Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
I am an unrepentant lover of life, and enjoy witty fridge magnets, love dawns, and sailing with my son. While I dislikes long car or plane journeys I has lived in several countries and visit many more. A reluctant attendee at the gym, I happily take my three dogs for numerous country walks, and ride a bike.
I has been writing from childhood and happily admit I’m grateful that nothing remains but one badly spelled poem! Over the next decades I wrote about eighteen books, most of which have been lost in the multitudes of moves my family or I have made. The advent of computers enabled me to loose most of the remaining ones.
My blog, Around the Bend, is loosely based on some of my experiences while traveling in various parts of the world, with or without children. As I’ve lived in five or six countries, and adventured to about eight times that number there are many tales to tell!
My parents were charismatic people, with an adventurous spirit. Frank Cordner-James was born in 1998 and ran away from Felsted (an English public School) and lied about his age so he wouldn’t miss the First World War, as they were told it would be over by Christmas. The first time he met my mother he was riding in Hyde Park and chanced to talk to a pretty nurse with a baby, the my mother, in a pram. Little did he guess that baby would travel the world with him and bare eleven children in different countries. Only three of them survived beyond a month or two.
My mother,Margaret Giffen, was a slender, beautiful and courageous woman. My father had been widowed twice before he married my nineteen-year-old mother. Margaret Giffen also raised her stepson, who loved her dearly.
I happened to be born on the islands off the coast of BC in Canada, and lived in many places until my father became very ill. At that point I was about ten, and my mother moved us all back to England.
I loved the country, and understood the older generations, but had trouble understanding those of my own generation, and conforming to their expectations. Fortunately I was blessed with a sense of humour, a love of my fellow man, and the ability to read four books a day. Between those I thrived!
After being in the company of only boys, and often having no formal schooling for months, or years, at a time my parents had the curious idea of sending me to St. Mary’s Convent, in Cambridge, a highly academic all girls school. However, I felt blessed to be taught by Sister Scholastica, amongst others, whose kindness and patience were not misplaced. An amazing person, she prevented the me from crashing and burning. It was because of her, I graduated Homerton College Cambridge, and went on to study many subjects and do well in them.
Now the mother of three boys and three girls, I write full time. My children groan at my puns, laugh over my fridge magnets, and sigh at my housekeeping when they notice, which is rare.
I graduated from Homerton College, Cambridge and I am the author of The Selene Experiment (the first book in a SF series), and Selene: Weal’s People (SF, 2nd in the series due out late 2015). Around the Bend (first in a series of travel stories) is in ebook , An Alien Touch (SF Romance), An Alien to Love ( SF Romance) this series of six will be coming out around December 2015, and The Dragons Return (SF) due out this year, and The Tangled Web (Mystery) due out early 2016. Also The First Dance, poetry, due out 2016. I am a certified Psycholinguistic Hypnotherapist, and an erstwhile teacher and potter.
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
The Selene Experiment has just come out in ebook and is the first of a seven book series.
I love the thought of what would happen if…? Life is so full of adventure, romance, heroism and sheer awesomeness if you just stay aware and in the now, but for most of us it’s easier to imagine it as somewhere else.
I delight in the romance of life and wanted to write a book about what might happen if a person was plucked out of one life and plunged into unknown adventures. I had a lot of fun writing it, so much in fact, that I decided to write some more.
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I doubt I have any unusual writing habits, unless requiring NO distractions is unusual. My three favourite places to write are; On my rose covered deck, often in the hammock, but that’s mostly when I’m doing research; on a couch in a sunny room because all the dogs and cats like to be near me. Correction, they won’t stop nagging until I let them snuggle all around me. The third place is in bed. I find that if you work in bed you can pretend it isn’t six o’clock in the morning and that really you are only lying in, and if you are just lying in you don’t have to attend to all the early morning chores till you get up!
What authors, or books have influenced you?
As a child I bought second hand books all the time, of many dates and genres. some I still re read to this day, like Nevil Shute’s book A Town Like Alice. He seemed to have such love for his fellow man, and respect for work well done.
I do have a weakness for a jolly good cozy murder, like Agatha Christie’s, but M.M. Kaye wrote some great ones too.
I have delighted in ripping yarns by authors like Captain Thompson who wrote The Flying Spray, YA books but lots of them are just as nice to read today as when I was a child.
It’s impossible to really list them, I had over ten thousand books until I downsized, now I have barely two thousand.
What are you working on now?
I’m working of an Alien series, due out around Christmas. Third generation American aliens.
It’s rather fun writing them. Each is a stand alone hot romance but I couldn’t prevent the SF influence in there creeping in.
In the first book the heroine thinks she is the last of the aliens as no one has heard from the few that left their isolated community. So she leaves…and that’s where her adventures begin.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
So far it’s been Amazon, but I guess that’s because I like writing and don’t like the business to writing so am really slow about doing it. Sadly, traditionally published or not, all emerging authors are having to face up to the fact that no matter how good your book is, if no one knows about it it will never sell.
Do you have any advice for new authors?
My advice isn’t anything new. Work consistently, learn your craft, learn the business, give great quality…and get into the mind set that you are in this for the long haul.
It takes a long time to be an over night success!
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
Beside some awesome spiritual advice I’ve had, I think the next best was ‘Never put into writing anything you wouldn’t like hearing read out in court!’
Needless to say, my journaling sucks.
What are you reading now?
M. M. Kaye’s book Death in the Andamans. It’s about the fourth time I’ve read it. It’s so very well written.
What’s next for you as a writer?
I hope to have at least seven new books out by Christmas. Most of them are already written but I want the whole series to come out in a boxed set, as well as separately.
Then I want to go on an adventure. I love just deciding to ‘up and go’. Haven’t decided where or when, but some of the adventures may well end up in the second book of the Around the Bend series.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
Humm. Tough one. Almost like asking a mother of six which child she would save, and yes I have six children and they have asked me that!
As it’s a desert island, no cook books as I could only eat the ‘sand which is there’ (groan) but I would take an Emmet Fox book to comfort me, a blank book with pen to write in, The Lord of the Rings in the single version which is sad as I love the three separate books…and perhaps Anne McCaffrey’s White Dragon.
Author Websites and Profiles
Wendy C Giffen Website
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