I always knew I wanted to be a great writer, not just a good one, and I know that getting there involves a lot more than just making stuff up and writing it in a pretty style – I spend more time researching (much of it hands-on) than ever I do writing and I am VERY aware that my books might be picked up and read by soldiers, police officers, shooters, martial artists, truck drivers, motorcyclists, doctors, pilots, criminologists, psychologists, herbalists, psychics and historians plus a host of other people in occupations I have touched on or written more deeply about who live and breathe what I have covered – I want each and every one of those people to nod and say, “Yes, she’s got it right, how refreshing,” and stay on to read the book or, better still, pick up my next one.

I want regular readers to know that they have something that’s good, something with integrity. For that purpose, I do my best to be 100% accurate and for the most part I achieve it without long-winded descriptions of technical detail (while still keeping the technical detail!). I don’t bore people.

Yes, taking on that martial arts course (see Have I ever mentioned I’m a coward?), then getting serious with it and training with the cops for roughly a year and a half (see I just wanted to write fight scenes, but I had to drop a policeman to achieve it!) was all done so I knew how to fight and how to write a trained fighting scene – Believe me, I have read some bad fight scenes that show the writer’s poor understanding of the dynamics involved, not to mention the repercussions – bare knuckle fights don’t work so well, people lose fingers when they punch someone in the mouth, not because they get bitten but because the human mouth can be a dirty place and after the hand gets damaged, infection sets in.

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