When I lived in London, we frequented a nightclub on Sunday nights, called Pips. Entry was four pounds, and all drinks, even top shelf, were twenty-five pence. Truly!
There were so many things to love about Pips - the music, those cheap drinks plus the delicious soup and bread they served later in the night.
But what really intrigued me were the Ladies and Men's toilet doors. I'm serious!
Instead of the appropriate wording or standard female/male stick figure, each showed a hand drawn, eighteenth century portrait.
After our Sunday nights out, these depictions stayed with me.
Then one Monday morning, while waiting for the tube, a crazy thought popped into my head.
What if a young man and a young woman were found murdered in the toilets of this club? Suspects are arrested, tried and convicted based on evidence but no motive is ever established.
It was a paranormal idea.
For years the story simmered and grew in my head. I jotted down notes and even 80,000 words at one stage, an unstructured mess of ideas in first person, multi-point of view (POV) - eight!
Locked away in my head, the story worked. On paper, I abandoned it over and over again, frustrated by my inability to translate it clearly onto the page.
I turned it into third person and felt far more comfortable.
It was finally a challenge (though I took it as a dare) put to me by my coach: to find four people keen to read my manuscript and tell them they were going to receive it before Christmas.
The idea scared the hell out of me, but it was just the motivation I needed and finally years after the idea first germinated in my head, I finished a readable draft.
There’s been many more drafts, the number of POV's more than halved and now it’s in a drawer, having had a manuscript assessment, waiting for the final rewrite.