When I was little, I had a Tortoise called Bannister - after Roger Bannister, the man who ran the first sub-4-minute mile. One winter he went to hibernate and in the summer my dad told me Bannister had woken and decided he wanted to see the sea. I remember looking over the fields into the distance, marvelling at a tortoise travelling that far, and it was only about twenty years later I realised my dad made it up and poor Bannister had died. Anyway, twenty years after that, I programmed Roger Bannister for the Chipping Norton Literary Festival and in the back room of a Methodist Hall, as he waited to go on, I told him the story of my tortoise.
When I Lost You
I hate macaroni cheese.
Every now and again I sneak in another tattoo and hope my husband doesn’t notice. My 17yr old daughter and I bet each other how long it will take him to notice. I won the last one – eight days.
The character of DS Nell Jackson is named after the above 17yr old, but they couldn’t be more different.
I used to have a nodding toy dog on my desk when I worked in the Met. One day he disappeared. For the following month I got numerous postcards from him, detailing his excursions around London. Turns out the officers I worked with had more time on their hands than they probably would now...
I have depression and anxiety. I’ve been on medication for about ten years. I feel lucky when I coast in neutral, good when I’m quite keen not to die but on the days when I want to live, it’s like seeing the beauty in a rainbow for the very first time!
My motto is ‘Be Kind, Be Brave.’ I actually stole this from the 2015 film ‘Cinderella’ with Lily James. I heard it and thought, yes, that’s me. I have a necklace by Tatty Devine saying, ‘Be Bold,’ so, in my defence, I had sort of thought of it first. There is also a bit in the film which says, ‘she saw the world not as it was but as it could be,’ and that’s totally me. Never accept what’s in front of you. I’m basically Cinderella and not just because I define my life through shoes.
I love Country music. Nanci Griffith is my favourite artist and so when asked who my editor is, I always reply ‘Emily Griffith’ instead of ‘Emily Griffin.’ She doesn’t know that though, so…
I’m an elected Councillor in West Oxfordshire. When things get heated, other Councillors lean over to me and whisper, ‘will you kill them off in your next book?’ It never gets old and I have a bank of victims ready to go.
It took me seven years for Rebecca Ritchie to take me on and another year before I got a book deal. My advice, if you would like it, is keep on keeping on; be kind to yourself, be brave, and read romance novels because their structure is a masterclass in plotting regardless of the genre you write/read in.
Merilyn Davies is the author of When I Lost You, released in eBook on 1st July and in paperback on 22nd August, published by Arrow, Penguin Random House.