BY day, Doreen Hearshaw is a nurse for Scotland’s first ever NHS refugee support team but in the wee sma’ hours she is DG Hills, crime fiction author.
“I can only write at night - I suddenly wake up at two or three in the morning and all these things come into my mind and I write them down in a notepad because if I don’t I can’t get back to sleep,” she said. “In the morning when I read what I have written during the night it is as if it was written by someone else. It is the weirdest thing.”
Doreen has previously published children’s books featuring characters based on some of the kids she has treated as a paediatric nurse but one night she woke up and began writing her first adult fiction, a psychological crime thriller.
“Heaven knows where it came from - I have no idea,” she said. “Once I started writing it I could not stop. I wrote loads the first night and then just added to it whenever I woke up. It is definitely adult fiction and a psychological thriller as it is quite a dark wee book.”
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Doreen assumes that when she is sleeping her unconscious mind goes over the people she meets and the stresses she has through her work and that makes her wake up at night and start writing.
“When I am finished for the day I think about all the people I have dealt with,” she said. “You come across families in all types of situations. I would never have thought that in the 21st century I would be supporting families from a war-torn country who have had to come here for their safety.”
The 63-year-old has written stories for most of her life but only began publishing them a few years ago when Olympia snapped up her first children’s book, Rodney the Rather Rare Rainbowsaurus. She also came to nursing later in life, qualifying as a paediatric nurse when she was 42.
“It was my daughter Gemma who brought me into nursing as she has hydrocephalus and was in and out of hospital,” said Doreen. “It was her paediatrician that told me I would make a good paediatric nurse and at first I thought I had enough on my plate but then I decided to go back to college to get enough qualifications for university.”
Once qualified, Doreen said she was “like a wean in a sweetie shop”.
“I spent time in all the departments so I could get experience of everything because I love learning – I’ve got my Masters as well. When you are at all these jobs it give you a different perspective on children and that probably influenced me when I was writing the books but where this psychological thriller came from I have no idea.”
Dreams, Wishes and A Ticket to Hell follows Clementine Fosdyke, an apparently archetypal middle-aged villager who lives with and cares for her parents. But there’s more to Clementine than meets the eye. Beneath the calm surface of her quiet life there lies a turbulent, troubled and traumatised mind and as Clementine encounters abuse and betrayal, the cracks began to show.
Doreen laughs that there aren’t many Clementine Fosdyke’s running about her home town of Irvine but when the name popped into her head “she became real to me” and she knew exactly where she wanted to take the book.
“It was the oddest thing because I had never considered writing an adult book, never,” she said. “But once I started I began really enjoying it and she just grew on me. The only time I got stuck a bit was when I knew I was heading towards the end as I had no idea which way it was going to go.
“Then one night I woke up and wrote the end which was nothing absolutely nothing like where I was thinking of taking it.”
It finishes with an “ending to discuss” according to Doreen, which means that a couple of nights after she had written the final word she woke up and began a sequel which she is gradually adding to whenever she wakes up in the early hours.
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The first book is “short but powerful” but now she is in her stride she suspects the sequel will be longer.
While it would be nice if they become best-sellers, Doreen has no plans yet to give up nursing as she is enjoying helping Ukrainian families to settle in Scotland.
“It’s very interesting,” she said. “If anyone has stories to tell it is these families.”
Dreams, Wishes and a Ticket to Hell is available to buy now.
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