Staging Death - 1
Last summer my husband and I left Kent and set up home in the Cotswolds. I will gloss over all the problems associated with buying and selling houses, because everyone knows just how stressful it all is. And at least we completed everything before the housing market went into its downward spiral, so we consider ourselves very fortunate. But no experience is ever too great or too small for a writer not to want to make use of it, somehow or other.
The obvious element was the new location, the Cotswolds, home to so many of the rich and famous (and those of us who don't quite tick those boxes). The next was my love of poking round other people's houses - even if that pleasure did pall after our prolonged search for a new home. And then there was the pull of Stratford-upon-Avon - though I never did get tickets to see David Tennant in Hamlet. So I popped everything together in that mental melting pot and out came Vena Burford, a gutsy protagonist in mould of Josie Welford.
