…for now. Answering yet another frequently asked question and revealing why I’m leaving Berylford behind for the time being…

When telling friends and family that I’m working on my third book, some of them ask what it’s about… others ask me, “Is this part of the same series?” And, of course I say, “No”. You Can Hear Chopin from the Attic is entirely separate from the Berylford series. Different country, different time period, and so on. That’s all easy enough to understand. What I don’t make a massive point about is why. Why did I choose not to write a third Berylford book?

I may have mentioned it on podcasts and other interviews in the past that, initially, when I released Lust & Liberty, I planned to leave the series alone for a few years. Write You Can Hear Chopin in that time and then come back and polish the existing draft of Sin & Secrecy. It was just sitting there, waiting for some love. A meeting with a friend turned my hand towards finishing that first. It made sense, I guess. With the space of two years, I’d have two books out. Twice as many products and so on.

After releasing Sin and Secrecy, I had truly had my fill of Berylford and the characters I’d been working on for over a decade. I needed a totally blank canvas. No traces of my old writing at all. And You Can Hear Chopin had already garnered such interest from fans in passing. A tale of a young hotelier protecting his schizophrenic wife from his Nazi clientele in 1940s Berlin. Unvisited concept and all that. I already had a story framework mapped out. It was ready for me to fill with research and plan out properly.

So, the answer to the question is, you can have too much of a good thing all at once. I had had 12 years of writing The Berylford Scandals… I needed a chance to work on something fresh. To challenge myself, if nothing else!

Will we ever return to Berylford?

However, the fact that people are asking about a third instalment to The Berylford Scandals can only be a good thing, right? The fanbase may be small but they like what they’re reading. So I can confirm that the historical mystery series is not done forever.

Thank you for reading. Do you have a question about my ongoing and future work? If so, get in touch via my Facebook and Instagram pages. Also read further posts out more about my latest novel, and stay up to date with my podcast.

Diving into one of the more divisive creative decisions I made on my first book. Why I chose to kill off a certain character…

As a rule, reader feedback as to the ending of Lust & Liberty has been good. The words have been featured as Instagram captions. Some have even reported shedding tears. But on the flipside, a couple of readers told me they would have preferred a different, happier ending to the book. One that did not require me to kill off a certain character. Needless to say, this post contains spoilers. So if you haven’t read Lust & Liberty and plan to, you’d probably best not read on.

I am generally quite selective when it comes to the readers from whom I’ll take feedback. And I’m even more selective in how seriously I take that feedback these days. A reader made a point about an earlier draft of Lust & Liberty. Specifically that it didn’t really appear to have an ending. The main reason for the open-ended nature of the book was so that it would indicate more was coming in its sequel, Sin & Secrecy. However, if a more definitive ending was what they wanted, then that’s what they’ll get. How to definitively end a story for a character? Kill off that character, or one that’s significant to them.

Jesse Blameford, in the earlier versions, was never meant to die. Under circumstances I now forget, our favourite butler George Whitlocke compels him to leave Berylford and let the grieving Lady Vyrrington go, which he does. Riding off into the sunset, you might say. His last contact with her is, as it is with the final book, a letter. In it, Blameford reveals how he found marriage, children, happiness et cetera, all the while Lady Vyrrington loses her humanity piece by piece as her loved ones die all around her. It set the Countess up for her frozen emotionless state that we see in Sin & Secrecy. But apparently it wasn’t satisfying enough for Blameford to have a happy ending by comparison. So, I decided to kill him.

It took a lot of skewing to the story, allowing me to get a murder trial in the mix as well. And then, Blameford decides to make a move of true love, in his mind, at any rate. He decides to sacrifice his life to give Lady Vyrrington another chance of happiness. To spare her continued suffering. Which of course doesn’t work. It did, however, give her a better reason for closing herself off emotionally. Both loves of her life dead in the space of a year. So, that’s why I decided to kill off Jesse Blameford. To provide a much more cohesive and emotionally provocative ending to the story and to his and Lady Vyrrington’s arcs, but also to provide a more convincing setup for the Lady V we come to know in Book Two.

Thank you for reading. Want to know more about my writing process? Get in touch via my Facebook and Instagram pages. Also, read further posts out more about my latest novel, and stay up to date with my podcast.