One morning in 2012, I woke up in my flat in Ramsgate with the idea for a story: 12 strangers, each born on the same date of consecutive months would form some sort of birthday club and, over the course of a year, get to know each other.
The idea remained a note on my phone (as below) for several months, until I penned the first thousand words of an early chapter - originally written in the first person.
After I finished The Lesser Evil, I went back to the Birthdays idea but couldn't quite get a grip on it. In 2016 I sketched out a few characters and wrote the first third in 2017.
After a busy year at school in 2017-18 (taking on the role of Assistant Principal for a maternity cover) I returned to the project in the summer and sped up my writing. (Having a lot of time to think and plot ideas, if not actually write turns out to have been quite productive).
I've been interested in the idea of interconnectivity for some time, and I have Donne's famous lines, "No man is an island, entire of itself..." on my classroom wall. Although I tend to write in order to explore certain themes, this piece is more character-driven, and presented new challenges to me as a writer. Nevertheless, as I crafted these dozen-or-so humans, I began to learn some things about them and the universe they inhabit. If you pay close attention, you might also realise who some of them are. #Everythingisconnected
I hope you enjoy this novel - a different genre from Time's Fickle Glass, it stands alone as a blend of romance, drama, mystery, and a mediation on contemporary life (which is often funny - because we are, to quote Eliot, often, the Fool).
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