Claire Moss: Chick lit debut with a northern flavour

IF you want to know who is in the Celebrity Big Brother House, who is sleeping with who in Coronation Street or who has been killed in EastEnders, don't ask Claire Moss.

This time five years ago, she typed the first word of her first novel. The first draft was 50,000 words long, a second was 150,000 and the final published novel, out this week, is somewhere in between.

"I stopped watching television, that was one of the ways I managed to find the time," says Moss.

The 32-year-old had to give up something. In the last six years, while writing the novel, she has also found time to have a baby, get married, travel round Australia and South East Asia, and move house half-a-dozen times. "Yes, it's fair to say it's been a busy period," she says.

Moss's debut novel, Northern Soul Revival, is published by London-based independent publisher Snowbooks this month.

The author, who is employed at Sheffield University, is now working part-time to concentrate on her second novel.

As with any aspiring author, Moss says that writing a book was something she always wanted to do. "Any author will tell you that they spend a long time thinking about the idea of writing a book, before actually getting round to it," says Moss. "When I first started I was thinking about writing a thriller and I sat down a number of times to write that book. Then, one day the book just came into my head, fully formed."

What makes Moss's story particularly remarkable is that, not only has she spent five years living an incredibly busy life while writing the novel, she has not, like many first-time writers, spent time working with writing groups, or attending courses – she just sat down and wrote

the book.

"I'd not really written much as an adult. I used to write lots of stories when I was younger, but in my mid- twenties I got a proper job, working for social services in Doncaster, and then just put the idea of writing a novel to the back of my mind," she says.

During this time, Moss was living with her then fianc in Sheffield and the daily commute to Doncaster for work gave her plenty of time to think. It was, she says, where the idea for the novel came to her.

Eventually, she decided to act on the impetus to write

a story.

She says: "I realised that there were a few things I wanted to do and if I didn't do them then, at that age, then I was never going to get them done."

One of the first things was to travel the world.

In early 2005, she went to Australia and South East Asia, where she worked and travelled for six months.

"Because I travelled on my own, I had a lot of time to think and I spent quite a long time during travelling planning the novel and thinking about it," she says. She then returned to Sheffield and began planning her wedding.

Her now husband works in IT and his job has taken them, during the past six years, from Sheffield to Leeds, then to the North -East and finally to Thirsk, where the couple now live with their two-and-a-half-year-old Kieron. Somehow, in between all this, she somehow found time to complete the novel.

She says: "I stopped watching television, and doing anything else really. I wrote the novel during time when I might otherwise have been playing Sudoku or something.

"I think the important thing was that I loved the characters and I loved the book. I think you have to really love doing it, that was the thing that made me come back to it time after time."

The story follows the tale of Carl and Joss. Old friends, Carl has always been in love with Joss, but she has lived blissfully unaware of his feelings. The night before Joss emigrates, Carl confesses his feelings and the pair sleep together, leading to life- changing consequences.

Firmly in the "chick-lit" genre, the book has enabled Moss to break into a notoriously difficult market. She says: "I didn't really think about the market or anything, I just wrote the book I wanted to write.

"I enjoy a lot of chick-lit novels, but they always seem to be about women who work in London and regularly go and max out their credit cards, which just isn't anything to do with my life. I wanted to write something in the genre about real people, who I could relate to."

As a result, the novel is firmly set in the North, with Sheffield and Leeds as much characters in the story as the ones invented by Moss.

"I've lived most of my adult life in Sheffield – it just seemed to make sense to set the story in the North – and, hopefully, it means other people will be able to relate to it, too."

Northern Soul Revival, published by Snowgoose, is out now.