Interview for Veronica Heley

» Posted on Mar 25, 2011 in Blog | Comments Off on Interview for Veronica Heley

This week I’m hosting Trish Perry with Unforgettable, Ruth Axtell Morren with A Gentleman’s Homecoming, and Veronica Heley with False Money. If you want to enter the drawings, please leave a comment on one of the post during the week with your email address. I will not enter you without an email address (my way to contact you if you win). If you don’t want to leave an email address, another way you can enter is to email me at margaretdaley@gmail.com. The drawings end Sunday (March 27th) evening.

Interview with Veronica Heley:

1.I’ve always known I could write but I had to get out into the world and earn my living before I had time to sit down and learn my craft.

2.It took me two years of hard work before I had anything worth looking at, but in l974 my first crime book – SUE FOR MERCY – was published. To my surprise, this was given a new edition in 2008.

3.I handle rejection by getting on with the next story!

4.I write because God has given me a most peculiar brain which makes up stories. The hard part is writing them down in acceptable form.

5.If I weren’t writing, I’d be reading.

6.I’m working on my 68th book, which is the sixth in the Abbot Agency series. Bea tries to help a victim of entrapment, because he’s innocent – although no one else is!

7.I don’t put myself in the books, but I do try to put myself into the heads of my characters, so that I can understand what makes them act the way they do.

8.The last book I had published was FALSE MONEY, in which Bea goes hunting for some library books – and the girl who got lost with them. It’s about the lure of money and what it can do to you. The next book to come out, in May 2011, will be another Ellie Quicke, MURDER MY NEIGHBOUR, where Ellie has to deal with the greed and stupidity of a neighbour’s relations – and with her own rapacious daughter Diana.

9.My advice is to learn your craft. Work at it. Keep trying to improve what you’ve done. Look for new ways of getting words on paper, and read everything you can lay your hands on.

10.Faith underpins everything in my stories. What you believe comes out in your writing, whether you put it into words or not. My two current gentle crime series show my heroines believing, praying and trying to be Christian in a very secular world.

11.I write about believable older women trying to deal with the evils in the world; murder, drugs, paedophilia, charity scams, honour killing, etc., in the adult books; bullying, fear of water, burglary, lack of self-worth for children. My is to see right triumphs, however much damage has been done to people along the way.

12.The favourite book has to be the one I’m working on next. Not necessarily the current work in progress, but the one after that.

13.I get the house tidy, and settle down at my desk to read the emails and catch up with the business side of writing. I usually edit the previous day’s work in the morning, and write onwards in the afternoons. I finish in time to cook supper…and then think about the next day’s work in the evenings.