Natalie Chandler

I have written since I was a young child, beginning with shameless plagiarising of Roald Dahl books as a seven-year-old, before eventually finding my own voice and original characters. It took me a decade of trying to get published, from literary fiction manuscripts in my early twenties because that was the cool thing to do in London at the time, to a Deep South mystery that didn’t contain much mystery, until lockdown came along in 2020 and suddenly everything changed.

For the first time, there was nothing distracting me from writing. I had moved from London to a small village in the North of England, and the pandemic hit hard. No pub trips, no holidays, no impromptu lunch invitations that I can never resist. I hadn’t written any full length novels for four years at this point, settling for playing around with short stories and bits of fanfiction, but my voice had developed even with those little projects and I’d had a spark of an idea kindling for some time that I’d been ignoring. I’d dreamed about a woman who had lost her baby, and even though that was all I knew about her, something was telling me to find out more.

So I sat down and wrote my first thriller. It was the genre I read the most, and the one I was most fascinated by, but I didn’t start this manuscript with the specific intention of writing a psychological thriller. It evolved organically – and it flowed, in a way writing 80,000 words never had before. No writer’s block, no loss of interest, no delays. Within ten weeks, I had a first draft. A couple of months later, it was ready to go, and the slush piles of literary agents beckoned yet again.

The rest you can read about on my media page if you’re particularly bored, or you’re in the submission trenches and looking for some much-needed hope.