I wanted to share with you all this infographic I created while writing The Bridge. The eighth DCI Cooper novel is centred around Odin’s Gale, an offshore wind farm in the North Sea. The PDF includes everything from the impressive stats of the wind farm—like its capacity to power 1.2 million homes annually—to the visual branding of Vayuvolt Renewables. The company's colour scheme and corporate ethos are laid out in this visual, helping me to better imagine how their employees would present themselves and interact within the narrative.

Visualising Odin’s Gale in this way made the setting feel real. I kept coming back to words such as vast, immense, innovative, state-of-the-art. Knowing the turbines were 250m tall helped me picture how small Cooper would feel looking up at them, how from a distance they’d appear as tiny white matchsticks but up close they’d tower over her, inducing vertigo. I thought about the blades, each over 100m long, and how to some people they might revolve leisurely in a hypnotic fashion, but to others they might appear to carve or slice the air.

In short, creating this infographic wasn’t just a few hours of procrastination; it was a blast of inspiration, sparking ideas. I hope this peek behind the scenes gives you a little glimpse into my creative process. 

You can order The Bridge here.