I am currently writing Out of the Shadows: A Witching Pen Series Prequel. While this book will deal with sexual themes (there is an incubus featuring quite heavily within the story) it is not a romance at all; it will fall under dark fantasy / paranormal fantasy / occult horror. And I am not interested in making Katherine Green a “likeable” character. I think readers will certainly resonate with her to an extent, but her attitude will always be questionable.

The joy of writing the unlikable character as the main character is that you can really get to the truth of who they are without worrying/caring what readers might think of her (or him) ... mostly, anyway. We are focusing on atmosphere and narrative here; we are focusing on keeping readers gripped by the story itself, without having to win aspects of their hearts through character loveability. Character truth is important, but not loveability.

This is the story of a teenage daughter who is angry, hurting, rebelling, craving so much, and in many ways should know better, but has a compulsion to act out. This is the story of a father who does not know how to be a father because he never stopped grieving his own past, thus emotionally disconnecting himself from everything that came after that grief, including his own daughter.

And right there, we have the breeding ground for everything that comes next.

Revisiting the vibe of The Witching Pen world, having left it behind in 2013, has been a bit of a revelation. There are parts of myself I had forgotten as a writer; things I wanted and desired as a writer in those early days. Every book is like self-development, whether intentional or not.

 “David?” Pippa shut the front door and dropped her car keys on the entrance hall sideboard as she wandered through the hall towards the kitchen and breakfast room, the table still a mess from five sets of breakfasts, two of them unfinished. “David!”
          His head peeked around the sliding doors to the garden. “Hey. Dropped the kids off at school okay?”
          “Yeah. What are you doing out there?”
          “Figured I'd get this patio laid before my afternoon meeting.”
          “Now? Two weeks before Christmas?”
          “It's a dry morning. Forecast says it'll be dry all day.”
          “'Cause that's always accurate. Look at the sky – I think it's going to snow. Why not wait until the spring or summer?”
          “The stones have been sitting here for months.”
          She stepped out into the half-completed patio. “Yeah, well, so has the rattling exhaust pipe on the car, the leak above the garage door, the loose tile on the roof above Liam's room, and the new TV we bought six weeks ago is still in storage and not mounted on the wall. It's a miracle the cat's still alive.”
          He laughed, and let go of the stone slab he was holding. “What are we like, eh?”
          “A busy, large family?”
          She smiled as he enveloped her in a huge, warm hug – he was always warm, even when it was freezing – and planted a lingering kiss on her lips. “Just what I've always wanted.”
          Her smile widened into the kiss. “Me, too. With you.
          “Mmmm…” His hug grew tighter. “Quiet house, no kids, me home during the day … make love to me now, Mrs Fellows.”
          She unintentionally let out a snort that was supposed to be a laugh. “Make love and lay the patio? Isn't that a bit ambitious?” she teased. “Do we have time?”
          He was already shuffling her back into the house. “My meeting's at three – I need to leave here at half-one. How often do I get the chance to be home, alone, with you?” His hands – fingertips icy from laying the stone – snaked under her jumper.
          She shivered with delight. “Patio needs finishing,” she mumbled into his mouth.
          His tongue gently swept against hers. “It's winter. I was thinking crazy. It can wait.”
          She laughed. “I need to feed the cat.”
          “Cat's a walking miracle. It'll be fine.”
          She felt a tug on her bra, and her strap came undone. She gasped as a cold palm cupped her breast, but it was heat engulfing her from the inside out.
          “Any more excuses Mrs Fellows?”
          “David—”
          “Jesus, what the hell am I missing working in a bloody office everyday. As soon as my partnership starts in the new year, I'm putting in a request to work from home at least three days a week.”
          She moaned as his thumb grazed her nipple; pressed against it; circled it. “You'll never get anything done.”
          “As you pointed out, we never get anything done anyway.”
          “We get plenty done.”
          He kissed her neck. His other hand squeezed her backside. “There's plenty I'd like to do right now.”
          Oh, hell, this was nice. “David…”
          “Mmmm?”
          “Slide the door shut.”


“Pippa?”
          “Hmmm?” She turned back towards Cathleen Barry.
          “You've gone silent. You haven't said anything for two minutes.”
          She hadn't?
          Pippa sighed. Only half of her was in the consultation room with her counsellor. The other half of her…
​          “It's the inconsequential things I remember most; things that had no meaning before are monumental now – relentless visions: the way he'd automatically glance right before left when walking out the front door; the way he'd always eat the crust of his toast before the rest of it, and I didn't even realise his toast smelled different – he made toast different than I make toast. How? How can someone make toast smell different using the same toaster? I miss smelling his breakfast.
          “I'll wonder if it's me – if I'm cracking up – and then I'm walking through that kitchen again, towards the garden, and the very last time he was in the garden hits me, clear as day – it was a clear day – less than twelve hours before … the accident. He was laying down the new patio; it looked like it was going to snow. I said he was mad to lay it now – wait until the summer. He said it would never get done if he didn't do it now…
          “It's still where he left it – that slab of stone lying a little off-centre, on top of the last one he'd laid. He was right. It never got done.”
          And then, there was the feel of his hands on her skin. Branded – branded into her. Her throat closed up. “I don't think these sessions are helping.”
          “You don't think you're making progress?”
          “Progress?” The word sounded alien to her; strange on her tongue. “No. I'm always stuck in the same place.”
          “And what place is that?”
          “Nowhere.”
          “What do you mean?”
          “I mean nowhere. There's nothing – I can't see the future, and the past is gone.”
          “Gone?”
          “Yes, gone. Wiped away by one accident… Who David was – that man doesn't exist anymore; my husband doesn't exist, but…” She fiddled with her wedding band.
          Cathleen placed her pen and paper down on the low table in front of her, and waited.
          “I'm stuck. It's been almost eight months. I can't change anything. Where he is … he's nowhere, too. I'd have to leave it behind … him behind.” She'd almost choked over those last two words. Tears welled.
          “Have you been thinking of leaving David?”
          “What?” Pippa started in her seat. She felt as if she'd been slapped. “No. Why would you say that?”
          “You just mentioned—”
          “No,” she said, flatly. Firmly. “I love him, I wouldn't leave him.” Guilt churned; rose fast… She felt sick. “His kids love him – do you think I'd take that away from them?”
          “I think your children will continue to love their father no matter what you do.”
          “They need him. They need their dad. And they need to know they'll never lose him.”
          “Do they know they'll never lose you?”
          She looked up from the gold ring, and met Cathleen's gaze. Her first instinct was to cry, 'Of course!', but a fearful cold lodged in her throat and stopped the words from coming out. Did they know? How was that a promise she could keep? Any decision she made could be the wrong one; could ruin four lives, maybe more. Or, she could stay here.
          Here is nowhere.
          She took in a sharp breath and pushed the bite of reality away. Here. Right here. No one would lose her – she couldn't get lost – if she stayed right here.
          “Pippa?”
          She blinked.
          “I asked you a question.”
          She had? “I'm sorry. I…” Her left hand was shaking. She gripped it with her right. “Could you repeat it?”
          Cathleen uncrossed her legs and leant forward on her seat. “Why are you here?”
          Here. Right here.
          “You're the one who called my office this morning to squeeze in an appointment when I haven't seen you in three months. Nicola on reception said you were upset on the phone. Did you come all this way just to tell me you don't find these sessions helpful? That nothing's changed?”
          Everything's changed. A tear slipped.
          “I'm sure you didn't, so … why are you here?”

​The cover for Book 4 will be revealed towards the end of this year.

Updates to what this book is, including excerpts and so on, will be posted in due course over the next 18 months on:
Facebook
Instagram
Twitter
Telegram
But please note, I will not be having a huge presence on social media - my life is too full of happenings for that. I will also not be sending out another newsletter until the book is written and ready for sale, so expect the next one to be in October, 2023 - and this is the best way to keep up to date: my newsletter. And yes, I'm confident this publication will go ahead - it feels like time and I have created a good foundation for all my other work enough for me to devote time to writing now.

In the future, I suspect you will see one book every 18 months from me. But they'll be damn good.

Thank you, keep well, and I will share more words with you very soon. 

Dianna xxx

​Today is release day for Blanket of Snow (After the Storm, #1), and what fun! This is the first of a series of novelettes (all about 20K words long - a one hour read) based on characters that we already know and love well, and focusing on their emotional states and their healing journeys, so the series lends itself to the novelette format.

When I first began writing in 2010, I was pretty keen on shorter stories. I liked the fact that in order to write a good one, it had to be short and snazzy; to-the-point, but not loose on detail; and it had to capture readers from the start and not let go, because you needed ALL of their attention for the very short time you have it. I liked all of that, and I felt some of that skill had been lost in the past few decades as commercial publishing houses favoured huge tomes over the shorter book (usually for financial reasons). With the emergence of eBooks, that financial reason is no longer valid - it's easy to pack a punch in a short story for an eReader and sell it for 99p, and people WANT this. What better for a one hour train journey than to be engrossed in a book you know you'll finish in time? It's perfect.

Writing Blanket of Snow was no less perfect. Not unusually for me (though it's been a while), this story came to me in a dream, and I knew when I woke up exactly how long it would take to write. My inexperience in 2010 failed to tell me that The Witching Pen Series would NOT be a series of novellas and that I was jumping the gun and possibly making a mistake by originally calling that series The Witching Pen Novellas. In my head, all the stories would be no more than 40K words, but I didn't know my writing well enough then. I didn't know that I would favour large-reaching arcs and plots that liked their twists and turns, and subsequently, half of that series was written as full-length novels, making the original series name (novellas) utterly pointless and inaccurate.

I have no such worry about After the Storm. There's a plot here, sure, but it's a mini-plot that buffers what the characters are emotionally going through - it's not the main focus - so I've been able to sit back and write a shorter story with full enjoyment in doing JUST THAT without doubt and without any external pressure. It reminded me of one of the reasons I love writing in the first place, and not least, one of the reasons why I love being an independent author: I can write for my pleasure; for readers' pleasure; for the characters' needs; all without having to unnecessarily expand the story, or dumb it down (or dumb it up) to fit a mold.

So I hope all Eye of the Storm fans thoroughly enjoy the After the Storm series, because it will be an insight into the main four characters that we simply won't get in the upcoming Aftershock series, because we won't be telling that series from the POV of the four Eye of the Storm characters - it will be from the perspectives of brand new (now adult) characters.

After the Storm will fill some blanks for fans, but also hint at a couple of future obstacles to come. There won't be any cliffhangers as such (remember this is not a plot-filled series), just these hints that will be touched on again in the Aftershock series, and possibly even the Blood Shadow series.

After the Storm will add a bit of depth to anyone who cares to read it, but at the same time, anyone who chooses not to won't be missing out on anything in order to understand what's to come.

It's fun. It's a lot of fun weaving worlds together. I hope you enjoy the read.

Dianna x
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