On the eve of my 3rd novel’s launch I’m sitting writing this post and it only seems natural to look back to the beginnings of that third book, Fool Me Twice.
Only the other day someone asked me why I wrote my books. It’s funny, because it’s a completely reasonable question, but I was stumped. They were asking particularly about my first book, why did I write it, what made me do it, what was the reason I wrote it. It’s strange because I guess I view writing as more of a compulsion than something I set out to do. I mean, there is planning in a novel, and you set out with the determination to write and finish it, but the reason, what made me do it, why I started writing it, well that doesn’t really feel like a choice.
And that’s not a negative. There’s something cathartic in writing. Even now, writing this blog, I feel calmer for it. It’s like drawing out the things from within which might otherwise struggle to find voice, and allowing them freedom. That’s how it was with Fool Me Twice. Quite randomly, I was listening to the song Welcome to Burlesque by Cher for the motion picture Burlesque, and there she was, sitting in my imagination; Caro Worth.
She wasn’t sat there for long. She rose and began to traverse the gaming tables, and that’s when I realised she was in a gaming hell. Her dress gave away her origin as the 1770s, and the darkness of the place, creeping in at the edges as candles worked their hardest to push it away, it hinted at the secrets that Caro Worth kept hidden.
And there she stayed, in my mind, winding around the tables, playing another game of cards, waiting for her story to be written. She was beckoning me, and only her face, her path, was clear to me from among the blurred faces of that hell. I couldn’t ignore her, not when she dwelt in my mind, she compelled me to write her story, from that first night in the hell where we met, until…
Well, I guess you’ll just have to read the novel when it’s released on the 1st…
Philippa Jane Keyworth 