I Wrote it My Way - Anneli Purchase

Today we welcome another tempting writer from way across the pond, in Western Canada! If ever anyone enjoys writing about 'what they know', Anneli Purchase certainly does!

I must say my preferred kind of book is one where I feel somehow different from when I started reading it; so Anneli and I are in perfect sync. Isn't it wonderful how we can all find each other, no matter where we all live?! I like, for example, the novels of American author, Anita Shreve; their background or setting adds a whole new dimension to the story and characters. So many good new novels are sweeping us away to other cultures and countries, or else present a new angle on a familiar world.

Anneli explains how her books came about:

'Living on the coast of British Columbia I’ve been very lucky to have forests and the ocean handy for pursuing my interests– fishing, camping, mushroom picking, and boating. Over the years, my husband and I had many funny adventures and a few near disasters. Often I emailed to friends and told of some of these experiences. One day a friend wrote to tell me that his computer crashed and he lost all his files. Did I still have those emails that I’d sent him.

“Well, no,” I said. “Why would I want to keep those?”

He groaned and said, “They were little treasures. You should write a book.” So after a while, I gave this idea serious consideration and my real life adventures became intertwined with imaginary ones.

When I read, I like to feel that I’ve learned something new by the time I finish the book. When I write, I like to think that the reader will glean some tidbit of new information from my stories as well.

In The Wind Weeps, the reader will want to know if Andrea can escape the intolerable situation she finds herself in, but at the same time he will incidentally learn something about boating, or fishing, or life on the coast, without it being a lecture or a chore.

In Orion’s Gift, the drama plays out as two lovers, Kevin and Sylvia, are beach camping at various places in Baja California. While reading about their vindictive ex-spouses hunting them down, the reader inadvertently finds out all about surviving in a harsh desert situation.

My third book, coming out in the spring, is different again. It will take us from post WWII times in Europe to modern times in Canada.

In all three of my books, the time and place settings may vary, but the common threads are the relationships of people like you and like me, and the circumstances in which the characters might find themselves. Very often the dilemmas are about love. Naturally, because what would we do without love in our world?'

 

A fascinating insight into how you found your genre, Anneli! What a particularly good friend you have there, too. Thank you.

 

Well, folks, are you thinking of all those old emails you archived or carefully deleted (dammit)?

 

Links for Orion's Gift: 

On Amazon.com http://amzn.to/UhJE00

On Smashwords.com http://bit.ly/MFOcOX

Links for The Wind Weeps

Amazon http://amzn.to/RclGVT

Smashwords: http://bit.ly/yPQvEP

A Time and a Place

Do you like to read books where you can pinpoint the place? Does it annoy you if you cannot tell when the story takes place?

Someone once told me that the year should be left vague so the book does not become ‘dated’. Really? For historical fiction the era is, by definition, essential. To be topical, Call the Midwife is, importantly, true life story of the 1950s. Ian McEwan’s Saturday is a specific day in 2003, and A Week in December (2007) by Sebastian Faulks reflects society as it was then. On the other hand, fantasy or science fiction might be anytime in the future, anywhere, bounded only by the author’s and reader’s imagination.

I can only assume this person was thinking of a particular genre where a book packed with eternal truths could belong to the ‘here and now’, keep fresh for a few years and not exceed its sell by date. But to keep this illusion, so many references would have to be excluded. I struggled with this. Almost always I like to be clear on the time – and the place.

When writing Gypsies Stop tHere I deliberately made it fairly obvious, eluding to Tony Blair and George W Bush for example, when it was written – about 2007. Laws relating to Gypsies and Travellers and relationships between them and mainstream society are pivotal to the story. It presents a snapshot in time; some aspects have stood still, others have changed – like the government! Maybe, as time passes it will mature, not become out of date. As the real-life situation evolves, and perceptions shift, I hope people will be intrigued to see how unbelievable some things were, even five years ago. As it says in the notice that the activist, young Natalie, puts up on Appley Green notice board, ‘How will future generations look back …? Are we any better?’ Think of To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee and, more recently, The Help by Kathryn Stockett. Since writing this, my first novel, Channel 4’s Big Fat Gypsy Weddings have come and, fortunately, gone; Dale Farm in Essex hit the headlines all over the world; many Gypsies have published their own memoirs. When I researched and wrote this book I had academic studies; real life encounters and a few scarce books to work with (all listed in the Bibliography). We have indeed moved on and I hope that will add to the interest in reading Gypsies Stop tHere and No Gypsies Served now and in the future.

As for Shades of Appley Green– this is set in the present day, for sure, around 2011. It is not a documentary, it is meant to be entertaining, but again it does reflect some current social issues, the plight of many old folk, the way single parenthood can be a struggle and how traffic can seriously affect the way a village functions as a community. These themes are not the story but do provide the background. In five years’ time all these views of village life may have changed, while human emotions stay pretty much the same.

Of course the location matters! No argument there, surely. Classics like Wuthering Heights, Lorna Doone; Thomas Hardy and Sir Walter Scott and thousands of other writers prove that. With their strong and wonderful sense of place, I like to think of Anita Shreve’s many brilliant novels with their robust setting in New Hampshire, each book set in a different era but often the same stretch of coast, the same building. This adds a whole new dimension to each of her novels, in my view.

I hope to make a series of novels set in Appley Green, where each one will connect with the others. Some familiar characters will pop up. There is a raft of characters in the first one of this series, Shades of Appley Green – after all, it is a village! They have lived curious lives but cannot all be developed in one story and I hope each book will leave people wanting more. That’s the theory anyway! I certainly want to find out more about them which makes me just itch to get on with the next book.

Gypsies Stop tHere is about to be reprinted and is available on Kindle. No Gypsies Served is available as paperback. Shades of Appley Green is a Kindle book will be available as paperback in about two weeks time but can be pre-ordered. All three are set in Appley Green, as it happens.

Gypsies Stop tHere on Amazon       No Gypsies Served on Amazon  Shades of Appley Green on Kindle