STEAL ME, says the book...

STEAL ME, says the book. 

Rowan is holding it open with her two hands, and she feels the tremor that passes through them. Her eyes widen. Warmth floods into her face and she feels sure she must be going red, guiltily red, as though everyone in the bookshop can read her thoughts. As though she’s responsible for what it says in large bold letters at the top of the page. 

She closes her eyes, squeezing them tight shut, and counts to seven—her lucky number, the number of fairytales and magic. Then she opens them again and reads: 

STEAL ME. You know you want to. 

Thus begins my brand new novella, available to order now from PS Publishing. Steal Me is about a gorgeous looking bookshop that opens on the high street of a small Scottish town, exciting comment from both book lovers and prophets of financial doom alike. It's a shop with a book for everyone -but it's also a shop you don't want opening anywhere near you, believe me! 

Steal Me comes to you thanks to Marie O'Regan, an award-nominated writer and editor who is Managing Editor of Absinthe Books, an imprint of PS dedicated to the novella. 

It has cover art from John Coulthart, who also created the cover for my recent collection Atmospheric Disturbances, from Swan River Press. I absolutely love John's work and was thrilled when he agreed to do the cover of Steal Me!

I'll be blogging about both Marie and John in the next few days as there is so much more that I want to say about them and I can't fit it all in one blog post. 

Meantime, I'd like to talk a little bit about book locations! If you happen to have read any of my previous books, you'll probably know that I get a lot of inspiration from real life places. My first ever novel, The Vanishing of Katharina Linden, was set in the German town of Bad Münstereifel, where I and my family lived for seven years. Bad M is an amazing place, full of history and absolutely wild folklore, and so it wasn't surprising that those things worked their way out as a book. 

Later, we moved to Flanders and I set some of my later books there (guess where Demons of Ghent is set? heh), and after that we moved to Scotland, where we have been ever since. Before Steal Me I had already created fictional mayhem in my sleepy part of Perthshire, with my novels Ghost, Too Near The Dead and Jump Cut. Steal Me continues this trend, with the arrival of Legends bookshop in a small town suspiciously like the one I live in. 

You can see some of the locations that inspired the book in this video!

Of course, the town in the book isn't exactly like my home town. It's more loosely based on it. The library isn't like the one in the book, which is an older building right in the centre - we actually have a modern community campus library on the edge of town. There used to be an older library in the town, but it is now the local arts centre, and it isn't in the spot where the library is located in the book either. So there's a bit of switching around, but the one thing I did want to do is accurately represent a small town with heart - one you'd fight for, as my heroine, Rowan, decides to do. 

Ever since I started writing full time, I've been very influenced by my environment. I spend quite a lot of time walking about (this was especially true during the pandemic) and if I see something interesting, it often sparks ideas. Sometimes these are quite ominous ideas! I think the classic case is the block of flats I used to pass on a particular bus journey. One window in this block was full of Spiderman memorabilia, and I often used to think how cute it was that some little kid's mum had indulged his mania for Spiderman to that extent. Then one day I thought: yeah, but supposing he's 50 and his mum is 80, and she won't let him out??? 

It's all about the way you look at things, I guess. In Steal Me I looked at my quiet, largely predictable, mostly respectable little town, and saw some monsters peeping out. I hope you'll enjoy reading about them!