemaBlend interview, Olivia Colman and Alexander Skarsgård discussed whether the Basketmaker might be able to modify the baby’s body as it developed. It’s a wonderfully whimsical possibility.

Perhaps the baby could receive a new wicker body as its understanding and maturity increased, or it wouldn’t remain an infant forever. We simply don’t know, and I actually quite like that uncertainty, because life doesn’t offer guarantees either. We don’t know whether our relationships will endure illness, ageing or unexpected hardship, but we choose to love anyway.

I also think it’s important to acknowledge that the Fisherwoman and her husband’s relationship isn’t perfect. Her belief in the rumours surrounding his supposed infidelity leads to a devastating act of violence, that shouldn’t be dismissed simply because the film ultimately gives them a reconciliation. Her pain explains why she reacts, but it doesn’t justify what she does.

For their relationship to remain romantic, I need to believe they can rebuild trust and safety, rather than simply pretend the damage never happened, and that’s the future I choose to imagine for them: a relationship in which both individuals are free to make choices, in which the baby is loved and cared for and a home free of judgement.

I know the ending could be interpreted as a happy-for-now rather than a traditional happily-ever-after, but I’m choosing the latter, because, in my mind, a happily-ever-after doesn’t require a life without difficulty, it requires the freedom to build a life worth living, but after everything they’ve endured, I think they’ve earned that.

The Real Monsters Were Never Made of Wicker

Ultimately, I walked away from Wicker feeling triumphant because the villagers finally faced the consequences of their behaviour. However, I felt distressed as I was sad for the women whose identities had been reduced to their relationships with men. For the husbands who appeared incapable of understanding genuine emotional intimacy and for the Tailor’s Wife, who allowed her resentment to destroy her possibility of happiness.

Finally, I felt sad for the Wicker Wife, whose ability to defend herself was a necessary response to a society that viewed women as possessions.

The film made me question what it really means to love another person. Is love still love if somebody cannot choose otherwise? Perhaps the most uncomfortable thing about Wicker is that its central couple isn’t asking for anything particularly extraordinary.

The Fisherwoman wants companionship, affection, respect, and society considers that revolutionary.

So yes, I’m choosing to believe that the Fisherwoman, her Wicker Husband and their little Wicker Baby found their happily-ever-after. And I hope that somewhere, in a tiny cottage far away from that dreadful village, they’re living a wonderfully unconventional life together, because love shouldn’t require conformity, and being different shouldn’t make somebody less deserving of happiness.

Perhaps the real monsters in Wicker were never the creations at all, maybe they were the people who couldn’t bear to see somebody else loved. It seems that the greatest act of rebellion was simply choosing to be happy.

Even if that meant falling hopelessly in love with a rather handsome, exceptionally well-endowed basket.

References

The interpretations in this article are my own, informed by the following filmmaker interviews, cast discussions and critical reviews.

  1. AwardsWatch (2026-10-14). Interview with directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson. Discusses the use of unnamed characters, the influence of the original short story, gender roles and the Tailor’s Wife’s desire for autonomy.
  2. The Playlist (2026-10-22). Olivia Colman, Alexander Skarsgård and Elizabeth Debicki discuss Wicker. Includes Colman’s reflections on women’s identities, occupations and agency.
  3. The Independent (2026-10-30). Wicker review by Clarisse Loughrey. Explores patriarchal expectations, intimacy and the film’s unconventional romance.
  4. RogerEbert.com (2026-10-23). Wicker review by Robert Daniels. Raises questions about the Wicker Husband’s free will and the ethical implications of his creation.
  5. Glamour (2026-10-28). The Wicker Ending, Explained. Examines the Wicker Baby, the Tailor’s Wife’s manipulation, the Wicker Wife and the film’s conclusion.
  6. CinemaBlend (2026-10-28). The Wicker Ending Is Wild, But WTF Happens to the Wicker Baby?. Includes the actors’ speculation about how a wicker child might develop.
  7. ABC Arts (2026-11-05). Wicker Weaves a Witty, Winsome Tale of Women’s Pleasure. Discusses the film’s treatment of women’s pleasure, mutual respect and unequal marital expectations.
  8. San Francisco Chronicle (2026-10-21). Wicker Builds a Dream Husband but a Flimsy Feminist Fable. Offers a contrasting critical interpretation of the feminist themes.

Wicker (2026) was written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, based on The Wicker Husband by Ursula Wills-Jones.

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Why Scotland Keeps Finding Its Way Into My Stories

At some point, I have to admit that this is no longer an accident.

I can begin a new manuscript with the best of intentions. I can tell myself I am starting completely fresh: New characters! New ideas! Maybe even an entirely different genre! Then, somewhere along the way, somebody ends up standing on a windswept Scottish hillside contemplating their life choices.

Apparently, I have a problem.

Although, considering my current work in progress involves an eight-foot celestial being crash-landing onto a Scottish moor, I think we may have moved beyond “problem” and into “personal brand”.

Scotland has been creeping into my writing for years, sometimes deliberately and sometimes without me really noticing it. The Wild Rover and Mairi’s Wedding are firmly rooted in the Highlands. Home to Brae Hill took me to the Isle of Skye. Masked at Midnight gave me a Scottish Borders village complete with an independent bookshop, a librarian and significantly more secrets than any sensible small community should probably have.

Then I decided to write Bond of Starlight, my science-fiction romance. Space, celestial beings, ancient cosmic conflicts, the literal stars! Surely this was my opportunity to leave Scotland alone for five minutes? Absolutely not. I promptly dropped Eryvael out of the sky and onto Iona’s family land in rural Scotland. Sorry, Vael.

The thing is, Scotland gives me something I struggle to find anywhere else when I am writing: place that already feels like a character.

I love landscapes that affect the people living inside them and I didn’t want a setting that simply sits politely behind my characters while they fall in love. I want the rain making them run for shelter, stinging their faces as they run and chillingthem to the bone. I want the single-track road that means they cannot avoid each other, with grasses growing out the middle to showcase the isolation of their surroundings. I want mountains looming over villages, the sea cutting communities off, darkness arriving early and houses glowing warmly against the sunsets overlooking lochs and moors.

Scotland can feel enormous and intimate at exactly the same time. You can stand somewhere surrounded by mountains, moorland or sea and feel absolutely tiny, then drive ten minutes down the road and find yourself somewhere everybody knows everybody, and someone has probably already heard about whatever embarrassing thing you did before you’ve even made it home. Which, frankly, is perfect for romance.

There is something irresistible about writing love stories inside close-knit communities because romance becomes everybody’s business. You cannot dramatically avoid the man you’re definitely not falling in love with when there are only three places to get coffee and his auntie has apparently decided you’re perfect for each other.

Small communities also make relationships matter beyond the central couple. Friends, families, neighbours, local businesses and old grudges all start weaving themselves through the story. People belong somewhere before the romance begins, or perhaps they are desperately trying to work out whether they belong there at all. And I think that is probably where Scotland and my writing really meet.

I keep coming back to the theme of belonging. So many of my characters are looking for home without necessarily realising that is what they’re doing. Sometimes it’s building a life in a community you never expected to love. And sometimes, apparently, home is a five-foot-four Scottish woman sheltering an enormous glowing alien in her house while his murderous relatives search the universe for him.

Romance is flexible like that.

The landscape helps me explore those ideas because Scotland is filled with places that seem to carry memory. Old houses, ruined buildings, stone walls, abandoned roads, castles, crofts and villages that have existed through generations of people coming, leaving, loving, grieving and coming home again. Even when I am writing contemporary romance, that sense of history inevitably slips in.

My characters are rarely living in places that feel brand new. Their homes have belonged to someone before them, communities have stories, families remember things, buildings have histories and even the landscapes hold memories. That creates exactly the sort of emotional texture I love writing!

Plus, I love how Scotland is wonderfully inconvenient. Rain ruins plans, snow closes roads, fog hides surprises and wind makes having an emotional conversation outside considerably less glamorous than films would have us believe. There is nothing particularly seductive about trying to confess your feelings while your hair is stuck to your lip gloss and horizontal rain has found its way inside your bra, but difficult weather creates wonderful opportunities for fiction.

Characters have to stay somewhere longer than they intended, and suddenly two characters who have spent forty thousand words insisting they are absolutely fine and definitely do not fancy each other are trapped in a warm room together while the rain batters the windows. (Yes this is in my finalised manuscript Home to Brae Hill!)

Scotland has always been part of my life before it ever became such a huge part of my fiction. My paternal grandmother was Scottish, she came from Glasgow, so that connection has always existed on my side of the family. Then, because apparently Scotland hadn’t made itself quite comfortable enough in my life already, I went and married a half-Scot whose family came from Aberdeenshire, with relatives still living there today.

At this point, Scotland did not so much find its way into my stories as quietly move in, put the kettle on and assume it was staying.

Scotland is beautiful, obviously, but it is not beautiful in a neat little postcard way. The land can be bleak, muddy and absolutely freezing, wild enough to make you feel as though you’re standing at the edge of the world. Then the clouds shift, sunlight breaks across a hill and the entire landscape changes in an instant. I think that contrast is part of what draws me back to it in my writing, because it mirrors the emotional landscapes I love giving my characters, where grief can sit beside humour, danger beside warmth, loneliness beside community and fear beside love. Nobody has to live in one emotional weather system.

Perhaps that is also why I keep returning to Scotland when I write romance. The landscapes allow enormous emotions without making those emotions feel ridiculous. You can put somebody on the edge of a cliff overlooking the sea while their entire life falls apart and somehow Scotland looks at them and says, Aye, it’ll be ok, ken?

It helps that I apparently cannot resist Scottish men either, fictional ones included, there are worse occupational hazards. I have tried to imagine my stories somewhere else, particularly when I worry that I am becoming predictable, but whenever I do, something feels slightly quieter. So perhaps I should stop fighting it.

Not every story I write will be Scottish, I already know that my imagination has a habit of wandering far beyond one country, sometimes considerably beyond one planet. But Scotland keeps finding its way back in because so many of the things I want to write about already live comfortably there.

Home.

Belonging.

History.

Community.

Isolation.

Family.

Grief.

And love, obviously. Always love.

So yes, my next idea might begin somewhere entirely different. I might tell myself there’ll be no Highlands, no villages, no cottages, no rain battering dramatically against windows. Maybe nobody will even own a suspiciously cosy jumper, but I know myself well enough by now. Give me fifty thousand words and somebody will probably be standing in the heather.

At this point, I think Scotland has simply accepted that it’s getting a recurring role.

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One Year Later: I’m Finally Choosing My Own Writing

Exactly a year ago, I wrote a post called From Ghostwriter to Author: My Journey.

At the time, I thought I was writing about a transition I had already made, but looking back, I think I had barely started it.

I had spent years writing professionally for other people, slipping into their voices, working to briefs, hitting deadlines and learning how to make myself invisible on the page. That is part of being a good ghostwriter. The finished work is not supposed to sound like you. Your job is to understand someone else’s voice well enough that nobody notices you were ever there, then I started trying to do the exact opposite.

I started putting my own name on things, and apparently, once I started, I became slightly… prolific. Over roughly the last year and a half, I have written five complete manuscripts. Five. I have to keep saying that because I’m not entirely sure my brain has caught up with it yet.

There is The Wild Rover, the first book in The MacKenzie Chronicles, followed by Mairi’s Wedding. Then came Signed, Sealed, Survived, Home to Brae Hill and Masked at Midnight. And because apparently five completed novels were not enough fictional people living rent-free in my head, I currently have another two works in progress: Bond of Starlight and Signed, Sealed, Desired.

I have gone from writing other people’s books for a living to having an increasingly alarming number of my own… and I love it. Writing your own novel in private is one thing, deciding that you genuinely want other people to read it is another beast entirely.

Over the last year, I’ve queried manuscripts, received rejections, received encouraging feedback, rewritten, cut, restructured and occasionally stared at a chapter wondering whether deleting the entire thing and becoming a farmer might be easier. I have hired beta readers and handed over manuscripts that, only months earlier, existed solely between me and my laptop. That is a remarkably vulnerable experience.

There is a specific kind of terror involved in sending someone 90,000 words you invented and then asking, essentially, So… did any of this work? But I have also discovered how valuable that outside perspective can be.

Other people see things you cannot see when you have been staring at the same characters for months. They notice the moments that make them laugh, the characters they fall in love with, the scenes that hurt, the places where they desperately want you to get on with it, and occasionally the moment where you realise that something you thought was incredibly obvious has, in fact, been understood by absolutely nobody.

The main thing that has probably been one of the biggest surprises of this whole experience is that I’ve connected with so many other authors, writers at different stages of their careers, traditionally published authors, indie authors, people querying alongside me and even people who understand the peculiar emotional rollercoaster of refreshing an inbox when you know perfectly well there won’t be a new email because you checked it thirty seconds ago.

There is something wonderfully comforting about discovering just how universal some of this is: the excitement, the rejections, partial requests and even the conversations about agents, publishers, tropes, covers, characters and whether the thing you have spent six months writing is actually brilliant or whether you have simply developed manuscript-induced Stockholm syndrome.

I’ve also started investing in the worlds I am creating by hiring artists for commissioned work for my books, and begun seeing people who existed only in my imagination turned into something tangible. That has been unexpectedly emotional. There’s a very strange moment when an artist sends you an image and you realise:

Oh. There they are.

These stories are no longer just files hidden away on my computer. They are becoming books with identities, imagery, readers, feedback and lives beyond me… and that is both absolutely terrifying and incredibly exciting.

As I started becoming more confident in my fiction, I noticed the way I wrote elsewhere, particularly on this website, I realised I was still hiding like a Ghostwriter. My book reviews were structured, polished and informative. They were very much the woman who spent years being paid to make words perfect. The problem is that I do not actually experience books tidily.

Nobody who knows me would believe for a second that I finish a ridiculous five-star romance, gently place the book down and announce:

The author demonstrates an effective command of romantic tension.

No.

Sometimes I finish a book and need to stare at a wall, or go for a walk holding my baby. Sometimes I become emotionally attached to a fictional man who would be an appalling life choice. Sometimes I’m reading monster romance and the sentence I actually want to write in my review is:

Dear reader, the muffins.

And that is fine, that is me. So the reviews are changing too.

I’m keeping the structure because I still think it’s useful. You’ll still be able to find the themes, audience, narration style and all the information that helps you decide whether a book might be for you. But around that structure, I want to talk like a reader again, I want to tell you when something made me laugh, I want to talk about why a sex scene worked emotionally rather than simply informing you that the book contains explicit content.

And if I’m reviewing monster erotica involving wings, tails, tentacles or some anatomical situation that requires a diagram and perhaps an engineering degree, I reserve the right to have fun with that too. Professional does not have to mean personality-free.

Ghostwriting gave me an enormous amount: it taught me discipline, how to finish things, how to work through the point in every manuscript where your brain announces that the entire book is terrible and you should never have been allowed near a keyboard. I’m bringing all of that with me.

What is changing is where I want to put it, for a long time, my own writing happened around my professional writing, but now I want my own writing to be the centre. That’s scary because there’s much more of me attached to it.

A ghostwritten project can be judged as work, my novels contain my humour, my interests, my obsessions, my characters and some surprisingly revealing evidence about what apparently goes on inside my imagination. There ‘s no disappearing behind somebody else’s name, but that’s also exactly why this feels so exciting.

I have five finished manuscripts that did not exist before I decided to take myself seriously as an author, and I have two more growing beside them, I have beta readers, I have artwork. I have author friends and writing communities I would never have found if I had stayed comfortably behind the scenes. I have characters I adore, fictional places I genuinely miss when I’m not writing them, and more stories clamouring to be written than I have hours in the day. Most importantly, I’ve stopped treating my own writing like the thing I’ll get around to once everybody else’s work is finished.

I don’t know exactly where any of these books will end up, I can’t control that part. What I can control is whether I keep writing them… and, apparently, the answer to that is a fairly emphatic yes.

A year ago, I thought becoming an author meant learning how to put my name on my fiction, now I think it means something bigger: allowing myself to be visible in all of the novels, the reviews, this website, in the ridiculous jokes and emotional ramblings. I spent years learning how to disappear into other people’s voices.

Now I am finally learning how much fun it can be to use my own.

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From Ghostwriter to Author: My Journey

For years, I made a living telling other people’s stories. Ghostwriting has always been a little like stepping into someone else’s shoes. Learning their voice, their rhythm, even the words they would never use, and making sure the final story feels like it belongs entirely to them. I still do it, by the way. Ghostwriting is what pays my bills, and I love the challenge of slipping into another person’s perspective. But a funny thing happened along the way: I realised I had my own story to tell.

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My Turn: Stepping into my Publishing Journey

For the past few years, my professional world has been shaped by the words of others. I’ve beta read, edited, and even ghostwritten stories for countless writers, and I’ve loved every second of it. There is a certain magic in stepping into someone else’s imagination, helping them sharpen their characters or restructure a chapter so the heart of the story beats stronger. It’s work that has taught me discipline, patience, and the joy of collaboration. Yet while I have guided others through their own publishing paths, there has always been a quiet voice inside me whispering: When will it be your turn?

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Pondering on Poetry

Poetry is an art form that makes many people sweat, whether they be creative or not. Tresha Haefner (2019) installs in her students that writing poetry can be really easy, and to not put so much pressure on oneself. Maybe this fear is due to the fact that in school, our teachers start with poems in English lessons that are complex, have rhythm and discussing the different metaphors that may not be that clear to us initially.

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Remember, remember the month of November…

This last month has been a rather tricky month for my writing due to working full time and I’m so eager to write it can be overwhelming, with what I have yet to accomplish. I have been in contact with some amazing authors for the last two months as well as completing writing challenges on my Instagram because it has been far too often that I get writers block!

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