Chocolat author Joanne Harris talks about coming through some difficult times to create her new novel, Blue Eyed Boy.

Bestselling author Joanne Harris is no stranger to writer’s block but it took the best part of a year and some serious trawling of the internet in search of virtual friends for her creative juices to start flowing again.

After her last book, The Lollipop Shoes, was published, the former Leeds teacher (whose most famous book Chocolat was made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) fell out with her literary agent, a factor she believes exacerbated the writer’s block she so often has after completing books.

“I was in a kind of rut and I was totally burnt out. I couldn’t think and I couldn’t read and I was so tired. I’d been involved in a messy agent divorce and that took up a lot of my emotional energy. ”

The anxiety she suffered led to an inability to concentrate on anything for very long, she explains.

“I went creatively limp for a while and spent a year doing very little except being online, writing the occasional piece of Lost fanfic (fiction on blogging sites for the popular TV show) and talking to people.

“I spent far too much time online, hanging around various sites and searching out ever more ingenious ways of evading reality.”

Under a pseudonym, she began to take an increasing interest in the way people interact online, the communities they create and join and the way they choose to portray themselves.

“I made friends in the virtual world – don’t we all? I ended up visiting and becoming part of a number of communities and made friends and contacts there.”

Out of this trawling has come Blue Eyed Boy, a dark psychological thriller featuring characters on a blog site, one of whom, B.B., is a 42-year-old hospital porter still living at home with his mother, whom he hates. He spins murderous fantasies about her to his virtual friends and it becomes difficult to distinguish fact from fiction in this creepy tale.

It’s a move away from the confection that was Chocolat, but Harris says her books, which include Coastiners, Gentlemen & Players and Five Quarters Of The Orange, are often dark.

“It’s not unknown for me to write dark stories. Even the ones that people think of as feelgood and upbeat have elements of darkness in them.”

Harris, 45, found the virtual world a fascinating backdrop for a novel.

“It struck me that people behaved in a very similar way to all communities. They have people who fall out bitterly online, people who ignore each other online, or confide in ways that they don’t even confide to their best friends in real life.

“This intimacy seemed to me to be rather false because you don’t really know who you are talking to – it could be anybody.”

Born in Yorkshire, the daughter of teachers, Harris’s father met her French mother on an exchange in Brittany and brought her back to live above his parents’ sweet shop. The family spoke French at home and she always felt a bit different.

She went on to Cambridge where she read modern and medieval languages and had a brief career in accountancy before becoming a French teacher at Leeds Boys’ Grammar school.

She met her husband Kevin at sixth form college and he now works with her, doing her accountancy and paperwork. He’s also the drummer in a band she formed as a teenager, but they no longer play in public.

They have a 16-year-old daughter, Anouchka, who thankfully doesn’t spend much time online, says Harris. “She’s a bit of an old-fashioned child in some ways and I’m quite grateful for that.”

Several of her books, including Blackberry Wine and Coastliners, have been optioned for movies, but she’s not holding her breath.

“Options are 10 a penny but movies are a bit harder to come by,” she says.

Blue Eyed Boy, by Joanne Harris, is published by Doubleday, priced £18.99 and is available now.