How was your week? We spent most of ours in the beautiful Lake District with my husband’s family. My mother-in-law has been a regular summer visitor to Eskdale for many years, so it was the perfect place for her to celebrate a landmark birthday. I didn’t write a single word all week (didn’t expect to!) but I absorbed a lot of useful impressions. It was a long, slow drive back to London on Friday, and I spent most of it thinking about what I’d learned.

My Gilded Lily series is set in Scotland, a couple of hundred miles further north, but the Lake District environment is very similar – wild, rugged scenery of moorland, lake and mountain, mile upon mile of hillside dotted with hardy sheep tended by even hardier farmers. Everyone has at least one dog. Everyone knows everyone else, often going back many generations.

My books star twenty-first century characters who have been brought up in this type of rural community and who combine the best of the traditional and the contemporary. Their roots are deep, and their values are those of their parents and grandparents, but they aren’t isolated from current lifestyles; they’re smart, worldly, entrepreneurial characters who adapt and innovate for the benefit of their home and community.

That’s exactly the kind of feeling Continue reading →