Hello Heidi, thank you so much for joining me today and inviting me onto your blog tour. Can you tell me about The Other Boy?

Hey Laura. Thank you for having me. I wrote The Other Boy after watching a documentary about Dean Corl, the Candyman serial killer, who raped, mutilated and murdered over twenty teenage boys and young men. I didn’t want to write from the POV of a victim or their family, or the detectives or even the killer, there was another story, in the shadows, that I wanted to tell. The Other Boy is about parents whose child makes a choice they could never have imagined. A terrible choice. A fatal choice. An unforgivable one.

What are the challenges of writing a psychological thriller and what advice would you give to someone wanting to write in this genre?

I have taken a master’s in creative writing and spent many hours watching master classes from Jericho Writers, and a comparison between mysteries and thrillers was a lightbulb moment for me. A mystery is about solving a crime; a thriller is about surviving it. The survival can be physical, or, as in psychological thrillers, it can be mental and emotional. The advice I would give to someone writing in this genre is not to be afraid of how far you push your protagonist, be brave, be bold, be ruthless. However bad the situation, it is how the character claws their way back to life, sanity and freedom that is exciting. The further they sink, the greater the battle back up to the surface, and the more satisfying it is for the reader. The challenge is having the courage to go the darkest places; my advice is to go further.

What’s your typical writing day like? Do you have any writing rituals?

I do love routine, and planning my time, it makes me more productive and makes my days feel more worthwhile. I walk early with my Great Dane, which puts me in a good frame of mind for my day. I have all the early morning school prep madness to do and then the school drop off. I come home and run or lift weights. I am terrified of aging and I LOVE exercising, it gives me an adrenaline buzz, and I listen to all my favourite tunes and sing along. Then I am in my office at my desk, clearing emails, doing the household or children related chores, clubs, appointments, you know the drill, then I write. Ideally I write for about three hours, if I’m lucky, four days a week. There’s always an appointment to fill one of the afternoons, and I take my mum swimming every Thursday. My goal is to write three chapters per week. I’m writing a book every six months since the release of The Other Boy.

From idea to finished draft, how long did it take you to write The Other Boy? How did you approach the research and editing process?

The Other Boy was a LONG process. It began at university, the opening chapters serving as my dissertation. The first, very messy draft, took a year. I paid for an editor, and that was another six months of back and forth and many changes. I also used beta readers for a different perspective. I lost characters, whole chapters, started four chapters earlier, then lost the lot and started several chapters later. I added and binned tens of thousands of words. It was a lot of work, and a huge amount of learning. I loved it all.The editing is my favourite part, finding what isn’t working and making it better, knowing that I can change anything and everything until I am happy with it. I had written another book by the time I was approached by Tule Publishing, and a year after I had put the Other Boy aside, I was back with the manuscript making changes for my editor at Tule. The second book, The Other Mother, has been a far smoother experience.

If you were compiling a playlist for this novel, which songs would you include?

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