Truth Vs. Fiction

There are unquestionable parallels between my amateur sleuth, Shara Summers, and me. But she is still a fictional character, as are the other characters in my novel DEATH SCENE.

But we all write about what we know, intentionally or not. My mother visited me from Canada recently. At one point she was scrutinising my ceiling and made the comment, "your cleaner's not very good. There's a cobweb on the ceiling".

I had to laugh at this. Shara's mother makes exactly the same comment in DEATH SCENE, when she criticises the cleaner employed by Shara's sister (except in the book the suspect dirt is on the window, not the ceiling). My mother hasn't read the book, so she had no way of knowing this. Maybe truth crosses into fiction sometimes. Or maybe it's just that mothers everywhere are all the same...