From creative side-project to landing a book deal, Caz Finlay is writing her own future

With a novel nearly three years in the planning, it wasn’t until recently that Caz Finlay switched on to the possibilities of turning her creative outlet into a fully-fledged business. Today, Caz has a Harper Collins book deal under her belt and is about to launch her debut novel, “The Boss”.

Approaching Enterprise Hub, Caz received the business advice and training, alongside support from the project’s community partners Writing on the Wall, to realise the potential and become self-employed.  

As WoWFEST 2019 gets underway this month, we thought it was the perfect opportunity to sit down with Caz to find out where it all began and what her journey to becoming self-employed looked like…

Tell us about your novel – what’s it all about and what’s the inspiration behind your work?

The Boss is a gangland crime thriller set in Liverpool. He’s inside. She’s running the family. But now he’s back and only one can boss the streets of Liverpool. Ultimately, it’s a story about family, loss and betrayal.

My inspiration for writing The Boss, was undoubtedly my beautiful baby boy, Finlay, and I use his name as my pen name as a tribute to him. It sounds odd to say that a tiny baby inspired me to write a gangland thriller, but he did. We found out Finlay was ill at my 20 week scan. He had a condition called Congenital Diaphragmatic Hernia (CDH) which meant that his diaphragm hadn’t fully formed, resulting in some of his organs moving up into his chest and restricting his lung growth. Like all babies with CDH, he was given a 50% chance of survival.

Finlay was born on 11^th August 2016. Although he was a whopping 10lb 14oz and initially seemed to be doing well, he died just over two days later at Liverpool Women’s Hospital. The days after his death passed in a blur. There was nothing quite as surreal as walking out of that maternity ward with no baby and knowing that he would never come home. I really don’t know how me and my husband functioned, except that we had to maintain some normality for our other son, Jude, who was two and a half at the time.

It was the day after Finlay’s funeral, and Jude was in nursery for the day. I was trying to keep myself occupied and decided to have a bit of a clear out. I found my old laptop in a box in our conservatory. It was the one I’d used to do my degree but it had stopped working properly and I’d intended on throwing it out. I turned it on and it seemed to spring to life. It had never been the fastest of machines even when it did work, so I was startled. It even connected to our wifi – something that had always taken at least a dozen attempts. At that moment I just remember thinking to myself, I’m going to write a novel. And so I did. 

You can read the full story over on our Enterprise Hub blog, here.