I last posted on Goodreads 5 and 1/2 years ago, in the Spring of 2020 as the world was closing down. I posted about a book I really wanted to write, that was outside my genre (which has been historical crime fiction up until now). The book was a standalone, non-crime historical novel set in the north of Scotland, not in the C17th, but in the C19th. One of its storylines was the cholera epidemic creeping across Europe towards Scotland and North America. In Spring of 2020, nobody really wanted to be reading about epidemics, and I certainly didn't want to be writing about one. I deleted the post very soon after writing it.
I got over my reluctance after a few weeks, and really got down to work on my novel about the members of a circulating library that had been formed in a northern Scottish seaside town in 1831. When my editor heard about it, in May of 2020, she said it would be a really bad idea to change genre at that particular time, and did I have anything else? The anything else that I told her about was a revenge story involving a Jacobite bookseller in Inverness a few years after the battle of Culloden. The next day, I was writing 'The Bookseller of Inverness', which would be published in the summer of 2022.
The publishing world is a funny old thing, though, and the success of that book meant I had greater freedom of choice in my writing. It gave me the confidence to go back to the book I had abandoned in the summer of 2020, and in a few months time - February of 2026 - that novel, 'The Cromarty Library Circle', will be published under my own name, Shona MacLean, rather than the initials 'S.G.' I have gone under for the last few years with my historical fiction.
Over the next few months, I will be posting about this novel - my motivations, inspirations and the challenges of writing it, on my 'Shona MacLean' author account on Goodreads, and I hope some of you will find it there.