ShortBookandScribes #BlogTour #GuestPost by Fenella J. Miller, Author of The Spitfire Girl @fenellawriter @aria_fiction
Welcome to my stop on the blog tour for The Spitfire Girl by Fenella J. Miller, a book that sounds right up my street. I have a guest post from the author for you today. My thanks to Vicky from Aria Fiction for the place on the tour.
It’s 1939 and the threat of war hangs over the country…
Flying instructor Ellie Miller has grown up a tomboy. She’s never had interest in the latest clothes or lipstick colours – her only passion is flying her beloved Tiger Moth. But when war is declared, and she is no longer be able to do what she loves most – fly.
Unless she joins the Women’s Auxiliary Air Force that is!
Given the choice to keep the home fires burning – or join the fight on the home front Ellie doesn’t have to think twice.
Joining the WAAFs she meets friends that become her family in the skies – sharing both the small daily triumphs and grief as war slowly tears both the country she loves, and her heart, apart….
Buy links
Why I write historical romance and sagas by Fenella J. Miller
I grew up reading Georgette Heyer and then, of course, the great Jane Austen, the Brontë sisters and Dickens. My first love was always Regency although when I was first married and had two small children to take care of I did read contemporary romance as well. No – that’s not quite true as my daughter as a teenager and I used to fight for the latest Jilly Cooper.
I am a romantic at heart and want a happy ending to the books I read and the books I write. Dorothy Dunnett is my all-time favourite writer and I’ve read all her books at least twice over the last thirty years. Now I can download her books to my Kindle I’ve begun to read them again. She is such an outstandingly good writer that it used to make me feel inadequate and I think this is why when I started to write seriously I started with contemporary romance. I think I’ve written about seven but none of them will ever be published.
I was struggling with my writing when Katie Fforde, who I met at an RNA conference, told me to write what I read. As I was only reading historical fiction then I immediately changed direction – and the rest, as they say, is history. Or historical fiction in my case.
I wrote more than twenty-five Regency romances before deciding I wanted to try something with a bit more gravitas. I started writing both World War II and Victorian family sagas. These require a lot of research and detailed planning but these are the books I like writing the best. I must have over a thousand research books on my shelves 75% of which I look at on a regular basis. I find that research books just don’t work as well as an e-book.
The only hard copies I buy that are fiction are the books of Bernard Cornwell, Michael Connolly, Christian Cameron and Lee Child. I have every book these four have written and I’m running out of space on my shelf in the dining room.
I write historical fiction because I love the research – history was my main subject at college – and it’s a joy to discover something new about our past every time I write another book. Both my stepfather and father were RAF in the war so my heroes in my World War II books are always pilots too.
I think that writing contemporary fiction would be harder for me as you have to be current with all fashions, technical stuff and so on. Also, the majority of them are now written in first person present which I hate, can’t read, and couldn’t possibly write.
The only drawback to reading historical fiction is that I find myself editing and correcting historical errors in my head as I go along which somewhat spoils the experience. This is why I also read thrillers as I generally know nothing about the subject of the book.
Thank you so much, Fenella, for a lovely guest post.
Fenella Jane Miller was born in the Isle of Man. Her father was a Yorkshire man and her mother the daughter of a Rajah. She has worked as a nanny, cleaner, field worker, hotelier, chef, secondary and primary teacher and is now a full time writer.
She has over thirty eight Regency romantic adventures published plus four Jane Austen variations, three Victorian sagas and seven WW2 family sagas. She lives in a pretty, riverside village in Essex with her husband and British Shorthair kitten. She has two adult children and three grandchildren.
Follow Fenella
Follow Aria
