I wasn’t as excited about this travel adventure as I usually am. Berlin was the first place I lived after graduating from my English degree, and I’d fallen hard for it. Returning twenty years later with a family in tow, there were parallels with the novel living there had inspired. My eldest son was now fourteen, the same age as Francesca, the protagonist in my story. The same tensions that had sparked the opening scene to Saving Francesca Maier more than two decades previou

There are many ways to keep the motivation to write going. Sometimes it comes from an expected source and sometimes a change of scenery...