There are many factors which make Mary, Queen of Scots a fascinating character to write about. The seed for me was planted when I was a child, and read A Traveller in Time by Alison Uttley. Here Mary appears as a mysterious, charismatic figure with a dark past, and a dark future. I wrote the first drafts of FOR MY SINS twenty or thirty years ago - and her story intrigues me as much now as she did then. She is accused of all sorts of things, and has been much maligned in history as a femme fatale, a foolish and weak monarch - neither of which I believe to be true. In fact, she returned to Scotland as a young widow of 18, a devout Catholic in a fiercely Protestant country, and managed to largely negotiate her way through the problems set to entrap her. She was surrounded by not the most helpful of advisers, men who were at best, self-serving and at worst, downright scheming. She was accused of murdering her second husband Darnley in order to marry her third, Bothwell. He was strongly implicated in the gunpowder plot to eliminiate Darnley, so why did Mary then choose to marry him if the world saw him as guilty of regicide? There are factors here which I explore in my novel (released by my publisher Fledgling Press in February) which I think are very important. To a modern audience/readership, these reasons may seem difficult to understand, but I think it makes perfect sense... The dark mysteries of Mary's colourful life are what attracted me to write this book, of which I am very proud. In my version, Mary sits in her English prison cell, at the end of her life, stitching her tapestries while being haunted by the ghosts of her past. She talks to her ghosts about the truth at last, what really happened. She reveals secrets, unmasks lies, confesses what she is guilty of, and who were her greatest enemies.