Why I Wrote Emerald

 I have always been fascinated by Tudor times.  If I could choose to be stuck in a lift with anyone, it would be Elizabeth I.  With EMERALD, I wanted to find a voice that was modern and engaging.

 Emotions don't change like fashions and while I tried hard to make Emerald a girl of her time, she had to be first and foremost a girl who had problems and worries that anyone now might understand. At first I tried to write the story in the third person but that didn't work because I wanted  the same immediacy of voice as in RASPBERRIES ON THE YANGTZE and CLIMBING A MONKEY PUZZLE TREE, alongside an authentic and believable historical background like that of WENDY or THE UNRIVALLED SPANGLES.  So I wrote EMERALD in the first person and that was the breakthrough. EMERALD took me a long time to write and many of the issues in the book are ones that I have faced in my own life.  It seems to me that you write best about what you know and certainly I knew a lot about how EMERALD was feeling about herself. I also intended to make the story funny and real and there are many ’laugh out loud' moments in the story.

I would like to think that EMERALD marks a new, distinctive and personal approach to writing a historical novel.  I hope my readers will enjoy it.