Please welcome author, Evonne Wareham to the blog as she tell’s how she decided to use paranormal elements in her thrillers.

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Many thanks for the invitation to talk about my corner of the paranormal world.

Paranormal is a pretty wide term – everything from vampires to special powers – and it was the special powers end of the spectrum that appealed to me when I had the idea for a contemporary romantic suspense where the hero and heroine both had the ability to read minds. Portrayal of mind reading on page, stage and screen often occurs in specific settings – within a stage magic act – playing on the ghostly and the spooky, or in a sci-fi scenario, with an evil practitioner intent on using a form of mind control to rule the world.

But what if you were an ordinary person in every other respect, who just happened to have this extra ‘talent’ – like being able to sing in tune, or bake a perfect cupcake, but a lot more inconvenient? How frightening would it be to have to control something like that? How isolated would it make you feel? Would you draw up your own rules of etiquette on how it might be used? How would you ever get close to something like a normal life?

I worked out that for my mind readers, controlling the talent would take the expenditure of some effort – that it would be something that required energy and focus – and that they would adhere to the dictum of doing no harm. But of course, if you have this kind of talent there is bound to be someone out there who wants to control it and use it for a great deal of harm …

I decided pretty early in the planning stage that it was not a talent I would want – but then I wouldn’t want to see ghosts or vampires on a daily basis either. Paranormal is great on the page, but I wouldn’t want to live there.

Evonne Wareham is a Welsh author who writes romantic thrillers. She got her first break in a reality writing contest in America. She is now published in the UK by award-winning independent publisher Choc Lit and her debut novel, Never Coming Home, won the UK Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers’ prize for 2012. Her second book, Out of Sight Out of Mind, published early in 2013, features a scientist who reads minds and a down-and-out who can’t remember his own name, and is set in London and Pembrokeshire.

Find her at: www.evonnewareham.com