Places I’ve been to or lived in often inspire my writing, as do people I meet, conversations I overhear, incidents that happen. They’re all fuel for an author’s imagination, as my family and friends know and say to me ‘you can put that in a book’ when we go to a particularly interesting place or something unusual happens – and I frequently do!
I often set my books in places that I’ve lived in or visited – many of my romances are set in Cornwall – where I lived for many years – or Spain – where I currently live. Whereas my psychological thrillers are usually set in a city such as Birmingham where I was born and grew up or Worcester where I lived for several years before moving to Spain. That doesn’t mean that I don’t have to do any research though, as I like to revisit a place to check on some facts, especially at a different time of day or a different month. A busy city, for example, will have a different feel to it during the daytime when it will be bustling with people going to work or shopping to the evening when it can sometimes feel dark and threating, whilst a holiday destination such as Cornwall can be teeming with life in 
the summer and almost deserted during the winter months. Unless you’ve actually experienced the difference between the crowded streets of a popular Cornish town in the summer months when sometimes you can barely put one foot in front of the other because of the throngs of people and cling tight to your child’s hands in case they wander off and you can’t find them, and the empty streets and closed shops of the winter, it can be difficult to write authentically about.
My latest romance, The Spanish Wedding Disaster, is partly set in Gibraltar, which I’ve visited several times, but I still made another visit to double check a few details for the book and went on both the dolphin spotting trip and the visit to the caves that feature in the book. I also stayed in a floating hotel as Steve and Kate do.
For my book, The Year of Starting Over, which again is set in Spain, I actually did the Camino del Rey walk which I mention in the book even though I’m terrified of heights.
Writing psychological thrillers and romance novels is like writing both sides of the same coin, in fact my tagline is ‘writing about the light and dark of relationships’ so I thought for my next thriller, which is out in October, I would do the dark side of The Year of Starting Over, which is partly set in a holiday retreat in Andalucia, Spain. It’s been interesting to turn the idea for my summer Spanish romance on its head and write it as a thriller. It meant looking at things from a different angle – in my romance novel the electricity going off sets of a romantic situation, in my thriller the consequences are more sinister. I can’t give much away at the moment as the book isn’t published yet but for a teaser let me tell you that my tagline is ‘Relaxation, Reconnection and … Revenge.’ And once again, it’s set in a location I know well.
If you want to find out more about me and my work, please visit my website at https://karenkingauthor.com/
