A message from Elizabeth Jayne

I always used to think that people who wrote had been doing so for most of their lives, were those kids in school who could always come up with amazing stories. For me, though, this urge to write began well after my school days. In fact, in school I hated the subject ‘composition’ because I could never think of anything to write! Storytelling was not my forte.

Over the years I began to dabble in poetry – poems about the family, fairy poems for children, poems about life in general. A friend of mine suggested I turn one of these poems into a story. My initial reaction was ‘yea right, me write a story? No way could I think of anything.’ But it got me thinking so one day I picked up my poem called The Gypsy Spirit. I fiddled with it, tried to make it more of a story than a poem and before I knew it I had an A4 page short story on my hands. I was rather tickled about that because I didn’t think I could do it. Over the next five years I would go back to it and stretch it out a bit more, then a bit more, each time surprised at the story ideas coming to me. By the time I was done, my little poem had gone from a few paragraphs to 150 A4 pages long! This became my very first novel – Elizabeth and the Gypsy Spirit.

I was still wondering how on earth I had managed to write a novel and also wondered how people could write dozens of stories because I doubted I would think of anything else to write. After all, this story had sprung up from a poem and I didn’t have another one that I felt would make a story. Then one day driving home from work I got an idea for a story about a man who sails the seas on his cargo ship and how he would feel if a spitfire of a woman became his passenger threatening his whole way of life. It was an idea that was only two or three sentences long. This idea soon became my second book – Rogue.

From that point on the ideas just kept coming. Sometimes I would come to a dead end and not know where the story was heading but then another idea would spring up and so I often have several books going at the one time! Amazingly, I keep track of what is happening in each.

From those surprising beginnings, I have now written, or partly written, over a dozen novels and I plan to add to the list for as long as my imagination keeps showing me stories of these wonderful characters and their interesting lives.

I hope you enjoy reading their stories as much as I enjoy writing them. 🙂