Authors Electric

My love affair with ice hockey goes back a great many years: to the late 1970s in fact, when I spent a couple of years teaching English Conversation to adults in Tampere, Finland. My students mostly worked in the large paper mills of Tampere, which is a long, thin and rather beautiful town, sandwiched between two lakes. I taught engineers, management, secretarial staff. Sometimes I went out to the factories by bus and sometimes students travelled to the language school which was above a department store in the middle of town. There were a few other people - all ages and stages - doing evening classes for various reasons. When we weren't teaching, we clustered in the cafe downstairs, chatting, drinking coffee and eating rice porridge with milk, a fabulous creamy, sticky version of yoghurt called viili or piirakka munavoi, the cheap and cheerful Finnish equivalent to scrambled eggs on toast. Finns are friendly but - on the whole - quite shy and private people. Teaching conversa...

From the Roman de la Rose - possibly the earliest romance! Let me say right from the start: there's absolutely nothing wrong with romance. Some of my good friends write romances, and they do it beautifully. And a lot of what I write certainly has romantic elements. But if somebody reads my books expecting them to obey certain romance conventions, he or she may be doomed to disappointment, and that's one of my reasons for becoming an independent 'writer as publisher'. I don't fit many of the genre specifics. Traditional publishers were never very sure where to place my novels. When I'm uploading them as eBooks, even I don't know quite where to place them and swither between contemporary women's fiction, historical fiction, (I write both) literary fiction and - you've guessed it - romance. Specifically, though, I don't really do happy endings. Or at least I don't do happily-ever-after endings. I do my best to make the endings satisfyi...