“[Peep Show] is cheeky, horny and very funny, and a delight for anyone who
has ever fantasised about cute blokes doing very rude things to each other.”
Peep Show
Peep Show: About a girl who likes boys who like boys
It took me ages to come up with the idea for Peep Show. I had the first half of it – the idea of a voyeur first. I really liked that idea because you don’t see a lot of female voyeur characters and also because it meant I could write a lot of varied sex scenes and still keep the same viewpoint character. I also wanted to include lots of male/male sex (because I like that) and that fitted in well too. But I knew the novel needed more and I came up with lots of convoluted ideas before I hit on the one that made me happy. The idea that Imogen – the main character – uses her boyfriend Christian as a sort of surrogate so she can woo gay men.
This also gave me the extra dimension that I could make the novel primarily about two people who really, really love each other. A little while after I crafted the plot I realised it had echoes of Cyrano de Bergerac, although I have not seen the play I know roughly what the plot is about, and then, a while after that, I found out that the ‘surrogate’ character in Cyrano is also called Christian. Weird.
Imogen
One of the things I like about Imogen is that I
deliberately never described what she looks like. Occasionally she might
tell you what she is wearing, but that’s about it. This is because she likes
to watch and doesn’t really enjoy being under scrutiny herself. There are
several moments in the book where we see this. Of course, I know from reading
books myself that the tendency is to assume that the cover model is Imogen.
Believe me, Imogen looks nothing like that.
Christian
A friend who read the book recently said, ‘I got
the impression that Christian was really hot.’ That’s about right. But the
thing is, knowing what Imogen is like, she would only really be with someone
really hot. Right?
Lorne
I love Lorne. The only tricky thing about her
was deciding whether to give her female or male pronouns. Initially I
used ‘he’ when talking about Lorne, but I was talked into changing to
‘she’ and now I can’t imagine Lorne as ‘he’. Lorne is a character that
I really want to write about more in the future.
I am seriously thinking about writing Peep Show II, although it would probably have to have a better title than that. I think it would focus on Imogen’s attempts to procure Dan for Mr Fox (I even have an idea how she might make that work), but I also want to write about how Imogen gets on with the promotion that she gets during Peep Show (although I’m not sure how many readers are panting to hear about that.)