Behind the scenes of my first novel ‘Raw Mistakes.’

A lot of people have asked me questions about my book, my process, and where the ideas came from. So here is the answer to the most popular question.

Question 1. How did this book even happen?

I never wanted to write; I’d never even thought about writing. In fact, my most hated class at school was English. Then, I left my homeland, the UK, at age eighteen and moved to Italy. I pretty much lived and breathed the Italian language until I realised my English vocabulary was pretty basic. My sister took great pleasure in poking fun at my quirky Italian-to-English translations and my tendency to mix up words like ‘angles’ and ‘corners’ and call foods by the Italian versions of their names. 

I remember the time I mentioned taking items to a place where folks could donate things they no longer needed in the hope that someone else could find a use for them. My sister promptly asked, “You mean a recycling centre?” That’s when it hit me: I’d lost touch with my mother tongue. So, I resorted to binge-watching English films and TV shows in a desperate attempt to sound less like a bumbling fool.

It’s safe to say that I was fated to avoid anything involving the English language, especially writing. But life has a funny way of throwing curveballs when you least expect it.

It was during lockdown that I began to write, not out of any great desire to take up a new hobby but out of some strange need to tell people what was going on over here in my neck of the woods in Italy during lockdown. We were cooped up in our houses, and despite the newspapers reporting people singing from their balconies, that wasn’t what I was experiencing. Now, don’t get me wrong, lockdown wasn’t all doom and gloom; I lived alone (thankfully), with a lovely terrace outside my house to enjoy the sunshine, and I found plenty of ways to get out and about, but that is a whole other story. I spent every day just writing what I saw, felt and experienced every day until managed to turn three months inside the house into entertaining stories.

Once we were let out of our cages at the end of the pandemic, I missed writing; I missed it so much that I just carried on doing it. I wrote until I had nothing else to write about, and then I found more. After a busy summer season photographing weddings, I decided that writing was a thing of the past.  Yet, a month later, I found myself in my winter home on the island of Zanzibar in Africa with a computer on my lap and lots of thoughts swirling around my mind.

This book wasn’t meant to happen; it was never part of my plan. Originally, I began to write about the chaos of weddings through the eyes of a photographer; after all, that is what I’d been doing for as long as I could remember. But as I delved into the stories, it was the wedding planners who stole the show.  So, I ditched the initial idea of the wedding stories and began to put pen to paper, or fingers to keys, and began to tell the stories of the planners that I’d created in my mind.

Before I knew it, my life was spilt across the pages, a mix of humbling, embarrassing, and oddly satisfying tales spread out over the four main characters in the book. It was a journey I never expected, but I was happy to see it on my screen.

After one book, I couldn’t stop, especially as I left the first one on such a cliffhanger that I had to jump straight into the next one and then the next, then the next, until I’d written five books and now this little introductory piece.

Right now, in September 2024 I’m working on the first book in the next series. It will be a totally different story from the first series. At the moment I’m writing about a tour guide on a rather entertaining Safari. I’m not sure if it will be a series or a stand alone right now, I guess I’ll have to see where my mind takes me.