Accent Press | Novels Now

Novels Now is thrilled to welcome debut novelist SOPHIE CLAIRE, who has agreed to share a few little known facts about her life. HER FORGET-ME-NOT EX is published by Accent Press and buy links are below.

Sophie admiring her hard work

Fascinating Fact One

I was born in Africa where, as a baby, I used to enjoy crawling up and down the lawn. One day I spotted a rattle snake following me up and down, half concealed in the flower bed and was captivated… Fortunately, Mum saw it too and snatched me away in time!

Fascinating Fact Two

It has been suggested (by my husband!) that I’m addicted to buying scarves.The thing is, I love for my outfits to coordinate so I’ve accumulated all the colours of the rainbow. When they didn’t fit in the drawer any more, I bought this clever sock-holder from Ikea to hold them all!

Fascinating Fact Three

I’m half French, and aged 4, I used to sit between my two grandfathers (French and Scottish) and translate for them so they could hold a conversation. I went on to study Modern Languages (French and German) at university, and my heritage sneaked its way into my novel, Her Forget-Me-Not Ex, with the hero, Luc Duval and his French family in Provence.

Fascinating Fact Four

One of my most calming hobbies is patchwork quilting. I like the English method of paper piecing and hand sewing. It’s very slow, but so much more relaxing than using a sewing machine. This is the one I’m working on now, nicknamed The Neverending Quilt because I started it over ten years ago and, although I’ve made a few others since, I still haven’t finished this one.

Fascinating Fact Five

I’m incurably nosey and have been getting into trouble for it all my life! I can’t write in cafés because I get too caught up listening to other people’s conversations. However, this is all inspiration for characters, and I pick up the most intriguing snippets of dialogue, which invariably trigger stories or plots.

Cover Her Forget-Me-Not Ex

You can keep in touch with Sophie through Facebook, Here:
https://www.facebook.com/sophieclairewriter

sophie's buy links are:
Amazon UK: Amazon USA

Welcome to Gilly Stewart author of Sunshine Through the Rain who is going to share some fascinating facts about herself with us.

Fascinating Fact One I never set out to be a farmer and yet ended up doing just that. I have used some of my own experiences when writing about Ellen, the heroine of Sunshine Through The Rain, who is unexpectedly left to run a farm assisted only by three young children. I really wasn’t very skilled, and remember trying to retrieve a dead calf

from a very possessive (and angry) Highland cow. Deciding that my son was much more agile than me, I distracted the cow with some cow nuts while son over the fence, lifted the calf, then nipped back. Fortunately he was very agile.

Fascinating Fact Two

I get great satisfaction out of setting up and maintaining a good, moderately complicated spreadsheet (for those who don’t know what a spreadsheet is, Wikipaedia defines it as ‘an interactive computer application program for organization, analysis and storage of data in tabular form’). Oooh, all those lovely figures!

Fascinating Fact Three

I am a cat lover and since leaving home have always owned at least one cat. The first two were named Porritt (after Green politician Jonathan Porritt) and Jean Paul (after Jean Paul Sartre). Pseudo-intellectual? Moi?

Fascinating Fact Four

For a short while in the mid-1980s I was a biker. My bike, a Honda CB250, was so heavy if it fell over I couldn’t move it. Until, that is, one day I skidded in the rain and crashed: adrenaline is an amazing thing – I picked up the machine no bother, got back on and rode home.

5. The most serious injury I have had to date is a dislocated elbow. How did I receive this, you may ask? By being pulled off my potty by my irate grandmother! Long may this continue to be my most serious injury.