{"id":330,"date":"2014-10-08T09:33:46","date_gmt":"2014-10-08T09:33:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.cranswick.org.uk\/judith\/?p=330"},"modified":"2015-02-06T08:26:22","modified_gmt":"2015-02-06T08:26:22","slug":"launching-into-unknown-territory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/?p=330","title":{"rendered":"Launching into unknown territory."},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Blood<\/a>The third Fiona Mason Mystery ‘Blood and Chocolate’ is now available as an eBook –\u00a0Amazon.co.uk<\/a>, \u00a0Amazon.com<\/a> etc<\/p>\n

Fiona Mason\u2019s hopes of leading a pleasant culture tour of Belgium visiting the great centres of Flemish Art go badly awry. One of Fiona\u2019s passengers is found dead soon after the assassination of a British MP at a rally outside the European Parliament Building in Brussels. Could there be a link between the two deaths?<\/p>\n

Once again, Fiona finds herself at odds with MI6 chief, Peter Montgomery-Jones who always appears to have his own agenda.<\/p>\n

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Writing Blood in Chocolate<\/em> proved to be quite an adventure. I am one of those novelists who writes to find out what happens. I’m no plotter. I enjoy the journey.<\/p>\n

With my standalone novels, I begin with an incident. this creates my characters and from their reactions the story evolves.\u00a0After a chapter or two, I may have an idea of my final destination, but the route map is never worked out in detail.<\/p>\n

It’s true that writing the Fiona Mason Mysteries is not the same process. Writing a series creates constraints. I know my main character, my tour manager Fiona Mason and her driver Winston plus\u00a0Peter Montgomery-Jones. Peter is an MI6 chief and he causes me no end of problems. I introduced him in\u00a0the first\u00a0in the series Blood on the Bulb Fields,\u00a0<\/em>not only did\u00a0he insisted on a much bigger part than the minor role I had intended, he\u00a0demanded to come\u00a0back in the\u00a0rest – characters DO take over!\u00a0 This means that there has to be an element of terrorism in every novel. Not quite the cosy setting I envisaged for the series when I set out!\u00a0As each story involves a coach trip to a different country, I\u00a0also need the plot to be related to that country so that it could not possibly take place anywhere else.<\/p>\n

Blood and Chocolate<\/em> proved to be the most complicated novel to write so far. It took me into territories I know nothing about from the workings of the Secret Services, politics both main stream and fringe groups,\u00a0government departments, UN, unions, Belgian police forces and the list goes on! The research has been interesting and far from straight forward but I hope the final result is credible. All my pre-release readers seem to think so. Let me know what you think!<\/p>\n

Enjoy my dear readers, enjoy!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The third Fiona Mason Mystery ‘Blood and Chocolate’ is now available as an eBook –\u00a0Amazon.co.uk, \u00a0Amazon.com etc Fiona Mason\u2019s hopes of leading a pleasant culture tour of Belgium visiting the great centres of Flemish Art go badly awry. One of Fiona\u2019s passengers is found dead soon after the assassination of a British MP at a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-330","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"entry"},"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=330"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":368,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/330\/revisions\/368"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=330"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=330"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.judithcranswick.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=330"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}