I am delighted to kick off the blog tour with a guest post today ~ thanks to Rachel’s Random Resources for organizing.
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Genre ~ family thriller
Publication date ~ January 25, 2024
Est page count ~ 315
Trigger warnings ~ There are references to domestic violence and someone does get shot
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The Seeds From Which Ideas Grow
by Elaine Robertson North
I waited a long time to call myself an author. I started writing my first book in my 20s and was published for the first time in my 50s. You’d be forgiven for thinking I simply wasn’t that motivated but the truth is life and my career simply got in the way.
Now that I’ve hung up my corporate hat, I wouldn’t change a moment of what turned into a twenty-five year career working in the media and entertainment industries. That said, working in British tabloid newspapers back in the 1990s was character building at best and soul-crushing at its very worst! But over those twenty five years, without the chance of riding the rollercoaster that was surviving daily contact with journalists, or hanging out on a film set or in a radio studio, or realising that my experience could actually be put to good use working with the amazing Comic Relief, without all of that, I’m not sure I would ever have had a compelling enough idea to put pen to paper, or more accurately, fingers to keyboard.
I’ve Been Waiting For You is my third book and although each book is stand alone in terms of characters and story, the one common theme is that each started with a very simple idea. The idea for my first came at the recording of a music and entertainment TV show called The Word that was broadcast in the UK back in the 1990s. I was there week in week out for the live recording of the show, accompanied every week by a paparazzi photographer. Sitting with my favourite pap, a good-looking chap who oozed charm from every pore, there was a particular moment when we sat opposite an actor (long since forgotten who it was, honestly!) along with the actor’s agent and I remember thinking that somewhere in that mix there was the most fabulously dangerous love triangle. And so I Can’t Tell You Why was born.
For book number two, Bring Me To Life, the world of newspapers provided the cut-throat backdrop that would send my main character, Grace, running to a life coach, a decision that would unwittingly throw her into the centre of two people’s desire for revenge; a woman who has struggled to move on from a failed relationship and a man unable to come to terms with the loss of his brother to suicide.
I’m already working on my fourth book and each of my main characters (there are three) have careers that I’ve either navigated myself, or worked closely alongside and it’s a joy dipping back into past lives, using real situations of my own to move my characters’ stories forward. It makes it wonderfully personal, even though the narrative soon overtakes any experience of my own!
Stepping back to the here and now and the release of I’ve Been Waiting For You, I’ve realised as I type this that it’s currently the exception to my own unintentional rule. None of the key characters share anything in common with me in terms of work or career but I’m pretty confident the starting sentiment is one everyone can identify with. The seed from which this story grew is possibly the simplest yet;
how two people, in this case siblings, can start life in exactly the same way but end up living dramatically different lives.
That seed of an idea is of course just the beginning and, without doubt, for me, the joy of being an author is taking that idea and carefully and sensitively turning it into a story that hopefully has enough heart and substance to give you the same escapism when reading it, that I enjoy when writing it.
Book blurb:
Esther grew up with a violent criminal father and suffered the loss of her mother at just fourteen.
When her brother, Matt, turns up after another long unexplained absence he falls for Esther’s friend, Abi. Two months into their relationship, Abi is dead and Matt is missing.
Now Esther must do everything she can to find Matt but doing so means opening herself up to a past she has worked hard to escape.
Esther knows she has no choice and must act quickly.
Matt’s life could depend on it.
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Author Bio –
Elaine spent twenty-five years working in marketing and communications in the media and entertainment industries. This included seven years marketing national newspapers, running the publicity campaign for three Red Nose Days and a number of years working in entertainment PR. She held senior communications roles at Capital Radio and UKTV, and latterly, she was the MD of a small marketing agency. It was all fast and furious and a fantastically rich source of material.
Having harboured a desire to write for many years, Elaine finally made this her focus once she’d hung up her corporate hat, publishing her first book, I Can’t Tell You Why in 2019. Her second book, Bring Me To Life, followed in 2022.
Today Elaine lives in North London with her husband and their two sons. When she’s not writing, she can be found looking harassed on the school run, on the side lines of her sons’ football matches, or singing her heart out with her local branch of Popchoir.
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