I had no intention of writing a novel when I signed up for a creative writing course in London but the seed was sown when I wrote a short story inspired by a travel assignment in Mauritius for Marie Claire magazine.
Still, the idea of cultivating a full-blown 300-page piece of fiction seemed a daunting prospect – Jack’s beanstalk compared to the shrub-like 1,500-word magazine features I’d written to date – and the story was shelved for a while. But as I worked in various editorial roles in different parts of the world, with breaks along the way, it gradually grew and ripened into Love Apples.
While it takes some authors a couple of months to produce a book, it took me over a decade in the end; and if some authors create fantasy worlds far removed from their own, my novel is rooted in experience, fed by my passion for food and watered with imagination. In this guest blog post for Women Writers, Women’s Books, I describe its journey from seed to novel-ripe-for-the-picking.
