One of the strange things about writing is that sometimes two completely different worlds decide to live in your head at once.

At the moment, mine could hardly be further apart.

On one side is The Road Back to Hidburgh, set in a small English village in 1922.

The story follows Frank Thompson, a former RFC captain who has returned from the First World War to a life that no longer quite fits the man he has become. He is working in the family motor business, surrounded by engines, tools and the expectations that come with being home again, while quietly trying to work out what comes next.

What has made this particular story especially interesting for me is that it is told from Frank’s perspective.

I usually spend a great deal of time thinking about the emotional lives of both characters in a romance, but following the relationship entirely through the hero gives the story a different rhythm. Frank notices things he does not necessarily know how to explain. He feels things he is not always ready to name. And after years in which duty came before almost everything else, he is learning what it means to choose a life rather than simply accept the one placed in front of him.

Then there is Elizabeth Heath.

She has returned to Hidburgh because her Aunt Rose needs her, although Rose would probably object to anyone suggesting she needs anything at all. Elizabeth brings with her her own independence, history and reasons for being cautious about where she belongs.

Between them is a village that remembers who they were before the war, even when they are both trying to understand who they are now.

And then, several thousand miles away in my imagination, there is The Café at Mile 312.

This one takes me into an entirely different landscape: America during the Dust Bowl.

Instead of green lanes, stone cottages and a family motor workshop, there are long roads, dust, failing land and people trying to hold on to ordinary life when the world around them is becoming increasingly uncertain.

The café at Mile 312 sits beside that road.

I love the idea of places like this in historical fiction: somewhere people pass through, where strangers briefly become part of one another’s lives, and where a cup of coffee, a meal or a conversation can mean far more than it appears to on the surface.

The two stories are very different, but I think they are both drawing me towards the same questions.

What happens after the life you expected disappears?

How do you decide where home is?

And how much of beginning again is about finding somewhere new, rather than finding your way back?

Both novels are still works in progress, so there is plenty still to discover about them. That is one of my favourite stages of writing: when the characters are becoming clearer, the world is beginning to feel real, and I still have the pleasure of not knowing every road they are going to take.

For now, one of those roads leads through a quiet English village in 1922.

The other disappears into the dust somewhere near Mile 312.

I’m enjoying following both.