Please welcome friend and author, Samantha Priestly...

 ...to my blog this week.  Hi, Samantha, thanks for making time in your busy schedule to be here.  So, tell me what is is your current release?

SP   My latest book is a novel, Rose Villa, about a cursed house.

AW   Hmmm... That sounds interesating.  What first got you into writing and why?

SP   I wanted to write from a young age, but I didn’t think it was something normal people could do.  Then when I left school I went to work for a large bookshop.  We had authors coming in to do signings and I realised many of them (not all of them) were actually normal people.  When I left work to have my babies I thought, it’s now or never.  It’s hard to say what first got me into writing though, I read a lot as a teenager and just knew that’s what I wanted to do.

AW  You write mystery and contemporary novels.  Is it all imagination or do you also undertake research?

SP   It’s mostly research!  I try to check everything to make sure I’m getting it right, especially when writing about the past and I do a lot of research before I start. Imagination comes into it too, of course.  I’m writing my first non fiction book at the moment and I’ve found the level of research needed for that to be so enjoyable, though probably because it’s such an interesting and gruesome subject!

AW  And what about other types of writing?  Have you ever dabbled with short stories, for instance, or other genres?

Samantha's writing space

SP   I started out writing short stories and my first novel began as a short story.  I also have two short fiction chapbooks published.  I’ve also written two plays, both of which are being staged this year.

AW  Famous authors, such as Roald Dahl and Dylan Thomas, had a special space for writing.  Do you have a writing ‘shed’ of your own?

SP   We moved house almost two years ago and for the first time ever I now have an office!  It’s a small attic space.  I love having somewhere that’s just for writing, it makes it so much easier to concentrate!

AW  Finally, what would your eight-year old self think of, and say about, you today?

SP  I think my eight year old self would look at me and say this is exactly who she’d expect me to be!  I feel so blessed to have been able to make the life I wanted to have.  I’m not going to say ‘lucky’ because it’s been hard work and a lot of patience, but my eight year old self would see the me today as being who she wants to be.

... about the book  Rose Villa has held a curse in its bricks since 1843, and the Yorkshire village it stands in has held the secret of a murder since 1987.  In 2007, Jonathan and Kirsty meet on Facebook twenty years after they last saw each other and Kirsty visits Jonathan in his home, Rose Villa, only to find the house has affected him and he’s no longer the person she once knew.

... about the author  Samantha is a writer based in Sheffield, England.  She won the H. E. Bates competition and The Tacchi-Morris Prize for short stories.  Her chapbooks, Dreamers and Orange Balloon, are published by Folded Word.  Her novels Reliability of Rope and A Bad Winter, are published by Armley Press and her latest novel, Rose Villa, is published by ASJ.  She has also written two plays, Greenwood and The Devil is in the Timing, to be staged this year.

You can follow Samantha on her Website on Facebook her  Author Page  Twitter  and on Instagram 

You can find her books on Amazon 

Writer and friend, Melinda Hammond...

...is visiting my blog today. Hello Melinda and thank you very much for making time to be be here.  Over to you...

MH  Writing.  A lonely profession, stuck at a desk for hours at a time writing, researching, thinking.  Getting those words down, then rearranging them, editing. So why do we do it?  For the joy – the hope – of creating something beautiful, of course.  I love every single book I have ever written.  They may not be to everyone’s taste, or huge bestsellers, some of them have not even found a publisher (yet) but they are my creations and I wrote them with blood, sweat and tears.  With love.

I love the new things I learn with each one, little snippets of history, of the world, I love the way the characters and the stories never cease to surprise me.  One of my earlier books, Lucasta, started life when I read a poem by Richard Lovelace, To Lucasta, Going to the Wars.  Lucasta – a wonderful name for a heroine.  It did not take long to create an adventure set in Georgian England, involving a cross dressing heroine with a very practical nature, a heroic viscount, a dastardly villain and even a cheese shop!

One of the biggest surprises has been Miss Moonshine, a character created “by committee”, as it were.  You see, there were nine of us, all authors, meeting for lunch in the beautiful Pennine town of Hebden Bridge and we decided we would write a book of short stories (why not?  After all, we all had busy writing lives, why not add extra work!).  But we needed a common thread.  Deciding to base our stories in a fictionalised town based on Hebden Bridge was easy, but from somewhere a character appeared, a rather other-worldly creature who would appear in each of our stories.

Some of us are historical novelists and wanted to write stories based in the past. That wouldn’t be a problem.  Miss Moonshine is ageless, it seems.  In Miss Moonshine’s Emporium of Happy Endings we see her first in my own story, set just after the battle of Waterloo.  Then she appears again in the Edwardian era, and on into the present day.  Logic tells us she can’t be the same woman.  Can she?  Ask any of the authors involved and we will all just shrug.  I don’t think any of us knows quite where Miss Moonshine came from.  That’s the magic of creation.
AW   I couldn't agree more!

Dunstanburgh and shorline

MH  My current novel is set in Northumberland and involved more “loneliness” than just the writing of it: a huge expanse of deserted beach in Northumberland, and castle ruins, visited out of season and therefore empty, but what was born from that journey was a tale full of life and action.  When I first visited Dunstanburgh Castle I thought I would write something set in the middle ages, but what my somewhat fevered imagination conjured up was very different.  A story set in 1745, a young sword maker who finds himself caught up in a desperate battle to save his family’s honour, and the woman he loves.  It has all the things I most love in a book, action, romance and history!
AW  I've walked along that beach many times and I've even got the same shot!  Last time I was there everything was covered in snow.

MH  So, thank you for allowing me to leave my desk for a short time, but I really must get back to it.  Words are calling…..

about the book... Blurb: 1745: John Steel takes a consignment of swords to Warenford Keep on the wild Northumberland coast. He suspects that the swords are destined for the rebel army of Charles Edward Stuart, but matters are complicated by his growing attraction to Katherine Ellingham, daughter of a known Jacobite and betrothed to the powerful Lord Warenford.

With Carlisle in the hands of the Jacobites, and government troops patrolling Northumberland, John makes a desperate bid to retrieve the swords from the Keep before his family is implicated in the uprising, but can he succeed, and protect Katherine and her family at the same time?

about the author... Melinda Hammond is an award-winning author of historical adventures and romances. She also writes historical romance for Halrequin Mills & Boon as Sarah Mallory.  Until recently Melinda  lived on the Pennines, drawing inspiration from the glorious scenery, but recently she ran away to Scotland, to embark on a whole new adventure!


You can follow Melinda on her Website Facebook and on Twitter 

You can get her books from Amazon

Thank you Melinda, and another fellow Author on the Edge will be visiting the blog next month, so watch this space...

You can read previous posts from Authors on the Edge 

Kate Field

Defined by Books...

... please join me...

I've been invited to speak at Sherburn-in-Elmet Old Girls' School on Thursday March 28^th at 2.00pm.

As my life seems to have been all about books - either as a reader, a student, a researcher, a collector and now as a writer - I thought the subject of books would make an excellent topic for my talk.  But, don't worry I won't be hogging all of the limelight.  I will be letting some of my characters take centre stage as I will be reading from my latest novel, Montbel.

There will be plenty of time for questions and I will be allotting some time to a short wrting workshop.

In addition, tea and cakes will be available all.  Tickets for the event are for the event are at the very reasonable price of £3.00.  Please make sure you book your place through Sherburn Library on 01609 5360330 or through the Old Girls' School on 01977 685178.

I will have a supply of books with me and they will be on sale during the course of the afternoon.  I hope you can join myself and Ellen Schofield - the organiser - on March 28^th.  I can promise you a fun afternoon!  

When you have to write poetry...

... Joan Livingston is making a welcome return to the blog this week, and poetry is the focus of her attention... 

I wrote poetry before I could write prose.  I began in college, where I fancied myself a poet, and a few years afterward until real life, including having six kids and a 25-year writer’s block, took over.  When I did resume writing, I turned to prose, that is, novels and short stories.  I no longer wrote poetry.  Ah, but that changed when I wrote the third book in my Isabel Long Mystery Series.

In Checking the Traps, Isabel is hired by a local bad boy drug dealer, Gary Beaumont, to find out how his half-brother died.  Did Cary Moore jump from a bridge known for suicides or was he pushed?  But what fires up Isabel’s interest in this case is that Cary drove heavy equipment by day and wrote poetry at night.

Gary lends Isabel the notebooks in which his half-brother transcribed all of his poems.  As Isabel discovers, Cary’s poetry in the early books are really juvenile. But he gets better, well, enough that a famous poet uses the poems for his own in what turns out to be an award-winning book.  (Yes, the poet is a suspect in the man’s death.)

Isabel also finds poetry that Cary wrote as gifts for other people.

So, that meant I had to write poetry, too, for this book.

Actually I found writing poetry wasn’t hard at all.  I was able to channel that inner poet to come up with several complete poems plus lines from others.  I tried to imagine what a man who had never gone farther than 100 miles from his country home would write about and how he would write it.  I figured on a plain but sturdy style of writing.  There would have been lots of imagery from nature.  The poems would not be long.

Poetry, including a reading where Isabel corners the famous poet, figures big in this book.

Did the experience inspire me to write more poetry?  I will be honest and say no. But I enjoyed letting one of my characters do it instead.

Here’s an excerpt from Checking the Traps.  Jack is the owner of the Rooster Bar, where Isabel works part-time. He’s also her love interest in this series.

Jack motions me to come behind the counter.

“I’ve got somethin’ to show you,” he says. “I forgot all about it. Here you go.”

Jack hands me a paper. I immediately recognize Cary Moore’s handwriting. It’s a poem he called “The Barman.” It’s a lot more sophisticated than his second book of poetry, aptly named Book Deuce, which I read this afternoon after Ma and I returned from our field trip and before I got myself ready for work. Cary got heavy into rhyming with Book Deuce. Sometimes it works, a lot of the time it doesn’t. They remind me of the poems I read when I was a kid in elementary school. It appears Cary read them, too.

But here’s “The Barman.”

What’ll it be tonight, boys?

The barman asks each one.

Give me some hope in a bottle.

Give me courage.

Give me love.

The barman laughs.

Sorry, boys, it’s only beer.

He even signed the bottom.

“I like it a lot,” I tell Jack. “You should frame it and hang it behind the bar. Want me to do that for you?”

Jack’s face squeezes into an amused squint.

“Really, Isabel?”

“Yeah, really, Jack. Let me put it in my bag.”

...about the book  Isabel Long is a bit banged up from her last case with a broken collarbone and her arm in a sling. But that doesn’t stop her from pouring beer at the Rooster Bar or taking her third case with Gary Beaumont, a local drug dealer who once terrorized her. Gary is convinced his brother didn’t jump off a bridge known for suicides. Somebody pushed him.

Gary’s brother was a boozer who drove for a highway crew. But what interests Isabel and her ‘Watson’ — her 93-year-old mother who lives with her — is that the man wrote poetry.

The chief suspects are one of Gary’s business associates and a famous poet who plagiarized his brother’s poetry for an award-winning book. Yes, he was that good.

As a journalist, Isabel did regular meetups with her sources for stories. She called it checking the traps. She does the same as a private investigator, and this time, she’ll make sure she doesn’t get caught in one.

...about the author  Joan Livingston is the author of novels for adult and young readers. Checking the Traps, published by Crooked Cat Books, is the third in the mystery series featuring Isabel Long, a longtime journalist who becomes an amateur P.I. The first two are Chasing the Case and Redneck’s Revenge.

An award-winning journalist, she started as a reporter covering the hilltowns of Western Massachusetts. She was an editor, columnist, and the managing editor of The Taos News, which won numerous state and national awards during her tenure. Recently, she was named editor of the Greenfield Recorder.

After living eleven years in New Mexico, she has returned to rural Western Massachusetts, which is the setting of much of her adult fiction, including the Isabel Long Mystery Series.

You can follow Joan on her Website or on Facebook  Twitter  Instagram  and on Goodreads

Her books are available on Amazon