Anyone who has worked in IT for any length of time will have heard the phrase “Garbage in, garbage out.” It was practically a mantra in the 80s and 90s — a reminder that computers aren’t magical, mysterious beings. They don’t “decide” to misbehave. They simply process what they’re given. Feed a system poor data, broken code, or badly structured information, and you’ll get exactly that back out. And really, isn’t that the perfect description of AI?

The Story Behind My Stories series began because readers wanted to know how my life experiences fed into the DI Matthew Goodwin crime fiction series.

I retired on the 9 June this year. I said I was retiring to write full time. I reached a point where running someone else's company as the General Manager, really the COO, didn't leave enough time or energy to write. I was also a mother to a twenty one year old who was still financially dependent on me while at university and living at home. I was a dog mum. I was a partner in a relationship that was still fairly new but solid, fulfilling and supportive. Something had to give

A new series called The Story Behind My Stories. It sits alongside my crime fiction, but it isn’t fiction at all. It’s the real-life thread that runs beneath the books: the places I’ve lived, the work I’ve done, the people I’ve met and the moments that quietly shaped the stories long before I ever wrote them down.

That moment, the first reader, is the heartbeat of my ARC team. The first to turn the page.

Lately, my writing life has stopped behaving like tidy shelves labelled “fiction” and “non‑fiction”. Instead, everything seems to be talking to each other — ideas crossing over, themes echoing, one project nudging another awake. And honestly, I’m enjoying the chaos.

Crossing the boundary between Crime Fiction and the Non fiction that inspires my writing.