Here's how he describes his book:
A BLOOD THIRSTY KILLER HAS TAKEN HIS FIRST VICTIM AND HE’S GOING TO KILL AGAIN.On what becomes her last day as a uniformed police officer, Lucy Collins discovers the body of a woman at a construction site while on patrol.THE INVESTIGATION TEAM IS FAST RUNNING OUT OF LEADS AND TIME.The next day Lucy gets the news she’d been waiting for. She’s been promoted to Detective and she joins the CID team investigating the murder of the woman whose body she’d discovered. But every hopeful lead comes to a dead-end with no new ones on the horizon.AND THE KILLER’S NEXT TARGET IS SOMEONE CLOSE TO THE INVESTIGATION TEAM.Let It Bleed is a thrilling second installment of a highly enjoyable series.
Who are your influences?
Stieg
Larsson, Michael Connelly, Jo Nesbo and Lee Child all have influenced my
writing but Elmore Leonard by far has had the greatest influence.
When did you begin writing?
I
began writing when I was about 16/17 years old, right after secondary school
when I started harbouring aspirations of becoming a film director. I just wrote
short scripts then, some of which were really bad but I loved writing, I love
starting and finishing a story. So I kept doing it and it naturally evolved
into prose. I’ve read and loved crime fiction all my life so that’s just what I
wrote when I started writing prose without consciously deciding.
How do you come up with your stories,
characters, character names, POV, etc?
There’s
no consistency in how I come up with my stories and characters, they all come
about in different ways. My latest novel, Let It Bleed, for example came about
when I read an article somewhere online about an American college student who
went around shooting and killing a bunch of girls just because he felt girls
have ignored him all his life and wouldn’t go out with him or something along
those lines. What most shocked me about the article was the fact that in the
comments section for article a few people agreed with what he’d done. So I
started researching the theme crimes against women for the novel and the plot
came out of that research. Whereas for my short story, A Good Day, which has
the same lead character as the novel, the character and consequently the story
came about when my mother fell ill and my sister went above and beyond to
ensure her wellbeing.
Do you work from an outline?
I
don’t write anything down in the form of an outline when I start because I only
know just about ten percent of the story then if not less. I start with a theme
I’d like to stick to or an idea of what I’d like to have at the end of the
story but that original idea almost always changes by the time I finish. Unless
I really close to finishing the story, I hardly ever know what’s going to
happen beyond the next five or ten pages and the potential end of the story.
The story constantly changes throughout the writing process so writing an outline
for me will be a bit of a pointless exercise. The only thing I write down as a
guide is what I’ve already written and need to remember.
Tell me about your favorite scene in your
novel.
This
is a tough question. Erm... I hope I’m not giving much away, but my favourite
scene in the novel will have to be the scene where the main character, Lucy
Collins, finds out that her father had died. I’ve chosen that scene for the
simple reason that I got emotional and teared up a bit when I was writing it.
Can you tell us a little about your writing
philosophy?
“Finish
whatever you start” is my personal philosophy that I try to stick with but writing
can demoralise even the most motivated person on the planet so there are two
quotes from two great writers that I remind myself of every writing day to help
me finish whatever I start. They are “If I waited for perfection I would never
write a word” by Margaret Atwood and “Every book is the wreck of a perfect
idea” by Iris Murdoch.
Have you ever tried writing in any other
genres?
I
only wrote dramas when I first started and was mainly writing short scripts but
I’ve never written anything but crime fiction in prose. Maybe sometime in
future I’ll try some other genre.Find Francis on Twitter @francis_yamoah or at his website, francisyamoah.com
