My first exposure to The Woman in Black was GCSE Drama many years ago. We studied it in class and then saw the West End version, which, by the way, was not only a feat of both technical design and acting, but was also bloody terrifying.

Dracula is like Frankenstein or Jekyll and Hyde – everyone knows the main beats, so the real meat of the story gets twisted or ignored. I want an adaptation of Dracula that takes it as seriously as the Muppets and Sir Michael Caine took A Christmas Carol.

I hear ‘Why do you write? a lot, especially now I’m grand and get to do the occasional interview. It’s a natural question to ask anyone who does something like this, because it certainly ain’t for the money.

While Jim Steinman might be the more overt musical influence on Coldharbour, Stevie Nicks really can’t be discounted, as her lightly Gothic combination of rawness and femininity with that dash of mysticism appears in Coldharbour.

I’ve read this incredible novel at least five times since last February. The mastery involved in this tale unfolding – if I produced a book like The Secret History, I’d only be putting out one novel a decade too.

Why are we so nostalgic for the Nineties? Well, I’m a Millennial so I have a pretty good memory of the mid-Nineties onwards and I have some theories as to why this particular decade is so ‘in’ right now.

According to the Cambridge Dictionary, writer’s block is ‘the condition of being unable to create a piece of written work because something in your mind prevents you from doing it’. But what’s behind it, really? And how can we overcome it?

There’s grief, madness, and loss steeped into it. And of course, the first truly malevolent haunted house in pop culture. In my opinion, what makes The Haunting of Hill House truly powerful is its narrative ambiguity – how much is in Eleanor’s head?

When I originally planned this blog, I was simply thinking of women writers who have influenced me and whom I haven’t already written about. However, once I really looked at my list, I realised that all five are best-known for their Gothic work.

‍Coldharbour I is the only book I’ve written so far in the series that doesn’t have a prologue of sorts, so here’s the official prologue to Coldharbour: A Gothic Tale of Love and Death, from an exclusive POV: the elusive Elizabeth Black.

World building is most commonly connected to speculative fiction, in which the writer has to create more of the environment their characters are in, as opposed to researching a real time and place.

I had to write something that at least partially reflected my own lived experience, seeing as Coldharbour is such a personal (if completely fictional) story. Here’s a relatively spoiler-free outline of some of the representation in Coldharbour.

I have a confession to make (as usual): I was incredibly snobbish about publishing at the beginning. I had this idea in my head that I had to get a literary agent and be traditionally published in order for it ‘to count’.

Why are we so fascinated by haunted houses? They crop up again and again in pop culture and I feel like it’s one of the first spooky things we discover as children. Most episodes of Scooby-Doo have some form of haunted house going on, after all.

I haven’t had a Netflix account for at least a year, but when I (briefly) reactivate it this winter, I’ll be paying a visit to some old favourites, because if there’s one shining light in Netflix’s library, it’s the horror series.

Full disclosure: I’ve studied much more poetry (reading and writing) than prose. But I always knew that the story of the Wildes was a story in prose, so I’d just have to spend years learning how to write a good book. In the most poetic way I could.

With my love for a good old British beach, it’s no wonder that my fictional setting Coldharbour is a seaside town. In alphabetical order, here are my top ten personal favourite seaside towns across the UK and Ireland.

I’m often asked about my influences when it comes to writing and obviously, I have many literary ones. But really, it all comes back to the legenday Jim Steinman. If you don't go over the top, you can't see what's on the other side…