My Inspiration

Since everybody else has been writing about their debut novels, I thought I’d better write about mine. This is the story of how I got the idea that became The Heir.

Authors sometimes get their inspirations in the strangest of places. When it came to the idea for The Heir, my husband was responsible.
My husband thinks cheesy pick-up lines are funny, not that he ever uses them on anybody. (Lucky for him!) One day when we were driving to the Sunshine Coast in Queensland for a holiday, he was trying to make me laugh by telling me his favourites. I was trying to think of some too, but I’m not good at that kind of thing. The only one I could think of was the line where the guy says to the girl, ‘you are the only reason I was put on this planet’.
As I thought about that, I imagined a guy saying to me, ‘You are the only reason I was put on this planet.’
‘Yeah, right,’ I replied.
Then, in my head, that guy gave me an intense look. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are the only reason I was put on this planet.’
As I imagined that, I started to think about what it might mean if someone said that to a girl and meant it literally. He really was only on that planet because of her. Before I knew what was happening, the story was swirling around in my head and I spent most of our holiday thinking about it.
Within a few months I had the plot of The Heir figured out and outlines for what I knew would become two more books. Eventually, the story started knocking on the inside of my head, demanding that I let it out, so I sat down at the computer and started writing. It had been a while since I’d tried to write a novel, so I was a little stiff, but soon got going and enjoyed the experience immensely. I was fortunate enough to find a publisher relatively quickly and after many subsequent edits and to-ing and fro-ing in terms of the story, The Heir was published on 1st June 2013, just over three years after I started writing it.