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The ABC Murders (Read Christie Challenge, March 2026): Book Which Made the Biggest Impact on Me as a Young Reader

28th March 2026 by claireladds 1 Comment

March’s Read Christie 2026 theme has been to choose and read one of Agatha Christie’s books which made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. With a prompt such as this, choices for every single reader are going to be intensely personal and individualised ones. I smiled when I saw the remit for this month because I was able to go straight to my bookcase and pick up a novel without hesitation. My choice for March is The ABC Murders. Let me explain why this has been, and will no doubt be, the easiest reading decision I make for this challenge and probably for the entire year.

So, what is The ABC Murders about? Before I go any further, I’ll give a brief explanation. Hercule Poirot receives a letter, telling him a murder has been committed in Andover – but this is a strange missive, as it comes directly from the murderer, typed, mocking Poirot and daring him to do something about it, and about the murders which threaten to follow. Indeed, the next one will be in Bexhill. The letter is signed ‘A.B.C.’. Poor Mrs Asher who runs a sweet shop in Andover is the first unfortunate corpse. So begins a series of deaths, always with a copy of the ABC railway guide left behind. Poirot, assisted by Hastings, and with Inspector Japp also joining them on the trail, need to capture this murderer as every part of the country begins to wait for it to be its turn and the victims use up all the letters of the alphabet. Meanwhile, the mentally fragile Alexander Bonaparte Cust has just been given a job selling stockings. He has all his equipment for finding his customers all across England: the stockings in a case, a typewriter, and copies of the ABC railway guide…

I was fascinated by this story, the way it built upon itself piece by piece, by the investigation and the clues until they converged in an ingenious solution right at the end, and, of course, by the distinctive characters on both sides of the moral and legal fence. If you’ve read any number of my blog posts and articles, or you follow me on social media (@claireladdsauthor, if you’d like to), you might know that I have an enduring love affair with all things Agatha Christie. This certainly isn’t because I write mysteries myself, or not in the way readers interpret conventional ‘mystery fiction’, certainly. Writers don’t write in every genre that they read. I have an immense respect for mystery fiction authors; the plotting of the crime or mystery has to be intricate and finely woven with breadcrumbs of detection and clues interspersed with red herrings, all while ensuring the characters are wonderfully developed and function as they need to. This respect I have was planted the day my dad came home from town with a copy of The ABC Murders.

I remember vividly Dad presenting it to me, as a ten-year-old. He already knew I was the kind of reader who devoured The Secret Seven (I wanted to be one of them. I’d have volunteered to be Scamper the dog’s next biscuit if it meant I could get in that shed and listen in on the secret conversations). Dad had also bought me some of the Famous Five and Nancy Drew books and had watched me devour them. But this present, on this evening, felt like something else, something special. He told me he had seen it and thought I would like reading it. Why this particular Christie book, I have no idea, but I did know that he’d bought it from our local bookshop, and I also knew that the entire middle section of the shop had multiple bookcases which only housed Agatha Christie books, with roughly ten copies of each one on the shelves. It was a sight to behold, and I used to spend ages staring at it when I went into the shop, no doubt much to the secret irritation of the man who ran the fountain pen section directly opposite. Having me propped incessantly against his glass counter I imagine did his pen sales no good at all. To his absolute credit, he was a very lovely elderly gentleman who never once asked me to move, even a little bit.

As a young reader, this was a pivotal moment in my reading. It was an indelible mark in my mind that I’d gone ‘up in the world’, had become an adult reader. This change in mindset paved the way for, not only my devoted and voracious devouring of Christie books, but also many others. My bookshelves have filled non-stop ever since, not only with Agatha Christie, but with so many kinds of books which have interested me over the years. I did move to either side of the Christie shelves in the shop (eventually, and every so often as curiosity and the need to regain bloodflow in my bookcase-rooted body drove me), to the works of the Bronte sisters, and of Thomas Hardy, and Keats and Daphne du Maurier, and Jean Rhys and Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Aeschylus and so many Ancient Greek and Roman writers, and … the list was endless, because I felt I was allowed to read beyond children’s books. That one igniting incident of being given The ABC Murders had fuelled my fire as a lifelong reader and had given me permission to explore the worlds between the pages, and to expand. It was as if my imagination had been given wings and it flew and flew, never running out of energy because it was constantly being fed.

My imagination had, of course, also been given Hercule Poirot. Dad could not have picked a protagonist more perfect for me. From the moment I began reading about him, I adored him. It led me to spend an inordinate amount of time preventing customers from seeing the full range of fountain pens available in my local bookshop’s beautiful pen section because I spent every spare minute gazing upon the Christie bookshelves, with a voracious need to hunt down every Poirot story I could lay my hands on. To aid me in my Poirot hunt and beyond, I typed up an alphabetical list on my clunky, manual typewriter, so I could tick off every Christie book I bought and read. I still have that original list somewhere. My utter adoration of Poirot from the outset has also led to many hundreds (or likely thousands) of hours watching film and TV adaptations of the Poirot books, too. This has been my solace and comfort blanket on many, many occasions, and my obsession. Even my Masters dissertation was written on Agatha Christie’s books and adaptation! This is the wonderful thing about reading. It can lead you down so many rabbit holes of complete joy and fulfilment, specific to you.

Ultimately, what I can wholeheartedly say is that, while I love the book itself, it has always been much less about the story within The ABC Murders than receiving the novel as a representation of adult fiction which has caused it to be the Agatha Christie book which has made the biggest impact on me as a young reader. I doubt my dad could have guessed at the impact giving me that one Agatha Christie book would have on the rest of my life. But I’m unendingly grateful for it. I often hear people telling me that it was ‘X’ book which hooked them on reading. I’ve been hooked all my life. It’s why, as a young reader, I always hoped for a book as a present, and as an adult I have no hesitation in giving them as gifts. I would urge anyone to give a book to someone; you never know – it could be you who begins their love for literature, and a gift that will last a lifetime.

Death on the Nile (Read Christie Challenge, February 2026): Book Containing Beloved Characters

27th February 2026 by claireladds 2 Comments

February’s task for the Read Christie 2026 challenge, as set by the Agatha Christie team, has been to read a book containing ‘beloved characters’. The team chose Mrs McGinty’s Dead, and it’s a great choice, featuring as it does both Hercule Poirot and Ariadne Oliver. As with January’s read, I have chosen to deviate from the suggested novel to reflect on my own choice for a book with characters beloved to me: Death on the Nile.

As with the Christie team’s choice, mine also contains Hercule Poirot, who happens to be my absolute favourite Christie detective, and possibly my favourite detective of all time. He was the first detective I encountered in adult crime novels, when my dad bought me a copy of The ABC Murders. I devoured it at the age of ten and became completely devoted to all of the Poirot stories. Without really realising it, I had also encountered Poirot much earlier, growing up as I did on Sunday afternoon cinematic films on the TV, several of which were the Peter Ustinov versions of Poirot, glamorous films, with Death on the Nile being one I saw multiple times, and also featuring the wonderful David Niven as Colonel Race. Moving on several decades, the David Suchet version of Death on the Nile is one of my favourite films in which he played Poirot. With all that in mind, I was always likely to be drawn to this novel like a moth to a flame. And it is the characters in the novel that I will discuss here.

Hercule Poirot

Out of all of Christie’s novels which involve recurring characters, it is Poirot who is my enduring love. I’m not even sure I can fully explain, even to myself, why he intrinsically appeals to me. What I do know is that I love his quirky dress and mannerisms, and the way he goes about picking at the carcass of a crime, piece by piece, until all the scraps of clues have been used up and explained. I also find it very endearing that he has such a humble backstory, one of being a child of a large family who had to make a success of himself to support them. A man who was injured during the First World War and was taken care of by a woman in England (and if you read The Mysterious Affair at Styles you will get a fuller flavour of this), and has a strong appreciation of poverty and desperation, and of skills of workers, which makes him an empathetic detective who treats a Duchess in the same way as he treats her maid (or, indeed, in Death on the Nile, the downtrodden, poor relation in the same way as the high-born, wealthy one).

Most of all, I love his approach to the human side of crime. He knows that, somewhere at the heart of the motive, is something intensely personal which reflects the way the victim lived their life and how it impacted the people around them. And he also shows himself to be, not just a problem-solving machine, but a human, too, considering the feelings of other people in the case, showing empathy, sympathy and, indeed, humanity. There are several cases he solves whereby he allows justice to take its course in an unconventional way. This is one of those cases, and highlights Poirot’s knowledge and acceptance that, sometimes, there are morally grey areas to consider, along with intertwined compassion for the perpetrator as well as the victim. This is, of course, Poirot’s subjective view, but it leaves the reader with plenty to consider: how would we have handled the final dishing out of justice?

The underrated sidekick

Now we turn to the sidekick. Ex-MI5 agent, Colonel Race is deployed by Christie in this role here. He appears part-way through, and is there to do some investigating of his own (the sub-plot of which I won’t spoil here). I always enjoy an appearance by Colonel Race; I find him a truly likeable man and a consummate professional, therefore a great extension of Poirot’s own impeccably performed investigations. It is interesting to watch these two professionals work through their findings. An appearance by Colonel Race always means that something much wider-reaching than a crime motivated by the private and personal is lurking in the background, which gives an extra edge of danger to the atmosphere, and therefore joining his investigations with Poirot’s reminds us that the world can be a dangerous place, both without and within our own lives. For me, Colonel Race is one of Christie’s underrated characters.

Impassioned suspect

I’ve alluded to the crimes I feel Christie is particularly expert at creating: those seeded in the intensely personal. These frequently interweave with the emotional, and are character-driven. And, as we know, getting inside the head of the people close to a crime is Poirot’s forte! There are few characters in any of Christie’s novels in which the emotional comes into play as much as in the initial prime suspect here, the impassioned Jacqueline de Bellefort. She is immediately suspected of the killing of Linnet Doyle, her former best friend who stole her ex-fiancée, Simon Doyle, and married him within weeks. After this devastation to her life, we next meet her as she follows the newly-weds to all the locations of their exotic honeymoon and confesses to Poirot that she has strong desire to shoot Linnet. Poirot both sympathises with her desperate emotions and is extremely fearful that such strength of feeling leaves Jacqueline herself in danger from her own passions.

Jacqueline frequently lingers in my mind when I think of Christie novels. Her emotional intensity has stayed with me from the very first time I read about her, decades ago. She is one of those stand-out characters who make me consider whether my actions would have matched hers, should I have been placed in her situation (which contains such huge spoilers that I cannot detail them here), and has gone a long way to inform me, as a writer, how someone could be driven almost entirely by the emotions burning within them. I believe that Death on the Nile is worth reading to follow Jacqueline’s story alone.

Other enduring characters to give us pause for thought

There are other truly enduring characters for me in this book. Once again, my choices revolve around the human qualities with which Christie has endowed them. I want to focus, in this section, then, on the mothers, and their younger female counterparts. Two mother stand out: the tormented Mrs Otterbourne, writer of romance which has been shunned by the libraries and increasingly her readership, and has turned to drink, and Mrs Allerton, possibly the most kind and caring mother that Christie ever wrote about in her fiction. The absolute pain of Mrs Otterbourne, which plays out in the tempestuous relationship she has with her long-suffering daughter, Rosalie, is placed into opposition with the almost idealised mothering of Mrs Allerton. She is an extremely endearing person, whom Poirot likes immensely, and who is ultimately able to provide comfort and love to Rosalie in a very humble, selfless manner. As a reader, I can’t help but feel desperately sorry for one, and admire the way the other is prepared to take on a ‘found family’ mother-daughter dynamic, based purely on her innate kindness of soul. Combined, they leave us with a lingering unease around the concept of motherhood, and the complexities of the mother-daughter relationship.

There are two other characters I would like to make mention of here, too: Rosalie Otterbourne, long-suffering daughter of the aforementioned Mrs Otterbourne, and Cornelia, poor and downtrodden relation of the high-born Mrs Van Schyler who has a secret. I have immense sympathy for Rosalie, dealing as she does with the difficulties of her mother’s professional and personal downfall, and struggling with her own entanglements of resentment of her mother and her undeniable love for her. Cornelia, by contrast, is blissfully unaware that she is being treated abominably by her rich relation and is grateful for the opportunities afforded her in being allowed to come on the excursion down the Nile. This unawareness and her accompanying obliging behaviour, led by the controlling Mrs Van Schyler, is what makes me have huge sympathy for Cornelia. However, what I love about both Rosalie and Cornelia is their strength of character, Rosalie’s which has had to be of a sustained nature to protect her mother, and Cornelia’s, ultimately, in choosing to follow her own path of love, unrelated to social position or money, both of which she could have and which would give her a ‘better’ life.

So then, for me, Death on the Nile contains very particular kinds of ‘beloved characters’: the repeat characters who are respectful and consummate professionals, and the women who fill this entire novel with everything it is to be human: the passion, suffering, resilience and, yes, love. In saying this, I am, of course, very aware of the discrepancy between gender roles and that males are given that of logical fact-finder and puzzle-solver whereas women are given the roles of the impassioned, the reactive, driven by a need of some kind. Yet, heading towards a hundred years after the book was written, this is what makes the women in particular stand out as sympathetic, real people, of their era and beyond, and I love that. There are other men in this novel whose actions provide the plot points for the story, such as the thief, or the fraudulent professional, yet continually it is the women who provide the heart of the story so that it is not merely a two-dimensional puzzle (and Christie’s books never are! If you don’t believe me, then I urge you to read Endless Night or And Then There Were None). This gender separation throughout may even be why the book ends with the promise of marriage between a man and woman who find a tempered middle ground between hard, factual logic and passionate interiority, thus drawing together facets of both. Could it even be Christie suggesting that extremes of either are unhelpful to us if we want to live a happy life? I’ll let you decide.

The Sittaford Mystery (Read Christie Challenge, January 2026): Book with the Best Opening

30th January 2026 by claireladds 2 Comments

I am absolutely thrilled to be joining in with the Read Christie challenge for 2026. Agatha Christie has been my inspiration since I was ten years old, when my dad first gave me a copy of The ABC Murders. Little did he realise what kind of literary obsession he had started; Christie has been my constant source of reading, and remains my deep-rooted inspiration as a writer. So, how could I be even remotely reluctant to get involved with Read Christie for 2026?

So, let’s start with January’s prompt for reading. The Agatha Christie team chose ‘best opening’ for eager participants’ monthly enjoyment. What does, or could this mean? The best opening line? Best murder from the outset? Most creepy start? Something else entirely? Whichever way you interpret it, there are some great options here. Right at the top of my list would be Appointment with Death, for its first line (which I will not spoil here for you – please do go and read it! I love this book, and the TV Poirot adaptation). The Christie team chose to read The Body in the Library, a great choice in which a random female corpse is found in the library of the Bantrys, friends of Miss Marple, and sets up a marvellous plot for this book.

But, I confess, I had a more visceral reaction to the prompt and ‘best’, while left open to subjectiveness, for me became an indulgence. I’m an unashamed lover of the snow. I love everything about it – the way it looks as it falls, the stunning beauty of its undisturbed settlement on the ground and house roofs, the way you can track footprints through it, from a pigeon to the postman. And there is a Christie book which opens with, for me, an idyllic wintry landscape: The Sittaford Mystery.

The novel begins with the sparsely numbered residents of Sittaford, cut off from everywhere by the vast amount of snow which has recently fallen, being invited to Sittaford House by Mrs and Miss Willett who have blown in from abroad and rented the large house from Captain Trevelyan for the winter months. The Captain has, himself, rented a small house in Exhampton six miles’ walk away and is oblivious that, at 5.25p.m. that evening, in his house, what begins as a fun game of table turning (getting ghosts to spell words by knocking against the table while the participants link hands via thumbs and little fingers) turns into something much more deadly. At 5.25p.m., Captain Trevelyan’s own table raps out the letters to inform the guests at Sittaford House that he is dead. And that he has been murdered.

There has been a fall of several feet of snow in a village which is so insular and tiny that it only consists of the big house belonging to Captain Trevelyan and the six cottages he has had built. All told, you would barely run out of fingers if you counted the residents of Sittaford at the beginning of this novel. This snowfall in such a place doesn’t merely satisfy my aesthetic nuances, it excites me because it provides the perfect backdrop for a mystery. But why?

Firstly, it provides a wonderful atmosphere for a novel which focuses intensely on the way everywhere is isolated from the its neighbour. The unsullied snow stops being a thing of beauty and becomes a means of a kind of imprisonment for the residents, or creates complications and difficulties for movement. This then forces a ring around the people who ‘could not possibly have committed the murder’, as they were holed up together, while the snow ravished the countryside beyond. Imagine looking out of the window of a large old house into the darkness while the snow batters against the windows and believing that you have just been sent a message from beyond to inform you of the murder of the man who owns the house you are standing in. The atmosphere of a perfect wintry village changes exponentially, doesn’t it?

Indeed, the snow sets up the entire landscape of the book, both physically and structurally. It acts as an inhibitor, just as the witnesses and suspects sometimes do. The picturesque snow could also, potentially, give the game away for the culprit, should any footprints be discovered around the house in Exhampton where Captain Trevelyan’s body is discovered, and again, one look at the beautiful, snowy hillside from Sittaford village all the way downhill to Exhampton makes us wonder how anyone could have managed to get to the house to murder the Captain. Cars cannot pass, and trains are disrupted. Travelling into Exhampton from other areas has been somewhat possible, so other suspects can be ruled in as they are proven to have reason to want the Captain dead. Does this, therefore, mean categorically that no one at Sittaford could possibly have committed murder? Suddenly, everything starts to feel impossible, unsolvable as with every great mystery at some point in the story.

Perhaps most importantly of all, without the snow established to great effect at the very outset of The Sittaford Mystery, this book simply would not work. Everything relies on it. The depiction of the village is not merely picturesque and establishing a wintry atmosphere. It’s not only hinting that the snow can be dangerous and cause problems for people (both with and without the intention to murder). It is absolutely essential to the plot, the clues which Christie plants so expertly from the very beginning, and is among the most vital pieces of evidence in piecing together the means and opportunity of the guilty.

I hope you can see why, despite so many incredible choices for ‘best opening’ that I could have chosen to kick off Read Christie 2026, I have sunk straight into the snowy Sittaford. There is so much more to this deceptively picturesque beginning than meets the eye. And this is just one of the many things I absolutely adore about Agatha Christie’s books.

My 2025 Writing and Business Goals

1st January 2025 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Happy New Year! As the wheel turns and we encounter, once more, twelve months of potential and possibilities ahead (I’m going for the ‘positive vibe’ – can you tell?!), today I am going to dig down into what I want to achieve in my writing and my business during 2025.

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, my devotion to the writing I adore, and to the publication of my work, has been nowhere near as good as I’ve wanted it to be. I miss it; I miss writing in the way I used to, and I feel that I’ve let myself down during 2024 by my lack of productivity and, more fundamentally, in my lack of creativity. I can be very hard on myself, and I’m going to be here, for without this honesty with myself, I won’t move forward. It’s not fulfilling me to write so little and to worry endlessly about whether I’m writing the ‘right thing’, neither am I satisfied that there are many publishing options and ways of serving my readers that I haven’t explored yet. Okay, this doesn’t feel much like positivity, but bear with me.

My intention, then, is to remedy this feeling of discontentment in 2025. But how do I do that? As much as I can weave spells in words to create emotions in my readers, a magic wand is something with which I am not proficient in real life! I think, first and foremost, I have to stop allowing other people’s views over what I ‘should’ do becoming in turn my worries over whether I am doing the ‘right thing’. I have a huge tendency to overthink my choices, which can inhibit, and sometimes thwart altogether, my productivity. Received wisdom in the indie author community has, for a long time, been to stay in your lane when it comes to genre choice. And it makes sense – being known for a particular kind of book helps with ongoing sales. But, for me, it can feel confining because my brain has become a gigantic vessel for all kinds of stories – and I want to write them! I also know that I write best when I am creating dark stories. This could mean that I sidestep into an array of sub-genres in, or even genres tangential to, crime fiction sometimes, and I will welcome it, if it stops the story eating me up from the inside, out.

I have always known that I am a writer first and a publisher second; the work itself is the most important thing to me, and would remain so even if no one but my mum ever read my work, ever again. I want to tell my stories, my way. And this is what I’m going to do. As I said in yesterday’s review post, I write the books I want to read, so I really am my own ideal reader. Throughout my writing career, which spans almost 20 years, I’ve only ever published, or submitted, work that I am proud of. As long as I continue to do that, then I’m achieving everything I’ve ever wanted: to be a writer, even when people have doubted me, or told me to stop wasting my time. It’s been the writing process itself which has been my therapy and solace during some of the darkest times in my life, and I have no idea who I’d be without stories as an intrinsic part of my life.

With that said, I want to be a much better publisher of my own work, too! I have several goals I want to achieve this year, in both writing and publishing.

Writing

Complete the short story collection, Petal by Petal: Stories of Love, Obsession and Murder. It will, to a degree, be a book of my heart, as it fits in my ‘Hearts & Crimes’ collection of more literary, emotion-bound stories of crime and unease.
Complete a standalone psychological suspense/thriller. I already know exactly which book this will be, and have begun some tentative planning, which I need to hone in on and clarify before I can start writing.
Complete the sequel to You Know You Shouldn’t (because, yes, there’s going to be one!). It took me what feels like an eternity to decide whether there would be another book. I couldn’t decide because I didn’t know how You Know You Shouldn’t would end (a rarity for me to not be aware of the ending before writing), or whether the story of the main protagonist would continue. It held up the project immensely – but no longer. The issue now is in deciding how many books there should be!
Complete another book that I’ve already started. I don’t want to say too much about it yet because I’m not sure when I’ll release it, whether it will be a novella, or in what kind of format it will eventually find itself. What I can say is that, as I mentioned yesterday, it’s very Hitchcock-esque and would actually fit Petal by Petal beautifully – so it may weave its way into the collection!
Plan the details of a mystery-thriller series that I want to write. I already have an over-arching idea for all the books and now the series needs fleshing out, and I want to connect at a deeper level with the characters. I will not be writing this series for publication this year, though.
Explore the possibilities of a side-step into something psychological/possibly Gothic with paranormal elements of this ilk, as an additional line of writing – but definitely not instead of my suspense and psychological fiction. This is something that has been interesting me increasingly over the course of last year, from both an academic and writerly perspective. As yet, I have no idea whether I will write in this arena or not.
Plan and begin writing another standalone book in my Hearts & Crimes series. I have two novels that I want to include in this series, and I’ve been experimenting with them since 2014 (yes, for ten years!), so I’d really like to complete them. They have become, just like The Secrets That Haunt Us, very close to my heart.

Publishing

Publish Petal by Petal in e-book, paperback and hardback formats. As this book is already available to pre-order, it’s probably a good job that it’s my first major publishing goal of the year!
Be a better publisher of my paperbacks! I intend to make all my paperbacks available in many more stores than Amazon only. This will mean that you’ll be able to request them from libraries where you live.
Publish the paperback and hardback of You Know You Shouldn’t, and also the sequel (working title: Eva Book 2!) in e-book, paperback and hardback formats.
Publish the standalone psychological thriller that I intend to write this year, in e-book, paperback and hardback.

A final word …

Writing is my obsession; books are my big passion; certain stories and characters are ingrained in my soul. I want to express this in 2025 by showing it, not just talking about it. As I said at the beginning, we all have twelve months of potential and possibilities ahead of us. I intend to make mine count for me. And my enduring hope is that you will come to love my writing and the stories that I weave as much as I do.

Have a wonderful 2025, whatever you choose to do with it. And happy reading!

~ Claire ~

Which of my psychological suspense/thriller books have you read? You’ll find them all, and more, here.

Review of my Writing and Business Goals 2024

31st December 2024 by claireladds Leave a Comment

I hope you’ve had a lovely Christmastime. As we reach the very end of the year and brace ourselves to head into the next, it’s time for me to reflect on my writing, my author business, and also my overall happiness with the way I have been working in 2024. It’s been a strange couple of years; I didn’t manage to write a review of my 2023 goals, nor did I set any heavy targets for 2024. Both of these meant I didn’t make myself accountable here, on my blog. There was a massive reason for this: during the end of 2022 and the bulk of 2023, I was suffering personally from illness, which very much scuppered any plans I had for that year, with the exception of releasing my psychological suspense thriller, Hers or Mine. My recovery was slow, but nevertheless steady, and I wanted no setbacks. This meant that, for 2024, I kept my aims private, and decided that my main goal was to write. Anything. As long as my work progressed in some way, then I would be relatively happy. But I did not want to put any kind of pressure on myself beyond ensuring I continued to recover, and certainly didn’t expect to publish anything.

I did write. I started several projects and, in particular, I progressed pretty well with a noir novella which may turn into a novel; I’m not sure yet. I was aiming for a Hitchcock-esque/Patricia Highsmith claustrophobic vibe because I find that particularly exciting. I also wanted to integrate something experimentally a little bit spicier than my dark suspense books, but nevertheless with my usual darkness of character and twists and turns. This has all led to an extra layer of tension that I’ve been thoroughly enjoying writing, and it has prompted plans for a themed series of standalones in the same vein.

I wrote a tentative plan for a Gothic mystery-thriller series, which has started developing into what I’m going to currently call ‘Gothic with grief and guts’. I have so many ideas for books which have never figured out their place in my writing, but each of them will fit beautifully here. What happened then was a proliferation of ideas – and all for two other series which have been lurking in my head for quite some time. They’re biding their time, and deciding whether or not they will wrangle themselves to fit my current genres of work, or whether they will be something a little…different.

Over the course of the year, I also went right back to my writing roots and started various pieces of short fiction, completing several of them. I was thrilled to find that three of my dark short stories gained places in the Bolts of Fiction charity anthology, published by the very lovely horror author, Daniel Willcocks, of Devils Rock Publishing.

But I wasn’t completely happy. I wasn’t publishing anything myself. I hadn’t, as I mentioned, made firm plans to even try to do so. And, despite being acutely aware that I ought not to push myself too hard, too fast, I couldn’t continue in this vein; it was enough to drive me crazy. I’m a writer, yes, but I’m also a publisher, and I was letting myself down.

So, In early summer, I got back to writing the first draft of You Know You Shouldn’t, the psychological thriller which had been giving me immense trouble the year previously because I hadn’t been quite sure exactly what to do with the narrative, and whether to continue the story of Eva Sewell, my main character, beyond this book. However, I decided that, no matter what, and regardless of whether I’d solved the standalone versus series issue, that You Know You Shouldn’t was coming out by Christmas. So I set a release date for the e-book of Christmas Day, however crazy that sounds. Guess what? The book came out on 25th December, as planned, which made for a great Christmas! I had written, and I had published. AND I’ve solved the narrative issue – there will definitely be more Eva novels to come. Her story is not yet over…

At a similar time that I re-started work on this book, I was also asked to speak on a panel at the Crime Book Festival in Boston, Lincolnshire, here in the UK. I thoroughly enjoyed talking about my writing, and offering advice to audience members who wanted to publish their work. The day ended on a high, as I had the privilege of talking at length with members of the audience and signing copies of my books. It was such a lovely experience, that I also agreed to become an attending author at their main book festival in September. Building up in-person connections over the course of the year has also meant that I have increased sales in signed, personalised copies of my paperbacks, which is something I intend to explore more in the coming months.

But, as I am wont to do, all too often, I have spent portions of the year second-guessing whether I am writing the ‘right thing’, both in terms of what makes me happy and in a business sense, together with agonising over the dilemma of whether my e-books should be available everywhere, or exclusive to Kindle Unlimited. There are pros and cons to both, depending on the genre, the author, as well as business style and objectives. After beating myself up about this for far too long, and making an attempt to remove my e-books from all the stores except Amazon in order to experiment with Kindle Unlimited after a number of years away, I found that I could not be absolutely certain that my books were not still lurking on some stores. I did not want to fall foul of Amazon’s exclusivity terms and conditions, and simultaneously I had a nagging feeling deep inside that, for me, this would actually be the wrong move. So, for all the books I ever write under the ‘Claire Ladds’ brand, I have decided that making my books available in as many places as possible is what I’m doing.

Am I worrying over whether I’m writing what makes me happy? Yes. Am I worrying that I should be writing books that are more in-line with the mainstream, or a long-running series? Yes. Or… oh, pick a thing and I’m probably worrying about it! These questions are a perennial concern for me. What I do know is that, if I’m writing a story that keeps me thinking about it all day, and dreaming about it at night, if it thrills me to plan it, and I have a real connection with my characters, then I’m writing the story I should be writing. I write what I want to read, first and foremost. And then I always hope that there are readers who want to read the same books as me. I’m not the kind of writer who can jump onto current trends, I know that about myself. I, finally, am at peace with the fact that I can only write the books that interest me. Without that, there is no authenticity in my writing and, in turn, no joy. This was something I was troubled by so much when I was in my heyday of writing short fiction for certain types of publications that I actually stopped writing fiction altogether for a while. I never want that to happen again. What I have noticed within myself over the course of this year, and something that has surprised me somewhat, is that I now feel ready to write the story of a character which spans a series of books, a task that I have resisted vehemently for years because I convinced myself that I was unable to do it.

So, what have I managed to achieve in 2024? Well, a bit more than I expected, to be honest:

~ I published my psychological thriller, You Know You Shouldn’t

~ I attended two authors events and met some of my readers

~ I wrote other work that will form the basis of a future publication, and short stories which were published (and for a good cause, which was a bonus)

~ I found new readers who became part of my community in my Readers’ Club, and people who are interested in my work via TikTok, which has resulted in an uptick of sales

~ I made direct, in-person sales bases on word of mouth and personal connection

~ In conjunction with my Readers’ Club, and with a great deal of soul-searching, I developed more clarity over where I want my writing to go, what makes me happy, and what I’d like to write and publish in future months and years.

For an author who set no solid goals for this year in order to ensure I stayed well, I don’t think that’s bad going. But spending some time sitting back and thinking about what I really enjoy, what I want to focus on, and what will also make decent business sense, now means that I have plenty of ideas for how I would like next year’s projects to go. I don’t plan on sitting back and letting the world go by, because that really isn’t like me at all. Writing is my life, and I intend to live it, even if it is only vicariously through my characters (and, considering what some of them get up to, then ‘vicariously’ is probably not a bad thing!).

I’ll be back tomorrow, when I will discuss my writing and business goals for the coming year, together with more details of what this ‘soul-searching’ of mine has revealed, in relation to what you can expect of me in 2025.

See you next year!

You Know You Shouldn’t is available right now from many e-book stores, as well as from libraries (just request the book). Click the button or the image below to discover more and buy this psychological thriller (with a hint of spice).

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Claire Ladds Books: Author Writing and Publishing Goal-Setting for 2023

1st January 2023 by claireladds Leave a Comment

Happy New Year to you! I hope you’ve had a fabulous Christmas, and that 2023 brings you a year of calm and happiness.

This is my first piece of writing of 2023. I wrote yesterday about the achievement – or not – of my goals for 2022 and of what I had learned last year in relation to my writing and author business generally (you can read about my lessons learned in 2022 here).

Today is all about goal-setting for the next twelve months. What I learned more than anything last year was how I achieve the most when I stick to sensible plans and don’t allow myself to deviate, either in my head or on paper/on screen, and how this drastically affects my mindset.

With this in mind, I have chosen a theme for my goal-setting for the next twelve months, to encompass my writing, publishing and readership growth.

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