Where does the biographical research end and then the creative fiction take over? Like, at what point in your research should you think, right now I'm ready to kind of immerse myself in this book? Or was it happening concurrently with the creative writing?

It was a really funny one because, so the stuff I'd written previous was sort of commercial fiction and they were just made up characters.

What I felt was really important, I realised about halfway through writing the book, I couldn't just write it really, really straight historically because if it is literally about her swimming and all the swimming competitions, no one's going to read that story.

And I would be bored writing it.

I wouldn't want people to try and read it.

So it started to occur to me that I needed to kind of to work things around in a slightly different fashion.

And so I started thinking about, well, what would I want to read about? It's going back to that route of writing of, you know, how would I want to learn about this stuff? And it's really learning without knowing you're learning, isn't it? It's understanding that time and place.

Once you'd had your Simon Cowell epiphany um what was the process then did you did you map out your story um I guess because in a way with the historical fiction as well you know there is there's already a natural art yeah so with with your writing when you were right coming to this um what was your process to then know what that story was and how did you yes what was your process to writing it