I thought I’d talk a bit today about the differences between writing historical stories and paranormal stories, with particular reference to The Hunted and the Hind, which is coming soon to audio. Most of my stories have magic and the paranormal in them, but I see myself as being more a historical writer than a fantasy writer—I try and get my history right and then throw in the extra ‘what if’ of the magic.

One of the things I like a great deal about my paranormal universe is that no-one, not even me, knows exactly how everything fits together. This is great as a writer because you can basically darn up plot-holes as you go along, but it is also a bit nerve-wracking, because you can write yourself into those same plot holes and it’s excruciating trying to dig out of them. Someone on twitter asked how I kept track of my magic system a while back and my answer was that I didn’t really, but in my head it looks like a room full of balls of wool and excited kittens. This is still true, although since that conversation I’ve started keeping detailed notes because it was all getting a bit out of hand.

Writing the historical parts of the stories is completely different. I like to have a clear idea of the period I’m writing in—for the 1920s now, I think I’ve got quite a grip on it. I started off with family stories about the period and then did lots of reading around, about specific areas of London, specific things that happened that I wanted to touch my characters in some way. It’s a much more measured approach. I sometimes get sidetracked by research into things that seem to blow up in my mind as immensely important and might only have a sentence in the finished book. In The Flowers of Time, for example, I became obsessed with how to make light in the Himalayas in the 1700s and ended up making not only my own butter-lamps, but my own butter.

For The Hunted and the Hind I got sucked down a sea-travel rabbit-hole that seemed to be endless. The characters take a liner home from Egypt to England and I needed to satisfy myself that I’d got the detail right before I started shoving magical happenings into the story. That seems to be the way it works for me—I get the historical period straight in my mind, I have my characters and then I say ‘what if this happened?’. It’s my own particular version of the writer habit of killing your darlings.

As the writer though, one of the most fun things about the 1920s books is the snippy dialogue between the main characters. It was really nice to get back into that when I began to write again. However, I didn’t want Hunted to be another Alec and Lew book, they’d had their turn and I wanted to focus on Fenn and Will. I ended up cutting quite a bit of Alec and Lew scenes because they were just there so I could write snarky dialogue that ending in shagging. Which is what I have as a deleted scene for you today!

The Hunted and the Hind is coming to audio in the next few weeks, narrated by the inestimable Callum Hale–catch up with the audios of Lost in Time and Shadows on the Border here.