Before I wrote PsychoAnalysis, I completed a bad thriller – essentially John Grisham’s The Firm rewritten in the world of hedge funds and featuring a protagonist who slept with every single female character – and spent years playing around with a sci-fi story influenced by a couple of books I’d enjoyed (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Futuretrack 5). I had always been a reader as well as a bit of a film buff. I loved stories and felt an urge to create them. But the urge wasn’t strong enough, and my skills weren’t good enough, to produce a decent novel.

Then I decided to write about a female serial killer and everything clicked. (Ok, I say everything clicked, but I spent two years writing six drafts and many hours in online writing workshops as well as reading books and essays on the craft of writing.)

With the benefit of hindsight, it is obvious where my interests lie. And yet, even after writing PsychoAnalysis, I still didn’t take the hint until I’d struggled through the first drafts of three more stories.

I need to write books about tough female characters.

They say that everybody has at least one book in them. But fewer people have the ability to sit their arses down and bash out the words, writing and rewriting until the thing is done. Writing can feel like a real chore, especially when, like me, you spend ten hours a day doing a real job and you have kids. After a few weeks of fitting my writing around my lifestyle I typically feel burned out and need to take a break. I should just enjoy what little free time I have, I tell myself, entertaining thoughts of making enough money from the day job so that I can retire early and write full time. And then I stop writing and feel like something is missing from my life.

Writing is hard and I really don’t want to be doing it just because I feel I should. I want to be in the state I was in while writing PsychoAnalysis: consumed by an idea and obsessed with the person who has taken up residence in my head. I believe that the urge to write, to, as a grown man, spend my free time making up stories, is a kind of psychological flaw: while other people are enjoying each other’s company, I’m spending time with my make believe friends.

But those make believe people need to be worth my time, they need to drag me away from the compelling make believe people in great books and films and TV shows.

Now, a lot of the make believe people created by other writers that I enjoy spending time with are women, usually tough women. When I think about my favourite films and TV shows from the past few years – The Bridge, The Fall, Kill Bill, Spring Breakers (sorry, but I love that film), Under The Skin, Raw, Blue Is The Warmest Colour – they are very much stories about women. Even when I start to lose interest in the plot of The Bridge or The Fall, I will still tune in to watch Saga Noren or Stella Gibson. I felt sick when I witnessed that moment half way through the final episode of The Fall. And by the end of films like Under The Skin or Blue Is the Warmest Colour, I felt truly moved, so invested was I in the emotional state of the female protagonists.

The heart wants what the heart wants. I think a famous writer once wrote that… And my heart just isn’t as interested in men. I remember, before I had children, that I really wanted at least one daughter. It’s not that I don’t love my son – I love him to bits and I’m enjoying the fact that he’s turning into a car nut like his old man – but I’ve been a little boy and a man. I suppose I was looking forward to having a little girl and watching her develop into an adult. She will find herself in situations that I never encountered and face challenges that I never had to worry about.

I think in some ways, though, the way I write about women is cheating. There are endless stories about tough guys in violent situations. Simply put a woman in one of these scenes and you will often get something interesting from that switch. A man behaving in a certain way can seem like an arsehole, but a woman doing the same thing may provoke a more complex reaction: why is she behaving in an unexpected manner? A lot of people who read PsychoAnalysis end up rooting for Sarah Silver, the serial killer. I wonder if that would have happened if she was a man doing the same things?

Now, this is a controversial topic. A number of people criticised the first season of True Detective because it was all about tough guys and the women were just wives and whores. Then season two featured three men who were more vulnerable and a tough, knife-wielding female cop. Season one was, at times, the best thing I’ve ever seen on TV. Season two, which I forced myself to watch was… awful. Now, there were other things going on – the director left after season one, which was disastrous for a show that was all about mood – but I think a big part of the problem was that Nic Pizzolato felt like he had to write something that didn’t come naturally to him. There are people who find tough guys fascinating and people who think they’re dicks. Of course we don’t want all films to feature women as eye candy. But I think it’s wrong to single out a specific TV show for criticism. I loved season one of True Detective, but I also love The Bridge. They’re both great.

I suppose people could criticise my stories because in some ways I make my women more like men. They are cold and tough and violent. But then of course you could ask why should women be portrayed as more emotional and reluctant to use violence? It’s also interesting that a lot of the female characters I respond to were created by men. Is there something that they, and I, are trying to express with these women?

Perhaps. There’s an old saying: write what you know. For me, it’s more a case of writing what you love. And right now, I’m excited and nervous and motivated to write. Because a female detective has taken up residence in my head. And she doesn’t take shit from anyone.