Welcome back to Section X!
However fantastic your fiction is, you can’t create a world without reflecting some reality – it’s what readers grab hold of, it’s what brings characters to life and convinces you to care about them. When I started writing Operation Hurricane, I planned every chapter and this gave me the chance to really get to know my characters and get under their skin.
Skye Rake is a young woman you’ll meet in the exclusive short story, Nine Lives – that will arrive in your inbox at some point if you’ve signed up to the website – why am I even asking, of course you have! Skye is a little older than Boyd and, like Fitz, their backgrounds have little in common, so she reacts to pressure quite differently from the young men in the book.
Skye is a journalist. She runs a YouTube channel called FrakeNews and she sees it as her duty to disrupt the establishment, asking questions that people in power don’t want to answer about events they don’t want to admit even exist. Because of this, Skye and her team are hunted by the Home Secretary, outlawed as ‘vigilante vloggers’. At the time of Nine Lives, the government still don’t know who Skye is or how she manages to fly under the radar and she gets a huge kick out of that. But the developments in Operation Hurricane are going to drag her into the spotlight and life at FrakeNews is about to change forever.
The thing about Skye is, she embraces responsibility. Where Boyd wants to walk away from problems he doesn’t see as his to deal with; Skye is ready to fight and make the world a fairer place. Sometimes we see people like this as dreamers or idealists, but that's not the case, as you'll see when you meet Skye. She is stronger than Boyd in many ways and as she says to him; ‘If you betray me, I’ll end you.’
Yep… Skye is definitely a woman you want on your side!
I hope you enjoy Nine Lives, it really sets up Skye for what’s to come in operation Hurricane.
Until next time…
B
