Tag Archives: Reading

The secrets of a bestseller

Researching a stalker was actually really fun although, you may think it was a little creepy. A lot of authors will tell you that police officers would find their Google search history very interesting, and mine would definitely be amusing if you looked back through the months when I wrote this story.

My first psychological thriller, written under the pen name J.S. Lark, has topped the Ghost Thrillers and Vigilante Justice Thrillers charts in the USA today and is in the Psychological Fiction top 20. I think therefore it is about time I got around to writing this post. I planned to do it a couple of weeks ago but then COVID-19 caught me. I am lucky to be well on the way to recovery now, though.

Of course, in real life I have never stalked someone so to understand what was possible in this story and to get into a stalker’s mind, I had to explore what can be found about someone on the internet. Without giving away any of the plot, which has a lot of twists I would hate to spoil, I can tell you I researched all of these things:

  • How the press report accidents?
  • Whether or not you can get up to the top of a car park in Swindon? The car park in the book is fictional, though, it’s a merged version of several multi storey car parks.
  • Facts about Bipolar, and videos recorded by those who have the condition.
  • Videos by clairvoyants.
  • I followed famous people on Instagram to see what their pictures could give away.
  • Then someone on a radio show talked about older family members checking into everywhere on Facebook, and giving away their location at every moment, so I explored that.
  • I looked up companies on the Companies House website to see what it tells you about the owners.
  • I looked at company websites to get ideas about how much they gave away
  • I also looked up actual obituaries – which is a bit creepy.

I did not only play stalker on the internet, though. As you know, for my historical books I do a lot of physical research, travelling to places to learn the reality in the setting, which is the whole premise for this blog. So, I did also spend a day in Bath where a large part of the book is set and walked around the areas my character does. I lived in Swindon for 16 years, and I lived in the centre of Swindon of several years, so the scenes set in Swindon are in areas I know really well. But I only recently discovered the Green Park area of Bath, and so I went there to try and get my mind into what it would feel like to sit on a park bench for hours and watch a house.

I didn’t sit on the park bench for hours, but I did sit there for one hour on a cold grey day, with a cup of take-away coffee in hand and just took in the atmosphere, and in my mind imagined what it would be like to be 100% focused on someone in the house on the other side of the road.

The outcomes of all this research can be discovered in the book…

You can buy the book from any bookseller but here is the Amazon link

Mary Shelley the author of Frankenstein; her own and the novel’s connection with the City of Bath

Mary Shelley

This information surprised me, it is something I was unaware of, despite studying Percy’s and Mary’s life and drawing out many inspirations from their experiences for my Wickedly Romantic Poets novels. So I thought I would share it with you in case you are surprised and interested too.

Mary and the poet percy Bysshe Shelley, who she married in 1816 after a long affair, lived in Bath between 1816 and 1817 (I do know this was because Percy was hiding from people he owed debts to in London, and Mary’s family had disowned her prior to thier marriage so her father and step-mother would not offer her protection). The information below, that is on display in The Pump Room in the City of Bath, explains how scientific lectures that she attended in Bath influenced the novel that she completed during the time she lived in the city. It was quite a strange time for the couple, because Percy’s wife was found drowned in the river Thames, pregnant by another man. It appeared to be suicide. It left him fighting a legal battle to be able to see his children too, which is potentially one of the reasons he hastily married Mary. He was not a monogomous man in any context, and was potentially having an affair at the time, but living in sin was turning the odds against him and making the chances of him winning the custody of his children unlikely.

The initial inspirations for the creation of Mary’s monster are known to be linked to her father’s creation of a sinful woman, through his strong political views about the rights of women, who he then disowned. Although she was welcomed back like the prodigal son after she married Shelley (I wonder which of my books that might connect inspirations too, can you spot a similarity in the Lure of a Poet perhaps … 😉 only my poet is definitely nicer).

It does make you wonder about all these influences in Mary’s life, though, and imagine how they played out in what is a very dark story.