Bermuda has been a muse for writer, actress and business woman Joy Chambers Grundy for more than 30 years.The former ‘Neighbours’ soap opera star has tried to live under the radar for much of her time on the Island; on Wednesday she will sign copies of her sixth novel ‘The Great Deception’.Published by Headline Books, London, it is a mystery thriller set in Nazi-occupied Holland and Australia during, and immediately after, the Second World War. Shelly Wareing’s husband Cole vanishes into the night, leaving only a note to say that he will come back no matter how long it takes.Mrs Wareing is bewildered and discovers a box containing Nazi medals, an SS ring, and a photo of a woman. Determined to uncover the truth, she sets out to track down the woman in the photograph. Meanwhile, halfway across the world her husband is on his own mission for the truth while his enemies, who believe him to be a traitor, are in close pursuit.Mrs Chambers Grundy is married to media mogul Reg Grundy and played the character Rosemary Daniels in the hit Australian soap opera for 13 years. She met Mr Grundy at a Brisbane television audition when she was 18 years old. They have been married for 37 years and have shown their devotion to each other by going through the wedding ceremony five times. Mr Grundy runs the largest independent television company in the world, Grundy Worldwide, and Mrs Chambers Grundy assists as board member and chair.She started writing in the 1990s after years of reading classic novels. Various family members were historians so it seemed natural to write from a historical angle.“The transition from acting into business and writing was not a difficult transition,” she said. “When you are an actor, you are reading someone else’s lines and giving a performance which is lovely. But for me, writing is everything. You are the director, you set the scene and do everything when you write. The characters are yours and they say your words. I prefer it. I enjoy writing and my characters are real to me. They have to be real to you, or it doesn’t work.”She does most of her writing from her home overlooking Castle Harbour in Hamilton Parish.“I get a lot of peace and comfort from it,” she said. “I get the vibes from the water of Castle Harbour. I think when you are writing, you get into your little world. My characters are always there waiting for me when I go back to them.”Mrs Chambers Grundy has never suffered from writer’s block.“I just go back to my characters and we move on from there,” she said. “The only trouble I really ever had with writing is probably starting a book. You know you have to get an angle and a plot, where you are going to come from or what you are going to do. Once you get that the writing flows very easily. Sometimes it takes me months. Once I get over that part I just write.”She does not plan her books from start to finish as some writers do. Instead, she revises as she goes along. She always starts a writing session by revising the work from the day before, and then writing new material.“The characters lead you along rather than you leading them,” she said. “You are writing a character and you have an idea, and sometimes it’s like a character says to you ‘I wouldn’t do that or say that’ and you have to go in a slightly different direction to get it right.”All of her books are about conflict. Her first book ‘Mayfield’ was about bushrangers in her home country of Australia. Many of her books involve characters from her hometown of Ipswich, in Queensland, Australia. Her second book ‘My Zulu Myself’ was set in South Africa during the Zulu war of 1879.“I usually write sagas and sometimes they can start in 1914 and don’t end until after the Second World War,” she said. “This latest book is a bit of a departure from that. It starts in 1947, goes back to 1943 and ends in 1947. It was a very different journey for me. I found it a little harder to get into, because mystery thrillers have to have a few surprises. At first, I felt it necessary to manufacture them. Then I stopped trying because they started coming more naturally and just worked.”Mrs Chambers Grundy admitted that she is a research junkie, and can often get sidetracked following various threads of history. Her work is marketed as “fact-based fiction”.“You serendipitously find out other things,” she said. “Sometimes you really want to use the information you find and you can’t. I love the research. That takes longer than the writing. It really does. You often forget that the people you are learning about have been dead for years. Sadly, this time I got to know some really nasty people, the Nazi criminals who ran Holland for Hitler.“My husband said to me at one point that I was getting very down and very depressed.”Her advice for people who would like to become writers runs along the lines of the Nike advertisement, ‘just do it’.“Don’t worry that you didn’t go to journalism school or you didn’t do a course in writing,” she said. “William Shakespeare didn’t go to school to learn to write. Neither did writers like Thomas Hardy go to school to study writing. Those people just wrote. My advice is if you truly feel you want to write, write your book. Get it out and look for an agent. If you have written something good you will find an agent and a publisher. I reckon just start. The hardest part of the process is getting started. You have to be sure that you have the right characters and the plot is moving in the right direction.”Her book signing will be at Brown & Company on Reid Street on Wednesday from 11.30am to 2.30pm.Useful website: Joy Chambers.com .