A Guest Blog - from N P Postlethwaite on Writing The First Sense novel

Last week, I had the pleasure of guest blogging on the website Beyond the Edge of Reality - a fantastic site by Peter Wake - a 'timber artisan, engineer, collector and Model Maker.' Peter also delves, questions and writes about Science Fiction, Fantasy & the Metaphysical - if you haven't checked his site out, you should do so... he'll make you think.

This was is my guest blog for Peter's site:

I'm Nisha P Postlethwaite. l write science-fiction, fiction, poetry and recipes. Sometimes I live in an alternate reality which is where I mainly write from. My novel The First Sense, is set in a future British city called ‘Lakes City’ that sprawls across what is now the Lake District and Cumbria. The First Sense centres around several characters who each have an unusual ability; you could call their abilities ‘gifts’ but they can be more like ‘curses’ – so my characters tell me. Sorry, did I not mention that? I am not quite sure my characters are fictional as they tend to take things over… like my space, my life and my blog.

Anyway. I am currently writing the follow up to The First Sense – not just because I want to, but I have to. I often get asked what inspires me to write apart from pure obsession, well, it’s quite a list:- the intricacies of the human species and relationships, numerous life experiences, unanswered questions, dreams, living in beautiful Cumbria, human intuition – something many of us feel compelled to replace for conscious reasoning, reading between the lines of conversations and situations, my love of creating recipes… I find food magical because of its endless creative combinations and some of the foods in The First Sense do some very unusual things to people. I find writing therapeutic and cathartic and ‘Lakes City’ is a wonderful place to escape to, for a change from the present.

Like a lot of writers, I read a lot. I love a writer with a vivid, visual imagination and a tendency towards the unusual and magical, or a writer with a very original style, who may invent their own words or language. There’s no limit to what I read, but I am drawn to writing that is deep and genuine, where I can tell the author really believed in what they were writing, even if that writer happens to live in a different reality, time or on a different planet. That’s the beauty of it all, you cannot impose rules or restrictions on the imagination.