It's time for my monthly Friday Chat & Drinks!
I am so happy to welcome 'new to me' and fellow Boldwood Books author, Kirsty Ferry to my blog and get to know her and her work a little better alongside you, my lovely readers.
Grab your favourite drink, settle in and I'll get started with my probing questions...
Hi Kirsty! Welcome!
R: Let's start with a nice easy question, shall we? What do you wish you’d known before you started writing?
K: That you need to develop a skin a little (well at lot) like a rhino! That first 1
star review hits hard; that first rejection from a publisher hits hard – as do all
the subsequent ones; and that no matter how many people love your book and
tell you they love it, the first time someone says they don’t like it, that’s the
conversation that will live in your head and whisper ‘imposter syndrome!’ at
you at random moments!
R: Absolutely true and I'm writing my 35th book *SIGH *
Is there one subject you’d never write about as an author? What is it?
K: In my little fantasy world, the Covid pandemic never happened. I’d never
write about it, or hint about it or even mention it. Readers, in my experience,
want to be uplifted and have a little bit of distance from reality. I think we can
all do without reading about that time in fiction.
R: Are you a plotter or a pantser?
K: Definitely a pantser! I start with a concept and know parts of the story, but not
necessarily how they’ll fit together. At a certain point I can see where it’s
going, and then I jot notes down for scenes and things I can expand upon, but
that’s about as far as my planning goes. So it was a challenge when my lovely
editor asked what I was thinking about for future books, as the pitches were
largely ‘well this might happen, or this could happen, or perhaps this might
happen…but look! Here is a witch!’ Luckily, she forgave me and gave me the
benefit of the doubt!
R: Haha! I'm the opposite end of the scale and plot, plot, plot!
If you could be the original author for any book, which book would it be?
Why?
K: Wuthering Heights is my favourite, and Emily Brontë is incredible. I’d love to
have written that book - I mean, I wouldn’t want the consumptive death and
the tragic life, but the words and images Emily comes up with in there are so
enduring and evocative, it’s phenomenal.
R: What are you working on at the moment?
K: I’m working on The Snow Witch, another witchy timeslip book, set on
Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland. We have a small stream called ‘Meggie’s
Dene Burn’ up there which springs from a Sacred Well the Romans used to
worship at, and legend has it that the ashes of a witch were thrown in the burn.
I wrote a YA novella about Meggie many years ago, and I’m in the process of
re-writing that as a full-length timeslip for an older audience. Meg is very
different to the innocent healer she was in the first incarnation of it, but it’s
fun to revisit the story. I’ve pulled everything out of the book that didn’t relate
directly to Meg, so I was left with about 20k words of her basic story, which is
giving me the opportunity to really build on a new timeslip and add a darker
side to her, and I’ve researched a little more about the 1649-1650 witch trials
in Newcastle, which were simply inhuman. So we’ll see where that goes.
R: Wow, it's sounds fascinating and clearly you are passionate about you research, too. Do you work on one book at a time?
K: One at a time. Sometimes ideas nudge at my mind, but I jot a basic sentence
or two down about them, then revisit them later, when I’m ready to start
something new. I did try to work on two things at once last year, and it didn’t
go well. I realised that when my word count was split between two stories, the
stories were only growing half as much as I wanted them to, so I decided to
focus on one thing again and it was much better.
R: Do you have a favourite character in your latest release?
K: Oohhhh that’s a difficult one. I have three strong female leads in it: Isabel,
who is a witch, Jess, who is the modern-day heroine and Eliza, who is a total
Gothic delight from the Victorian era – complete with amnesia and a
propensity for laudanum. I always love my craziest characters the best, as they
are the most imaginative and exciting to write, so I think I’d have to say Eliza!
R: Haha! These characters sound great - I've added your book to my ever-growing TBR list so will let you know what I think once I've read it. Thank you so much for joining us today. Good luck with your success and sales!
Blurb:
Some legends never die – they wait for you to come home.
When Jess Morgan arrives in Northumberland to research the history of a
crumbling chapel, she’s drawn to the legend of the Brinkburn Witch – a woman
said to appear when blood is spilled near an ancient standing stone. But the
longer Jess stays, the stranger things become. Whispers echo through empty
corridors, shadows move where none should, and the boundary between dreams
and memory begins to blur.
Over a century earlier, Eliza Stratford turned to the witch for help after a violent
betrayal – and sealed her fate with a terrible bargain. Now her story, and the
secrets she died to protect, are surfacing again.
As Jess unearths the truth behind the legend, she begins to suspect her own
connection to the past runs deeper than she ever imagined – and that some ghosts
will do anything to be remembered…
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Witchs-Stone-Kirsty-Ferry-
ebook/dp/B0GQXCPQJ6/
Author links
Facebook - Kirsty Ferry Author
Instagram - @kirstyferrybooks
Author bio.
Kirsty is from the North East of England and won the English Heritage/Belsay
Hall National Creative Writing competition in 2009 with the ghostly tale, Enchantment
Her timeslip novel, Some Veil Did Fall, a paranormal romance set in Whitby,
was published by Choc Lit in Autumn 2014. Many of her subsequent Choc Lit
books have since been re-published by Joffe Books, including her popular
Cornish Secrets timeslip series.
Kirsty now writes dark, witchy, Gothic timeslips for Boldwood, with her first Boldwood book being The Witch's Stone.
Kirsty has a BA (Hons) in Literature, and subsequently achieved a Masters with
Distinction in Creative Writing from Northumbria University in 2016.
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