I've never known an Amtrak train to be any less than three hours delayed. In many ways, that is perfectly fine. If you want to be somewhere fast or on time in the US, you won't be on a train.

 

However, my train from Savannah was due to arrive in New York at 11am, and the last ship to Europe for a month would depart from the Brooklyn Terminal at 3pm. So it was a touch tight. I hadn't planned it this way, for what it's worth. I'd intended on sucking it up and flying to New York the previous evening (I don't fly). However, a thunderstorm had cancelled every single flight leaving Savannah (Savannah is quite a wee airport, if you're not familiar).

 

When I'd thought I would arrive in New York the night before, I'd planned brunch with a couple of incredible producers who run The Writers Lab, a mentoring program for female screenwriters over 40, which I had been selected for the previous year. I'd been gutted to have to cancel, so I figured that if by any miraculous chance we did arrive at 11, I would have time for a coffee before heading to board the ship. They were happy to stand by — and the train pulled in to Penn Station at 10:43!

 

I should pause now and explain that long-distance train travel in the US is not for the faint-hearted. Like, you have to reeeaaally hate flying. Amtrak trains quite impressively manage to feel like out-of-control rollercoasters while going about 60mph. The food can be great, and you always meet fascinating people — I'm just saying, don't count on a decent night's sleep.

 

So it's fair to say I was more than a little zonked, having neither slept nor showered. Elizabeth and Nitza pretty much scraped me off the floor and took me for coffee and cake. In less than an hour, we managed to squeeze the most incredible chat about the film industry, being a female filmmaker, the history of Hollywood, depictions of authentic Scottish culture on screen, and writing steamy romance as a feminist.

 

A few hours later, I sat on the top deck of the Queen Mary 2 with a cup of tea, watching the sunset. We sailed under the Verrazzano-Narrows Bridge to begin our TransAtlantic crossing — and Chances Are downloaded in my brain.

 

It had percolated for years, with disparate ideas, characters, and themes swirling in thick fog in my mind yet stubbornly refusing to take shape. For a while, I had tried to make it work as a straight-up romance series, focusing on the main couples — but those early drafts ended up feeling one-dimensional. I'm not at all saying the romance genre in general is one-dimensional, simply that those early iterations only scraped the surface of this story.

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One of my favourite books is Jackie Collins' Hollywood Wives. I read it as a teenager and I'm not saying it was part of what made me aspire to be a filmmaker... but it didn't hurt. I knew I wanted to capture some of that Hollywood insider vibe -- but I didn't want to write about the wives adjacent to film industry power. I wanted to write about the world of female filmmakers. Chances Are is about female friendship, romance, ambition and secrets. It's a family saga and a workplace drama, examining the industry and what it takes to survive in it from the inside and out. While it's not directly autobiographical, it is by far my most personal work to date.

 

It's women's fiction, but more accurately, a prime-time soap in fiction form. It has more in common with Desperate Housewives, Dynasty and Greys Anatomy than any book, and given my background as a TV writer, it is deeply daft it took me so long to grasp that. Somehow, that chat in the food court of a New York train station, about every theme that drives and preoccupies me — working in the film industry as a woman, early Hollywood history, Scottish culture, feminism and romance — finally brought it all together. 

 

Luckily, I then had seven days at sea to scribble and brainstorm and build! By the time we docked at Southampton, I knew I had something special on my hands.

 

Meet Eden and Maeve…