Write what you know?

So, I start with an idea. For example: Swiss hotel, waitress, guest and a blossoming romance (as in ‘Never Again’).

I often hear the advice ‘write what you know’. I spent a couple of summers in my twenties working in hotels in Switzerland and Germany. Whilst the romance in my debut novel ‘Never Again’ isn’t, sadly, based on anything I experienced myself, the Swiss Alps provided a perfect setting for my novel. Nostalgically, my grandparents met in the same mountain village where I worked and my parents spent their last holiday there a few months before my dad died: special memories.