Like many writers, I’ve always been an avid reader, but becoming a writer was something that I didn’t rush into. It wasn’t until I went to university in my early thirties that I discovered that I really enjoyed writing. A good story, well told, however – has power – and with that comes responsibility.
When I moved to a small village on the outskirts of Ipswich in late 2006, I found the story I wanted to tell. Ipswich was a peaceful place, and I loved walking with my Dobermann puppy in the woods and fields that were on my doorstep. Then came December 2006, and events in the run-up to Christmas changed everything. Young women began to disappear from the red-light district, never to be seen alive again.
I was a teenager when the Yorkshire Ripper was active (between 1975–1980) and I knew that many of the women killed were working as prostitutes. Then he killed a student and, as I recall it, there was a change in the reporting and the public attitude. Now that he was killing so-called ‘innocent’ women, he had to be stopped. Thirty years later attitudes had changed, and the young women murdered in Ipswich were seen as victims, not only of their murderer but in a much greater sense. Tania Nicol, Gemma Adams, Anneli Alderton, Paula Clennell and Annette Nicholls were young, vulnerable, and desperate to make money to support a drug habit. There was huge sympathy in the town for the girls themselves and for their families. And rightly so. Even the language has changed – there are sex-workers and a sex industry, but to an extent, the word ‘prostitute’ has disappeared from the vocabulary in this area.
One sunny winter morning I was walking the dog in a very well used area called Long Strops when a man told me off for being out on my own. As I walked down past Millennium football fields, I saw fluorescent-clad police officers undertaking a linear search of the field on the other side of the hedge and decided, as the cold caught my bones, that the man may have had a point. But then the killer was caught, and the town began to heal.
Three years later, a Channel 4 documentary Killer in a Small Town, told the story of the women from the point of view of friends and family. It was very thought-provoking and suddenly I had the seed of an idea. It was a seed which grew very slowly as I learnt to write and found out about the process of taking on a project as big as a novel. The title Tangent was with me from the start. It was the idea of being on the edge of society, sometimes interacting with it, but never really feeling accepted by it.
In late 2017 I had only written around 17,000 words, ten thousand of those added since my marriage broke down in 2013. After the confidence boost given to me by the tutors Margaret Murphy and Helen Pepper on an Arvon Crime Fiction and Forensics course and the feedback from other students, I signed up for NaNoWriMo and wrote to the end. Months of editing followed until Tangent became the honest, raw thriller I hope you’ll enjoy. A story that I believe does justice to the memories of all the girls murdered over the years.
My journey to publication hasn’t been a straight line. It’s taken me many years to return to my calling. I was once told that the job we wanted at eight years old, is really the thing we want to do most in life.
At eight years old, I wanted to be an author, and the book that changed my life was Ballet Shoes by Noel Stretfield. Oh, the magic of make believe!
Writing is a solitary life and played for the long game. As a young person this was not for me. I lacked the maturity or confidence to sit down by myself for long stretches of time and put pen to paper (I still write longhand!). Prolonged periods of inactivity were interspersed with only short periods of intense writing.
At long last motherhood forced me to start maturing and I waved goodbye to a busy social life, and said hello to a life of early rises and bedtime routines. This cleared time for me to write more regularly and with increased intention.
After the birth of my second child Post Natal Depression kicked in and took hold. As a coping mechanism I journaled what I was going through, and I often imagined what it would be like just to get up and walk away. Thankfully I never took such drastic action myself, instead I created a fictional character who did, and followed her story.
That story became my first novel, The Day She Came Home. It has turned out to be a powerful way to share my feelings with other women struggling with PND, and help them know they are not alone.
Outside of writing I (now!) love days out with my family. We’re so enjoying being back in the UK that we’re like tourists, exploring Edinburgh and the rest of Scotland.
My husband and I have always loved travelling and now that the children are getting older, we hope to introduce them to the adventure that is world travel.
Leopold Borstinski is an independent author whose past careers have included financial journalism, business management of financial software companies, consulting and product sales and marketing, as well as teaching.
There is nothing he likes better so he does as much nothing as he possibly can. He has travelled extensively in Europe and the US and has visited Asia on several occasions. Leopold holds a Philosophy degree and tries not to drop it too often.
He lives near London and is married with one wife, one child and no pets.
Saffron Bryant is an Australian author with a passion for fantasy and science fiction. She began writing at a very early age and hasn’t stopped since.
She has a degree in Biomedical Science (with honours) and recently completed a PhD in chemistry at the University of Sydney.
Unfortunately her cupboard didn’t open onto Narnia, she didn’t get a letter from Hogwarts, and a strange man in a blue box hasn’t shown up… (here’s hoping for an old Wizard on my 50th!!)
So she spends her time writing stories and releasing them to the world.
She read her first book when she was four and wrote her first poem when she was seven. And though she lived vicariously through books, and her far too few travels, life happened. She married the man of her dreams and birthed three boys (and added two dogs, a cat, three chickens, and some goldfish!) So, life became all about settling down and providing a means to an end. She climbed the corporate ladder, exercised her entrepreneurial flair and made her mark in real estate.
Traveling and exploring the world made space for child-friendly annual family holidays by the sea. The ones where she was forced to build a sandcastle and barely got past the first five pages of a book. And on the odd chance she managed to read fast enough to page eight, she was confronted with a moral dilemma as the umpteenth F-word forced its way off just about every page!
But in a strange twist of fate, upon her return from yet another male-dominated camping trip, when fifty knocked hard and fast on her door, and she could no longer stomach the profanities in her reading material, she drew a line in the sand and bravely set off to create her own adventure!
It was in the dark, quiet whispers of the night, well past midnight late in the year 2017, that Alex Hunt was born.
Another wonderful and humorous instalment in the Guesthouse on the Green series as Mammy and Moira travel Vietnam.
I love the series and can't wait for book four!
A quick but emotional read - reading about the cruelty to the dog was heartbreaking but this was a lovely tale of the love and healing that animals can bring to our lives.
I would have given five stars but for the missed typos - a few t...
I get the impression that this could be a nice story but I've had to give up after forcing myself to go as far as 15% of the way through. If this novel has ever been near a remotely professional editor then the author was conned.
Chapte...
Another very enjoyable story but with a few niggles, hence the four stars rather than five. Maybe it's because I was tired but the editing issues grated on me more than in the first story and, do people really generally believe that 'ear...
