My writing process

I’m obsessed with writing and am always striving to improve my craft. I experience degrees of painful pleasure in doing so—pleasurable when I come close to nailing the words and sentences I’m searching for as I write, painful when I spend days revising over and over everything I’ve written. It took me sixteen years to research and write my first novel, The Albatross Necklace, in 2012, for example. It crashed and burned, but I learned from my inexperience and wrote the next six from its ashes. I didn’t give up.

My writing style is as rhythmic and supple as I can make it. I do my best to produce compelling sentences you’ll enjoy reading, varying the length of my paragraphs and balancing a mix of action and dialogue. I make the settings as visual as possible and bring my familiar characters to life, so that you share their emotions as they think, smile, laugh outright or grieve and cry.

My research is thorough and my references accurate. I’ve accessed sources as disparate as the Archives in Middelburg and Cape Town, the Shipwrecks’ Museum in Fremantle and, of course, Google—the latter with a hefty pinch of salt. One thing often leads to another, and I’ve disappeared down many a rabbit-hole in search of the truth. Some say that if you need to research you’re not ready to tell a story—but many of my stories lie like opals in the rough in the tailings of the research.

I work with my insightful editor to make my word choices, plot sequences and storylines as close to faultless as we can get them, so that you’ll find reading my books a surprising and interesting experience.