Welcome to my blog, Jennifer! It's great to have you here - I am looking forward to finding out more about you and your work :) Let's kick off with my questions...
1)
What did you want to be when you grew up?
Why, a writer, of course! I never really thought I
would be a ‘proper’ writer but I always
knew that I’d end up doing something with words. And indeed
I do — as well as novels I also write travel and Earth
science articles.
2)
Coffee, tea or hot chocolate?
Coffee first thing in the mornings, because otherwise
I don’t wake up. Green tea for the rest of the day.
And although I’m trying to avoid too much sugar (yes, I know,
boring!) a hot chocolate is just perfect for those days when you get really
cold, really wet and really miserable. And there have been a few of those
recently!
3)
What genre do you typically read? Why?
I read across genres so what I’m reading depends
on my mood. If I had to pick one it would be romantic suspense, which has
always been a favourite. I like a bit of (non-romantic) action alongside the
romance but I really don’t like too much
blood and gore. Romantic suspense pretty much fits the bill. At least then you
know your main characters are going to survive!
4)
Share a favourite childhood memory.
I don’t have many
memories of my childhood, probably because it was so long ago! Some of my
favourite memories are of beach holidays in North Wales. We went to Abersoch
and sat on the beach with a striped canvas windbreak, green and white and
orange. I don’t know why I remember the windbreak so clearly,
but I do!
5)
Do you have any shameless addictions? ie. Tea, Books,
Shoes, Clothes?
All right, confession time. I’m a stationery
freak with a particular weakness for notebooks. I have more than I can ever
fill (or even begin to use) but I still keep buying them and other people keep
buying them for me as well. I particularly love ones with maps on. In theory I
have a new book for each story but I have so many ideas that I never have the
right notebook with me and they end of full of snippets from different plots.
6)
What do you think is the biggest challenge of writing
a new book?
Without a doubt, it’s maintaining my
self-discipline. I used to get an idea and sit down to write before I’d
sorted out plot or characters, and that just led to confusion. Over the years I’ve
learned to hold back until at the very least I have an idea of where I’m
going, and preferably until I’ve drafted
something fairly detailed. But the worst part is desperately wanting to start
writing and knowing the idea isn’t ready.
7)
Do you aim for a set amount of words/pages a day?
Only when I’m doing NaNoWriMo
(National Novel writing Month, and initiative in which writers are encouraged
to write 50,000 words in the month of November). Then I try nd write as many as
possible — my record is around 12,000 in a day. But I do
try and write (or plot, or research) every day. It isn’t hard, because I
usually have several novels on the go at the same time, at different stages.
8)
What are your thoughts on writing a book series?
Funny you should ask —
for
the first time I’m in the middle of doing just that. Previously
I’ve written stand alone novels but I wrote one over the
summer and found that though I’d concluded the
story comfortably enough from my heroine’s point of view,
two other young women were clamouring for their stories to be told. It’s
more difficult that I thought, though — it’s
a particular challenge to know how much of the earlier books to include in the
later ones.
Looking For Charlotte — Blurb
Divorced and lonely, Flora Wilson is distraught
when she hears news of the death of little Charlotte Anderson. Charlotte’s
father killed her and then himself, and although he left a letter with clues to
her grave, his two-year-old daughter still hasn’t been found.
Convinced that she failed her own children, now grown up and seldom at home,
Flora embarks on a quest to find Charlotte’s body to give the
child’s mother closure, believing that by doing so
she can somehow atone for her own failings.
As she hunts in winter through the remote moors
of the Scottish Highlands, her obsession comes to challenge the very fabric of
her life — her job, her friendship with her colleague
Philip Metcalfe, and her relationships with her three children.
Tirgearr Publishing
Amazon UK
Amazon US
Smashwords
Author bio
I live in Edinburgh and I write romance and contemporary women’s fiction. I’ve been writing all my life and my first
book was published in February 2014, though I’ve had short stories published before then.
The thing that runs through all my writing is an interest in the world around
me. I love travel and geography and the locations of my stories is always
important to me. And of course I love reading — anything and everything.
Links
Facebook
Twitter
@JYnovelist
Website
Excerpt
They parted just
beyond the bridge across the Ness, Grace heading up the pedestrian streets and
Flora cutting across to the library, fronted by the long line of cars full of
Saturday shoppers manoeuvering towards the car parks. She wasn’t
a regular library user, but once the idea had taken her she remembered that
there was something she wanted to check.
In the reference
section, she stood for a moment before selecting the Ordnance Survey map that
covered the area south of Ullapool. She knew it quite well. When the children
were young they’d gone walking there regularly, able to reach the open
spaces without pushing the slowest (usually Amelia, though Beth was the
youngest) too hard. They’d graduated to more difficult
walks, then stopped walking altogether. Eventually she had developed a fondness
for the slightly less bleak terrain to the south of Inverness, where she went
occasionally with Philip and his brother, or with a colleague from work. She
hadn’t been out all year, not since before Christmas, in
fact, and even then they’d been rained off not very far
in and driven back to the comfort of a tea shop in Grantown-on-Spey.
A nostalgic
yearning for a good long walk swept over her as she unfolded the map and
smoothed it out across one of the desks. She and Danny used to look at maps
together plotting their routes. His stubby forefinger, with its bitten nails,
had traced the most challenging route to start, sliding along the steep and
craggy ridges until he remembered the children and reluctantly redrew, shorter,
safer.
She thought she
knew the place where Alastair Anderson had left his car, and found it easily
enough. Under her fingers the map was a flat web of never-parallel lines, of
ugly pock-marking that told of steep, loose rocks and inhospitable terrain,
just the type of place they used to walk. Somewhere up here, Charlotte Anderson
was buried. Carried there, already dead? Or walked there and then killed?
Surely neither was realistic; surely they would have found her, with their dogs
and their mountain rescue helicopters scouring the ground for new scars, and
all the rest of the equipment they had at their disposal.
Looking at the map
had been a mistake. It was obvious now. Besides, she couldn’t
see it any more; all she could see was the image of Suzanne Beauchamp, that
beautiful face with the cold faรงade, like a wax death mask from Madame Tussauds. More poignant, of
course, since it must hide a struggle, a struggle to conceal or to suppress a
deadly mixture of grief and guilt.
‘Go away!’ she
said softly to this mirage of a grieving woman, a little afraid of its power. ‘Go away!’ And
then, in the only defence left to her, she began to fold the map away.
JENNIFER IS WAITING TO CHAT! QUESTIONS? COMMENTS?
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