Holly Seddon writes thrillers, and says that she “writes novels under cover of darkness.”
Show notes:
- Holly Seddon
- The Short Straw
- 59 Minutes (release August 2025 in the UK, and November 2025 in the US)
- Julie McDowall: Attack Warning Red!
- Gillian MacAllister, Just Another Missing Person
- Honest Authors Podcast
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On her website, Holly Seddon says that she “writes novels under cover of darkness.” This isn’t as sinister as it sounds; she told me that, “when I first started writing, I was writing early in the morning and late at night, because I had three very young children. So it was snatched time. I didn’t tell anyone I was writing a book.”
I asked if she had told her husband, and she said, “My husband knew because I was blank-faced and staring at the laptop. So he had to know, or he would have thought something was terribly wrong with our marriage.”
Holly worked as a journalist, so the writing part was easy, though, as a freelancer, “every minute that I spent on my on my secret novel no one knew about was a minute I wasn’t billing somebody else for.”
For a first-time novelist, it’s hard to balance full-time work, a family, and writing time. “I think it really comes down to how much you want it, because you are taking time from other things. You’re taking leisure time from yourself. You might turn down social events, if it feels like a chore; if it’s not something that you feel like you have to do, you are not going to do it.”
After Holly finished her first novel, she started contacting agents, and she got lucky. “When I finally finished, I was signed off work. I was recovering from an operation, and it was the first enforced downtime I’d had in a really long time. I thought, I can tinker with it and tinker with it, or I can just do it. So I sent the submission package to agents, just two initially. And the first person that I sent it to, 46 minutes later, I got a response asking – and this was luck – asking to read the full manuscript. The reason it’s luck is because she later said that she just sat down with a sandwich at her screen as my email landed.”
When luck knocks on the door, you have to answer. But then, “I decided that the book wasn’t ready, so I spent all night, and I mean, all night, editing it. I fell asleep at about 5 am and then I woke up to an email asking if I’d sent it, and she’d missed it. And I thought, ‘Oh my God, I’ve blown it.’ And I said I just wanted to have a final read-through and sent it off.”
Holly’s latest novel is The Short Straw, a creepy story set in an old haunted house. I suggested that Holly had some twisted ideas but in a good way. “I grew up on horror books and scaring myself stupid. I wasn’t allowed to watch horror films when I was little. I was a very easily spooked kid, but they didn’t know what I was reading, so I got away with reading books I really shouldn’t have read that early. One book in particular was The Ghost of Thomas Kempe, which I was just obsessed with. But I didn’t sleep properly for years. So I think that sort of horror, that sort of desire to stick your hand towards the flame and read things that scare you has definitely gone into the books that I’ve written as an adult. Now I don’t write horror, but there’s definitely something in me that wants to unnerve people and make them think, ‘What would I do in that situation?’”
Holly’s next novel may be even scarier, but in a different way. “59 Minutes follows the journey of three women trying to make it home to and protect their families after everyone receives a message that missiles are set to destroy England in 59 minutes time.”
Holly said, “This is the book that I’ve been preparing for my whole life. I was born in 1980 so I was nine when the Berlin Wall came down. The Cold War was very much present in my childhood. It’s something that’s been an interest, a sort of obsession. What 59 Minutes is about is, how do people behave when all the rules go out the window and nothing matters anymore, and then how do you come to terms with how you behaved? What you learn about yourself in that kind of extreme situation, you can’t unlearn it. It’s the most existentially terrifying book I’ve ever written, and I’m incredibly proud of it.”
I noted that Holly writes short chapters, and asked if this is because she uses Scrivener. “The most useful thing for me is being able to see the Binder, and being able to move things around. I often have multiple points of view, so sometimes I will write all of one point of view first, and then I’ll slot the other points of view in. When I’m planning, I plan on a spreadsheet, and then the next step is building that spreadsheet into Scrivener. So I have all of the folders filled, and they each have about a paragraph. Then I’ll put one scene in each of them, and they will have a paragraph saying what’s going to happen. I don’t stick to it religiously; once it actually gets up and running, other avenues pop up and new characters and things, but that’s my first step. It’s worked out well and it suits the genre, but that’s very much how I read and write. I don’t have a great attention span, so I like things to be fast-paced and quick.”
Kirk McElhearn is a writer, podcaster, and photographer. He is the author of Take Control of Scrivener, and host of the podcast Write Now with Scrivener.