Gilly Stewart | Novels Now

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.