Elaina James

Rating: About the Author: Although passionate about writing from an early age, Heidi Swain gained a degree in Literature, flirted briefly with a newspaper career, married and had two children before she plucked up the courage to join a creative writing class and take her literary ambitions seriously. A lover of Galaxy bars, vintage paraphernalia and the off bottle of fizz, she now writes contemporary fiction and enjoys the company of a whole host of feisty female characters. She joined the RNA New Writers’ Scheme in 2014 and is now a full member. The manuscript she submitted for critique, The Chery Tree Café, is her debut novel published by Simon and Schuster in July 2015. She lives in Norfolk with her wonderful husband, son and daughter and a mischievous cat called Storm. Links Twitter:  https://twitter.com/Heidi_Swain Blog:  http://www.heidiswain.blogspot.co.uk/ Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/WriterHeidiJoSwain?ref=hl Book Summary: Th...

A few weeks ago I noted that my writing seemed to be taking me on a tour of England. I couldn't help wondering where it would take me next.  It turns out the answer was York, to The People’s Friend Writing Workshop. My grandmother got me started reading The People’s Friend years ago. Money was tight so the magazine was passed between my Grandmother, Aunt and Mum before eventually making its way to me.  Often by that point it would be a few pages short where someone had ripped out an interesting recipe to try later, or a knitting pattern that was added to their ever growing collections. I didn’t mind the somewhat well-read state of the magazine, all that interested me were the stories. Though I did learn to check that the entire story had survived before I started reading… These days it’s just Mum and I reading the magazine and sometimes I even get to read it first. Oh the thrill of reading a magazine that is fully intact before someone has stolen their favourite ...

This week I'm delighted to welcome author Mark West to the blog. I started publishing in 1999 and managed to catch the tail end of the small press zine world - those ‘for love’ magazines and periodicals so beloved of genre, homemade and often stapled though some were perfect bound. Moving into the noughties, as the Internet slowly grew in usage, those physical mags became webzines. It was a brave new world out there and, Luddite that I am, I resisted for a while - I didn’t want my story to appear online, I wanted it to be in an edition I could put on my ego shelf (I often still feel the same way as we careen towards the ‘20s!). But aside from markets, the Internet promised much more - a web presence. I think most of those early adopter websites have long since disappeared (thankfully) but I’m convinced that if you could find any now, they’d be full of rotating skull gifs, dripping blood gifs, screams (whoever thought a website that screamed at you whenever you clicked on i...

One of the things I love about books is their ability to transport me somewhere else. I can leave behind my own surroundings and lose myself in another time and place. What I didn’t anticipate when I started writing however was that books not only have the power to lead me on adventures to unknown destinations in my imagination, but they also do so in the real world too. My naïve assumption that writing is a solitary pursuit has been proved wrong so many times this year as I found myself drawn into the sociable side of being a writer. What has surprised me the most though is how writing has lead me to journey across the country. Each summer when I was a child my parents would load up Dad’s Peugeot 205 with camping gear and we would head off on holiday. The long drives were passed fairly amicably with endless games of ‘I Spy’ and the inevitable repeated question; ‘Are we there yet?’ Until eventually Dad pulled into the campsite. Mum and I weren’t particularly what you cou...

When I began writing stories in the 80s, I was a classic pantser – I didn’t realise it at the time because I was barely eight years old, and to waffle on for pages and pages about the fairy at the bottom of the garden seemed appropriate. My mum would ooh and aah in all the right places, and my teacher would add a smiley face at the bottom of my page. Little did I know that they were lulling me into a false sense of security. The revelation of being either a pantser or plotter would only become known to me once I hit forty. I wrote blindly, hoping to get to the brutal end of my story with a suitable middle and a punchy beginning, but it never panned out. I would inevitably run out of steam, or my characters would become bored with their adventure. It was in 2013 when I was finally introduced to the joys of plotting. Eager to take part in my first NaNoWriMo contest (National Novel Writing Month – a contest to pen a 50,000 word novel in 30 days), I engaged in the forum discussions...

I just had to use the waxing and waning of the moon as the timeline for my novel, ‘A Jarful of Moondreams’… Last month, I enjoyed reading Jack Steele’s contribution to Elaina's blog. It was on visiting and choosing the right locations for a novel and I thought about how vital the setting of place and time are to any novel. I decided to carry on the theme of setting this month by writing about how I have shown the passage of time in my debut novel, ‘A Jarful of Moondreams’. I write contemporary fiction and my currently released novel is set in the present day, 2015 to be precise. When I was writing, I had a calendar out to track events from May to September but I just knew that my characters would feel happier if I used the waxing and waning of the moon as the timeline for my novel. This could be lots of fun when I got it right but, at times, it was a headache to track the moon calendar of 2015 and make sure that it was in synch with the events in the novel. Why did I d...

Today I welcome Jack Steele, author of 'Loose Cannon', to my blog... Bannister House Flats (where I grew up) Capturing the essence of a location in my novels has become somewhat of a mini-obsession. It has to be detailed enough to transport the reader into that place but at the same time allow the mind to fill in the gaps and maintain the flow of the story. I could make it up of course but for whatever reason there is the need for me to visit that location. In my novel ‘Loose Cannon’ I used a pub in Canary Wharf called ‘The Gun’. It has a room upstairs where Admiral Nelson and Lady Hamilton are said to have had their private meetings. They showed me around the pub so I could get a good feel for the place. The research gained from that one visit alone was enough to use in all of my future novels in the series. The compulsion to physically walk through the doors of a pub and enjoy a drink there….. is why I love research! Brick Lane (where a Mafia family m...