Guest Author Alison Stuart

Alison and Anna Campbell

Please help me welcoming award-winning, multi-published author, Alison Stuart, who is talking about her new book Gather the Bones and has a giveaway. (applause)

Ella: Alison, thanks so much for being here today. Tell us a bit about yourself and what made you decide to start writing?

Alison: Thank you so much for having me, Ella. To start with the easy question…I always wanted to be a writer. I recently found some letters I wrote as a young teenager in which I stridently asserted that was my intention.  All through my teens I scribbled historical “novels” in pencil in shorthand notebooks. My best friend and I spent our lunch hours writing away – her novel was sci-fi and mine, of course, English Civil War (“The Locket of Grace”…great title I must use it!).

University, career and family intervened. It was only when I dislocated a shoulder in a skiing accident (note to self…do not trust husband who declares a ski run “looks easy”) and found myself stranded in a snow bound chalet in the Australian Alps with nothing for company but a notebook computer, did I dare to write the story that had been tugging at my sleeve for so long. That story became my award winning novel of love in a time of civil war…BY THE SWORD.

http://www.alisonstuart.com/by-the-sword.html

My story is that my family had moved from Kenya, where I had been born, to Perth, Australia in the late 1960s.  After a rocky start we settled in Melbourne and I studied Law and Arts at university. Apart from a few years when we lived in Singapore, I have worked all my life as a lawyer, both in private practice and in a range of different organizations including the military and the emergency services. A fatal attraction for men in uniform (including my husband who I met doing officer training in the Army Reserve) may explain my leaning towards soldier heroes!

I finished my ‘career’ as a senior executive in a highly stressful job. The turning point in my life came the day I found myself without a job, an anniversary I am celebrating this week, Ella. (Tipped off the Hamster Wheel:  <http://alisonstuart.blogspot.com.au/2012/11/tipped-off-hamster-wheel-defining-who.html> ). With no children living at home any more, and a somewhat relieved husband, I am finally enjoying the freedom of actually calling myself a writer.

Ella: You’re here today to promote your newest release Gather the Bones, a historical-paranormal. What drew you to that genre?

Alison:  Several genres really…history, mystery, romance and ghosts… I started off wanting to write a ghost story. I’ve always liked ghost stories and have written a couple of short stories with a supernatural bent but never turned my hand to a full length novel. I thought a change from my beloved seventeenth century was called for and a recent tour of the battlefields of the First World War gave me the major plot for the story.  A story about the aftermath of the Great War.

Setting a book in 1923 allowed me to write an Australian character (my heroine, Helen) and I love archaeology so my hero (Paul) is an archaeologist.  Finally I wanted to try my hand at a mystery, because I actually read more mystery novels than romance!

Like the witches in Macbeth, I threw the whole lot in and stirred.

The result is GATHER THE BONES < http://www.alisonstuart.com/gather-the-bones.html>

One young friend described it “Downton Abbey with ghosts” but I am sure my editor would prefer…

The horrors of the Great War are not the only ghosts that haunt Helen Morrow and her late husband’s reclusive cousin, Paul. Unquiet spirits from another time and another conflict touch them.

A coded diary gives them clues to the mysterious disappearance of Paul’s great-grandmother in 1812, and the desperate voice of a young woman reaches  out to them from the pages. Together Helen and Paul must search for answers, not only for the old mystery, but also the circumstances surrounding the death of Helen’s husband at Passchandaele in 1917.

As the mysteries entwine, their relationship is bound by the search for truth, in the present and the past.

Excerpt from GATHER THE BONES

When the turn of the handle still did not shift the ancient door, Helen leaned her shoulder against the wood and pushed. The door creaked reluctantly and opened on to a large room dominated by two massive bookshelves taking up the spaces on either side of an old fireplace. A long, low window looked out over the moat to the driveway. Ancient framed maps and paintings of Holdston Hall crowded the remaining wall space. Several smaller family portraits were dotted among the maps and watercolors, including two head and shoulders studies of a man and a woman painted during the Georgian era and a couple of later Victorian models with severe, frowning faces.

Helen walked over to the Georgian pair and studied them closely. She could see at once that they had been painted by different hands, probably at different times and yet they had been framed identically and hung together as if in life they had belonged as a pair.

The man had obviously been a Morrow. Like the other portraits of Morrow forebears, dark hair tumbled over his handsome aristocratic brow and he glared at the artist, his stiffness emphasised by the high collar of a scarlet uniform. Charlie’s fair hair, inherited from his mother, made him quite a cuckoo in the family portrait gallery.

In contrast to the formality of the male portrait, the woman beside him glowed with life. A fierce intelligence burned from her light grey eyes. A tangle of chestnut curls framed her face and her mouth lifted in a half smile as if any moment she would burst into laughter. She wore a green gown that exposed a great deal of décolletage in a manner fashionable in the early part of the nineteenth century and no jewelry except a slender gold chain, with a locket hanging from it, nothing more than a blur of gold under the artist’s brush.

Helen shivered and pushed the windows open, admitting a breeze that carried with it the waft of warm grass and the sounds of the country–birds and the distant hum of a steam engine driving a threshing machine.

Along with these comfortable, familiar sounds drifted another faint sound, a whispering, a woman’s voice half heard, the words indistinct and undecipherable.

Helen frowned and tilted her head to listen, turning back into the room.

“Can you hear something, Alice?” she asked.

Alice looked up from turning an old globe on the table.

“No,” she said.

Helen looked around. The whispering seemed to come from within the room, not through the open windows. She stood transfixed, staring at the two wing chairs by the fireplace. The whispering grew more insistent, more urgent. Wrapping her arms around herself, Helen gripped the sleeves of her cardigan. The back of her neck prickled, her breath almost stopped.

As she took a step toward the chairs, the whispering ceased and she let out her breath and straightened her shoulders before crossing to the windows and pulling them shut.

“Come on, Alice,” she said. “We’ll be late for supper and I don’t want to annoy your grandmother on our first day.”

Buy Links:

Amazon Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Gather-the-Bones-ebook/dp/B0091US8G8/ref=la_B004CB59LI_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1353543986&sr=1-3

Lyrical Press (for all eformats) where it is ON SALE 75% off Nov22-24!: http://www.lyricalpress.com/store/index.php?main_page=product_info&cPath=3_28&products_id=551

And in print:  See my website: http://www.alisonstuart.com/gather-the-bones.html

GIVEAWAY:  Tell Ella and I what genre of fiction is your preferred read and why and if I can get over ten comments, I will give away an e-copy of my latest book, GATHER THE BONES < http://www.alisonstuart.com/gather-the-bones.html> to one randomly drawn commenter.