I’m joined by the lovely Emma Davies today. She’s here to share her thoughts and inspiration for her second new release this year, Gooseberry Fool.
Gooseberry Fool
Willow’s strawberry fields are bursting with fruit and open for business. This heralds the start of a long hot summer, and for Willow the chance to reap the rewards of all her hard work; but Willow is not the only one with a project. It seems that her husband, Jude, has plans of his own and when Willow has a horrifying glimpse of the future he is proposing for their land, she knows she must come up with something to make him change his mind, and fast…
With help from her friends, Freya and Merry, Willow builds her love of all things fruity into a brilliant new business venture. But will she have enough time to get Willowberries Nectar off the ground before Jude sets the seal on the biggest deal of his life…?
Buy Gooseberry Fool here –
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Emma:
One question I’m often asked is where I find my inspiration from. It’s a question that makes me smile because my problem is never in finding the inspiration, but in finding the time to write down all my ideas! The one thing I do love however is when I finish one book and can then go on to plotting and planning for the next in line to be written. I really enjoy dreaming up my new characters, giving them names, crafting their characteristics and then finding the most wonderful place for them all to live.
For those of you that have been following my Tales From Appleyard series which began with Merry Mistletoe, you might already have a favourite character or two, but the one who I get most comments about is Amos Fry, my mysterious drifter. Amos came to me fully formed as I was out doing the shopping one day. I already had my plot for Merry Mistletoe – most of that came while I was brushing my teeth one morning, but as I pulled up behind a motorbike at a set of traffic lights that day, I noticed it had a personalised number plate – AM05 FRY, and minutes later there he was, practically fully formed with his black curly hair and bright red Doc Marten boots. People have told me how much they’d like an Amos in their lives; wise and thoughtful, caring and just a little bit magical. You never really find out who (or what) Amos is, and I’m certainly not going to tell you who I think he is, I’ll leave that up for you to decide, but one thing is for sure, when Amos arrives in your life things will never be the same again.
This series of novellas has been incredibly fun to write. They absolutely indulge my love of our countryside, rural traditions and crafts. In fact the ideas for the plot lines in each were sparked by a Country Life book I bought on a very wet week’s holiday in Pembrokeshire – Turn your hobby into a business. The book featured some hugely inspiration people who had all set up their own small business, and as you can imagine with a Country Life production the photographs alone made me drool, dreaming of a rural idyll. Each of my stories has its own set of characters and plot so they can be read as standalone titles, but throughout each, which incidentally has its own season too, is woven the background story of Freya and Sam, a story begun in Merry Mistletoe, and which concludes in Blackberry Way, the last of the titles which is due to be published on the 20th April.
The other wonderful thing about novellas is that they’re short, so often the focus can only be one or two main characters or, before you know it, you’ve got a full length novel on your hands. This also means that your secondary characters are often like little cameos, you can drop them into the story with only the barest of details and often without the need for further explanation, but this makes them no less memorable or important. Take Rupert the impeccably mannered Weimaraner in Spring Fever, or Grandma Gilly in Gooseberry Fool. In fact you never even meet her, just her notebook, but her spirit is there just the same. And as for the other characters in Gooseberry Fool, well I bet you never met a naked goat keeper called Delilah before…
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Buy Gooseberry Fool here –
Find Emma’s other books here:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Emma-Davies/e/B00L1N8TLW/ref=dp_byline_cont_ebooks_1
Abbey MacMunn 