Author Heath Buckley Shares Their Story
I have spent most of my career as a magazine journalist, but I think that this job simply evolved from my love of writing. Although I have to say that the last thing someone who writes for a living wants to do is to come home after a day in the office and then spend several hours focused on their latest work of fiction! I have been very lucky in that I have had the time to pursue my own original fiction. And I know what I like; I like to write books that I would like to read. I know that sounds like a simple statement, but it is true. I was looking for a hard hitting bio thriller and I couldn’t find one so I wrote one. I am also very interested in political thrillers and thought that it was time we had a British antihero so I wrote a book with one.
So far I have written three books; ‘Virus’ and ‘Bullets & Bull’ and my latest ‘The Love Spell.’ My inspiration for these novels comes from many different places and I am not sure that I want to be one of those authors that is known for just one kind of genre. I do like writing thrillers and I like merging the fantastic with the contemporary, adding realism whilst not fooling the reader.
Anyway, I live in London, the best city in the world, and I like to use it as the backdrop to my novels whenever possible. The city has such a diverse cosmopolitan feel to it that it is really believable to base anything within its environs. All I hope really is that when the reader has finished my book that they have enjoyed themselves and been transported to another place and another environment where, just for a while at least, reality has been suspended.
The name of my latest book is ‘The Love Spell’ Part One. It is called Part One because I have already started Part Two! Inspiration is a very abstract connection between witnessing, hearing, reading or feeling something that then leads to an idea that then links to another and another until suddenly you have a story. For this book the female characters came first. I know a lot of strong confident women and I wanted to use them in a story.
Where the idea of witchcraft came from I am not sure but I knew that although I had already created a comfortable suburban environment for them there was more to their characters. I think that the idea of a coven had been in my mind for a while and I knew that I would have to approach the subject matter in a whimsical and idealised fashion and this is the first book that I have written where the need for humour and comic interplay between the characters was important. Also important was the research. I might not know anything about witchcraft but there are plenty of people out there that do so I knew that I had to get the basics right and it was great fun learning about something that I had no knowledge of before.