An interesting question “where do you get your inspiration from?” It provokes two emotions both in equal measure. I love it because it makes me reflect on how I came up with each idea, and I hate it because it makes me question, sometimes doubt things. The worst thing that could happen to a writer is running out of inspiration, and each time I finish a book I think, “I’m never going to have such a good idea again”. So it’s a very worrying question!

Rejection’s inspiration came from seeing something on the news about a guy who had committed a mass shooting. The guy was Martin Bryant  and he was responsible for Australia’s first mass shooting at Port Arthur in 1996.  Australia had never had a mass shooting before, so it made me ask the question ‘what set of circumstances could be so bad that a person had no choice but to murder innocent people?’ – and that was the beginning of the idea. I used this Aussie experience, coupled it with an all too familiar issue in the USA and brought it to a small country town in northern New South Wales, Australia. You won’t pick the ending!

Shattered was completely different. To start with it wasn’t going to be a mystery, because at the time I came up with the idea I had no idea how successful Rejection was going to be. Shattered was going to be a story about a group of people who through a common connection devise a cruel and painful plan to torture this person who had done them all so wrong. The concept came from two separate incidents. A conversation with a Mafia boss in his nightclub (I used to manage the building in which the nightclub ran) and an adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express. I took a basic idea, expanded it dramatically, and made a story from it. In the end, Shattered retained some of those elements although very loosely. The Mafia boss, unlike my victim in Shattered, is still living today in my home town.

Ultimately, the ideas for my books come from people – seeing how they treat each other and behave towards each other. I like to take the smallest flaw in that behaviour and magnify it a thousand times until it becomes dangerous.

One idea running through The Secret of Barnesdale Manor is loneliness. As an only child, I’ve always been a bit of a loner. I enjoy the company of others but I can easy enjoy my own company. Charles Abernathy, a rich land baron outside Bangalow, NSW was a loner. He wanted people in his world but he could easily do without them at the same time. I’ve felt a bit the same way ( but I’m not a wealthy land baron). It’s this loneliness that I wanted to exploit in The Secret of Barnesdale Manor. And so loneliness became a significant part of the theme.

People often tell me that they have a great idea for a story, but in reality their ideas rarely work for me. Generally something bad has happened to somebody they know – even occasionally to the person telling me the story. But horrific as it might seem to be the victim of this story idea, unless I can actually feel the crime myself, I can’t mould it into a crime fiction book. I need to understand both the perpetrator and the victim and what makes them tick.

When I was writing Murder on the Beach, I was intrigued by the idea of somebody who was so self-sure about themselves could at the same time be so vulnerable to the outside world that they didn’t pick up on their own short comings. I wanted to see how one error of judgement, and the lies that then became essential in order to sustain that mistake, could escalate into a truly terrible and deadly scenario. That one thought led to another. Once I had an idea of the consequences of this lie, I then had to intertwine all my characters and my imagination started to fly. It was kind of easy – I have observed my characters for years. I enjoyed writing this – some people call it therapy.

Breaking Point was born out of thoughts about an irritating neighbour. But while my early books were short novellas, I wanted to delve a bit more into the lives of the characters exposing them more to my readers. My 5 star reviews are proof I’ve hit the spot.

That’s how my inspiration comes. By reading about or witnessing behaviour that can be exaggerated until it becomes murderous and by letting my mind go wild. As long as people continue to be unique, interesting, and with a mix of good and not-so-good traits, I don’t believe I will ever run out of ideas. Inspiration is all around me.

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