Well that’s another book up on Amazon. It wasn’t as difficult and didn’t take as long as the first one so there’s hope for us yet. Not that it was easy. There were still a few niggling problems.
I enjoyed writing these two books (Tough like Donna and its sequel, Jailbait). It was fun being a teenage girl for a while. Some might wonder what qualifies me to write about a teenage girl, especially one from a broken home. That’s a good question.
I think it helps not to have had any children of my own, so I still have access to my younger self. There seems to be an amnesia that comes over people when their children arrive. Too often parents seem as shocked and horrified by their children’s behaviour as their parents were with them. I remember being young. I even remember some of the parents of today when they were young.
The divorce was essential to the story because it gave Roz a clear choice of value systems. A stable upbringing can leave a young person thinking that their parent’s values are absolute. I needed Roz to be faced with a choice, and the knowledge that it was a choice.
Then the question, why did my protagonist have to be a girl? A boy would have had to come up against the prevalent and bloodthirsty myth that a real man is a violent man. That will require a book in itself, which I’m not yet ready to write, so I chose a female protagonist. I don’t claim to ever have been a girl myself but after another forty years of experience they aren’t quite the total mystery they were when I was seventeen.
As you can see below, I have put up the first chapter of Tough Like Donna as a sample. I had a problem with the tabbing in that post so please forgive the lack of tabs.
This is the link to Tough Like Donna, if you are interested in purchasing it.
Graeme Buckley (author) 
Congratulations, Graeme, on having published another book. In my novella, my protagonist is a man. I didn’t find it difficult to write his point of view because he’s an artist with an artist’s soul and I felt quite at home in his head.
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