Tag: author

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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A Review of: Another Man’s Treasure by Hazel Mack

Fake Mates, Monster Cowboys and Questionable Muffins

Rating: 8 out of 10.

I had the absolute pleasure of reading the ARC for Hazel Mack’s newest book Another Man’s Treasure, a cosy and sexy fake mates story that turns into something real.

There are books where you can explain the premise to another person without raising an eyebrow.

Another Man’s Treasure is not one of those books.

Continue reading “A Review of: Another Man’s Treasure by Hazel Mack” →
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A Review of: Blank 12

Cover art courtesy of Aleeza Nelson

Rating: 8 out of 10.

Thank you to the author for the ARC in exchange for an honest review. Due to be published February 2026, this is a Sci-Fi dystopian fiction, perfect to release fresh into a new year!

When I first opened Blank 12, I expected a familiar dystopian setup: post-war America, experimental science gone wrong, and the inevitable military fallout, but Nelson surprised me with the heart at its centre. Beneath the politics and action is a story about fear, identity, and the price of survival.

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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.

Continue reading “From Ghostwriter to Author: My Journey” →
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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?

Continue reading “My Turn: Stepping into my Publishing Journey” →
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A Review of: The Big Power of Tiny Connections; How Small Interactions Spark Awesome Outcomes

This is my very first review of a non-fiction piece of work that focuses on self-help, specifically: empowering oneself and making positive connections in their work as well as in daily life. I received a free audiobook for review, so please, take a seat as we delve into the nuances of this interesting book. Written by Jen Nash, a trained public speaker and professional specialising in life coaching and consultancy for companies and published by Big Shift Press in July 2022.

Rating: 8 out of 10.
Continue reading “A Review of: The Big Power of Tiny Connections; How Small Interactions Spark Awesome Outcomes” →
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A Review of: Suspension – A Novel

Rating: 9 out of 10.

***Potential Trigger Warning – discussion of death and suicide***

Suspension is a modern fantasy novel that indulges in a magical, yet ghostly storyline that I would imagine many readers would enjoy. Fresh off the press as of the 30th June 2022 and written by Andrea Faye Christians, a new author on the scene, this novel is her literary debut that explores the unknown mysteries that death holds. Having fascinated people across the globe for centuries, death is still a completely unknown adventure, which Christians creates in this well-written contemporary fantasy.

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