The writer and her writing
I grew up in North Devon, England, spending summers on the beach or wandering around Exmoor and Cornwall. I’ve always been an outdoors sort of person, and I get very edgy when hot Málaga summer weather keeps me indoors all day.
Prior to becoming a full-time writer, I spent many years in international education in Europe. Meeting people from all over the world heightened my awareness of how young people, and the not so young, have to adapt to new environments to be successful in a culture very different to where their parents were raised. I am particularly interested in how genetic inheritance informs our personalities and life choices. How, for example, a great-grandson can be the image of his great-grandfather and share his character traits. The wily rogue Ludo in The Chosen Man is an ancestor of Leo Kazan in The Empress Emerald. Certain character traits in my books follow through down the generations.
With very few exceptions, the locations in my stories are places I know well. Ludo da Portovenere comes from somewhere I visited often when we lived in Italy. The house, Crimphele, in The Empress Emerald and The Chosen Man Trilogy, is based on the lovely Tudor mansion, Cotehele, in Cornwall. Cornwall is also the setting for the Bob Robbins Home Front Mysteries. I deliberately re-visit locations in my stories to show how we are not the only generation to have lived and loved in these places. Setting a story in a specific time and place means it has to be as historically accurate, but I enjoy doing research and constantly get side-tracked by fascinating details. Truth is stranger than fiction they say: I often think if I wrote that, no one would believe it.
My new historical fantasy series for Penmore Press, Doomsong, also connects to familiar places on the Baltic Sea, the Mediterranean and the English West Country. The idea for the series came after reading non-fiction on the Viking epoch because I visit Sweden often and I used to live on a Viking battlefield. The next story is taking me back to that battlefield in North Devon. Whether Hubba actually lead 33 dragonships into the Torridge estuary (as in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle) I do not know, but it makes for a good story.
If you have a favourite character you would like
to know more about something in any of my novels, do let me know.
Email: jgharlond@telefonica.net
My Amazon's Author Page