Vision and Reality

The second in the Riviera series is very close to being ready to go to the publisher - fingers crossed, next week. Then we all have to hope that they like it.

I'm at the stage at the moment of the obsessional fact check. You can never be sure that you have absolutely everything right in a book, however much you try, but I do make the attempt. Which is why I have been watching videos of parallel parking (I don't drive) and checking the legal requirements concerning air guns, and consulting experts about motor cycles. Anything to do with cars is dodgy, as I have no experience to draw on. If you find me prowling around your car - as I did this morning, to a very nice Mercedes, on the way to the supermarket, you'll know why. Technology can be a bit of a challenge too, as I am not into the very sophisticated stuff. I have to go to the experts for that.

Writing a book is always a bit of a thing - making the vision you have in your head accord with something that relates to reality. For this one I had a very strong vision of an opening scene set at a wedding.  My villain was there for a very specific purpose, so I had to find the reason to support that. As part of the story someone present had to recognise him. I decided that would be my hero, and I then had had to find a reason that he was there, and for him being in a similar situation some months before. All those things dictated the role for my three main characters, because my hero's occupation dictated his relationship to my heroine. Confused yet?  It was complex to work out, and it gave me both people and plot for the book. All that from the mental picture of a wedding. I know I am guilty of complicated plot syndrome, but I do get a buzz from getting everything to work out.

Weddings got to be a theme of the book, and as I have said before, I had a lot of fun with that. The wedding that was the absolute core of the plot was simply vision - imagining the most up market wedding I could, then dialing it up even more. Sadly I had to cut quite a bit of the description, as I was over my word count, but if we make it into publication, I'll probably share the out-takes, but we have to get there first!