Different voices…

One of the joys of writing (and reading) fiction is to be able to immerse yourself in someone else’s thought process. The Spike books are told mainly from Spike Sanguinetti’s perspective, so for some years now I have had to pretend to be a Gibraltarian lawyer in his late thirties with a big heart and a bagful of personal issues. Some of the Spike books have cutaways — e.g. Zahra’s thoughts when imprisoned in ‘Sign of the Cross’, or the assassin’s vicious ramblings in ‘Hollow Mountain’ — but they have tended to be short passages to provide breathing space in the narrative. The new Spike novel — number 5, untitled —  contains two much longer sequences removed from Spike’s perspective. So this morning, I am going to become a 15-year-old girl in Gibraltar on the cusp of WW2. See you on the psychologist’s couch…