IT'S GUEST AUTHOR SATURDAY!! Please welcome historical fiction author Helen Yendall...


Hi Helen! It is so nice to have you here today and I am excited to learn more about you and your latest release WWII novel, THE HIGHLAND GIRLS AT WAR - let's kick things off with my questions...


1.)                What was your first job? Did you like or dislike it? Why?

 

I think my very first job was a (short-lived!) stint delivering newspapers, when I was about 14. What was I thinking? I hated it! I had to get up early, in the pitch black of winter, the newsagent’s was two miles away, the Sunday papers weighed a ton and it nearly killed me to cart them all around and I kept getting told off by the police because I didn’t have lights on my bike! (I rode on the pavements!).

 

I only lasted a few weeks before I got measles – at Christmas – and very happily gave it all up! Looking back, it was a ridiculous thing to do but I had a strong desire to earn my own money and that ‘work ethic’, if you want to call it that, has never left me.

 

2.)                Do you have a pet peeve? If so what is it?

 

Yes! I’m a regular at my local swimming pool and I get rather irked by the lack of ‘lane etiquette’! Splashy, super-fast men (it’s always men), who nearly knock you out in their haste to complete their lengths. Then, there are the dawdlers, who shouldn’t be in the medium lane but are too proud to book the slow one; the women who try to swim side-by-side, so they can chat and the people who’ve actually booked the session after mine but who get into the water early, just as I’m luxuriating in a blissfully empty pool. Do I need to go on…?

 

3) Do you spend more time researching or writing?

 

I write historical fiction so I spend a fair amount of time ‘looking things up’ but I’ve learned that it’s much more important to spend time writing. Readers, on the whole, want a good story, with believable characters that they can root for and are really not that bothered whether the train from Paddington to the Cotswolds actually stopped ten times during the journey in 1941. You can get too tied up in the historical details (and it's also a terrible time suck!) Obviously, it’s vital to get the main historical elements spot-on but I always aim to do more writing than researching.  

 

3.)                Tell me about your book, The Highland Girls at War and where you got your

inspiration for it?

 

Some years ago, I stumbled across an article about the Women’s Timber Corps (the thousands of women who worked in Britain’s forests during WW2, supplying vital timber for all kinds of industries). It inspired me to write a short story called ‘Blood Sisters’ which was published in a women’s magazine in 2015. But I always thought there was more mileage in the story of these adventurous and brave women (nicknamed ‘Lumberjills’), some of whom were only 16 and most of whom were living and working away from home for the first time.

 

So, it was only a matter of time before I wrote a novel about them. ‘The Highland Girls at War’ was published on 4th November 2022 as an e-book and will be out as a paperback on 22nd December 2022. It’s the first in a series and I’m busy working on the sequel at the moment.

 

 

4.)                Having said the writing’s more important than the research, I still do a lot of research, so in this book, although all the characters are fictious, everything else is realistic. I’ve changed the names of the places but I’ve based them on real places, where women – and members of the Canadian Forestry Corps – worked, during WW2.

 

5.)                What are your ambitions for your writing career?

 

I’d love to see some foreign-language versions of my books and also to see them on the shelves of some of the big book sellers and in the supermarkets. But other than that, I’d just like to keep writing and keep improving as a writer.

 

6.)                Who is your role model? Why?

 

I admire many writers and I suppose you could call them my ‘role models’. They include: Elizabeth Strout, Marian Keyes, Sarah Waters and Kate Atkinson. I would buy any of their new books in a heartbeat, without even reading the blurb, because they know how to tell a good story and I’ve enjoyed everything they’ve written.

 

 

7.)                Share one fact about yourself that would surprise people.

 

I’m useless at maths! I failed my maths O level twice and I seem to have a blind spot where numbers are concerned. The Women’s Timber Corps recruited girls who were good at maths (graduates, in some cases) to be ‘measurers’. They worked out wages and calculated how much timber had been felled and the payment that was owing to the landowner. All clever stuff. I definitely couldn’t have done that!

 

 

BLURB

Scotland, 1942.
The Lumberjills, the newest recruits in the Women’s Timber Corps, arrive in the Scottish Highlands to a hostile reception from doubtful locals. The young women are determined to prove them wrong and serve their country – but they’re also all looking for something more…

Lady Persephone signed up to show everyone she’s more than just a pretty face – but it’ll take more than some charm and her noble credentials to win handsome Sergeant Fraser over.

Tall, strong Grace has led a lonely life working on a croft, with just her mother for company. All she wants is to find her place in the world – even if that’s a thousand miles from home.

And Irene misses her husband terribly, so until he returns home from the frontline, she’s distracting herself with war work. But one distraction too far leads to devastating consequences…

Can the Lumberjills get through their struggles together – even when tragedy strikes?

          LINK: https://geni.us/sBEwuF


 

Bio:

Helen Yendall has been writing ever since she could pick up a pencil. She’s a proud Brummie by birth but now lives in the North Cotswolds.

After many years spent writing short stories, articles and poetry, she got an agent in 2020 (Robbie Guillory at Underline Literary Agency), finished her first novel (‘A Wartime Secret’ and secured a 2-book deal with HQ Digital (Harper Collins). 

She’s a member of the RNA (Romantic Novelists’ Association).

Helen has a degree in English and German and has worked in a variety of marketing and export roles in factories, a camping club, a university and a children's charity, all of which have provided inspiration for her fiction.

She likes the way fiction can help make sense of the world and that, as a writer, she can give good people the happy ending they deserve. 

 

Blog: www.blogaboutwriting.wordpress.com

Twitter: @helenyendall

Facebook: www.facebook.com/helen.yendall

 

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