The release of Ravishing Among The Roses this month is almost the end of an era. This book is the third in a series that began with Moaning Under The Mistletoe.
That title came about as a joke with Ebony (who organised many of the anthologies I’ve written in) and it just stuck because I couldn’t come up with anything better. This series, like many of mine, began as part of one of Eb’s anthologies. The process was simple, write the first one for the anthology, then write the others, get the rights back to the first and publish the whole series.
This post is really about creativity. What I’ve always loved about anthologies is that there is an over-riding idea that ties all the books together, but everyone takes that idea and goes somewhere amazing.

The idea is the easy part, the basic part, the starting point.

And it’s what AI misses completely as the point. All those people who used to say, “I’ve got a great idea, you write it” now use AI to churn out slop based on a boring idea. It’s regurgitation and it misses the point (and variety) of taking an idea and making it into something brand new.
Look at any multi-author anthology based on a theme or an idea and they are the perfect example to demonstrate that the idea is the easy part. The writing, the creativity and what a human brain does with an idea is the vast fascinating part of fiction.
I often get people ask if I use real people as inspiration in my novels and the answer is no. I might get inspiration from a situation or a comment, and that moment in (real) time can become the beginning of a scene, but creative fiction has nothing to do with real life. It’s not a copy (like AI), it’s something new and almost magical that takes a starting point and goes somewhere else.

It’s why the book I’m writing right now is always my favourite – it’s the immersion into that creative space that I love.