Q: Are you a city slicker or a country lover?
A: I love the country and if I had my way, I’d very happily move out to the mountains to live beside the lake. However, my husband works downtown in a major city, and he would go absolutely crazy if he didn’t have the stimulation and challenge of his job. So we compromise by living in a small town outside of the city and he commutes. We also take off to the mountains whenever we can. In fact, I take the kids and more or less move out to our summer home for the months of July and August. He knows that I need the quiet and the inspiration to recharge my batteries.
Q: How do you think people perceive writers?
A: I think some people have a very romanticized view of what it is to be a writer. They think we sit at these beautiful oversized oak desks, with a steaming cup of coffee, quill in hand and we spend our days with the sun shining through the window, creating beautiful prose that flows from our imaginations. Um…that’s not totally how it works. Being a writer is far less glamorous than people think and for me at least, it usually involves a dark office with a cluttered desk, a cup of coffee that’s grown cold, and a laptop that hopefully doesn’t crash before I’ve saved a particularly crucial scene.
Seriously though, I love being a writer and I think I have the coolest job in the world. I’m thankful everyday that I’m able to play with my imaginary friends for a living.
Q: How important are friends in your life??
A: Friends are, and have always been an essential part of my life. I love to surround myself with people who share the same interests and values that I do. Friends are the family you choose for yourself. I have been friends with some of the same people since I was a toddler and we still enjoy each others company and have a great time together!
Q: How many friends does a person need?
A: When it comes to friends, quantity is not nearly as important as quality. If you have people in your life that you can trust, that care about you and you know will have your back, you only need a few. You’re a very lucky person and truly blessed indeed if you have these kinds of people in your life.
Q: Can you share a little of your current work with us?
A: I’m SO excited about my new book. It was released on May 1. It’s called Composing Myself and addresses the complexity of mother and daughter relationships, through three generations. Whitney (the main character) is struggling to accept where she comes from and who she is as well as finding the strength to be who she really is.
This book was inspired in part by my Grandmother and my relationship with her. I lost her around this time last year, so it’s strangely fitting that the book was released around the same time. There’s a lot of my heart in this book.
Q: How did you come up with the title?
A: I always have a hard time coming up with titles and truthfully, I usually have a lot of help in this area. For this book I had a brainstorming session with my writing group where we came up with a full page of possibilities, but none of them really jumped out. It was the next day when I was alone in my office, that I thought of, Composing Myself. Because the story is about a woman who is trying to find herself, and in the book there is a focus on songwriting, it seemed like the perfect blend.
Q: Why did you choose to write this particular book?
A: I actually took the opening scene of a story I wrote years ago, and took a look at it. I really like it, but I didn’t like how the rest of the story played out. It was much darker and sadder than I wanted to work with. So, I decided to take the opening scene and turn it into something much different. From there, I used a situation that had occurred in my own life and wove them together.
Q: What was the hardest part about writing the book?
A: In the book, the main character and her grandmother are very close and together they have to deal with a devastating diagnosis. This was a situation inspired by my own grandmother and I wrote those scenes with tears streaming down my face. It was very difficult for me to deal with some of those feelings.
Samples to Savor: Book Club Picks, presented by Her Books:
Discover your book club’s next page-turner and spark fascinating conversations with your friends in this free sampling from eight bestselling authors. You’ll find rich prose, evocative plots, compelling characters and surprising twists from:
Finding Emma by Steena Holmes
Composing Myself by Elena Aitken
Spare Change by Bette Lee Crosby
The Scandalous Ward by Karla Darcy
The Tree of Everlasting Knowledge by Christine Nolfi
The Promise of Provence by Patricia Sands
Broken Pieces by Rachel Thompson
Depraved Heart by Kathleen Valentine
About the Author(s):
Bestselling authors Steena Holmes, Elena Aitken, Rachel Thompson, Patricia Sands, Christine Nolfi, Kathleen Valentine, Bette Lee Crosby and Karla Darcy provide readers worldwide with contemporary fiction and nonfiction releases ranging from historical romance to literary.
Buy Now @ Amazon
Genre – Women’s Fiction
Rating – PG
Connect with the authors on Faceboook
Website http://herbestbooks.com/
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