How to find the laughter and the tears

I became a genealogist long before I started writing novels, and love delving into the past. I’ve recently had the privilege of helping someone write up their family tree. It’s been a fascinating experience, following the good times: the love, the fun, the successes, and the laughter. But there are always enmities and tragedies among the convoluted connections and mixed up relationships of such a large family. Through it all, there are snippets of history to learn about for the first time, and a chance to recall memories of events and times I already know and understand. But large families are difficult to capture in print.

My current work in progress is set between the two world wars in rural New Zealand. It is an era I know only superficially through some of the major events, but to embody family time and what life was like, I will have to dig deeper.

Families were large in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It wasn’t unusual to have anywhere between six and fourteen children, who all had children, who had children. By the mid-twenties and into the thirties, the families became smaller and nuclear groups developed, but it is the camaraderie and conflict between siblings, between cousins, between generations that create a true family story. That is what I hope to epitomise. Wish me luck.

While you wait for my next novel, there are seven others to choose from, two of which are on sale. Happy reading