Sunday 21 June 2015

Indian or British? The journal that inspired Victoria's War.

Ahttp://amzn.to/1HFeMTQ (.com)
http://amzn.to/1GlQigd (.uk)

I was inspired to write Regency books because I read Georgette Heyer as a teenager and later read Jane Austen's wonderful books. In latter years I watched the many Jane Austen adaptations that appeared on television and this spurred me on to write my own Jane Austen variations, as well as over thirty Regency stories.
http://amzn.to/1HvkEP (.uk)
http://amzn.to/1KZdmCD (.com)
However, when I found my mother's journal about the time she spent in India with her father, my grandfather, I decided to write a historical family saga using her memoirs for authentic background and detail.
 The first part of Victoria's War, Shadows, uses a lot of my mother's actual descriptions of the India where she lived for two years between 1937 and 1939. I also made the decision to get her memoirs typed and transferred to my PC and then to publish them on Amazon.
The electronic version has been live since last week and I'm about to put up the paperback version with Create Space. I shall make a colossal loss on this project, but writers don't do everything in order to earn royalties – sometimes we write and publish books because they are important to us.
I wish I had known the woman who wrote this journal – maybe I would have liked her more. It was only when I discovered the manuscript, after my stepfather's death, that I also found a couple of other, more recently written, journals in which she had put that she had loved my brother and I.
I wish she'd been able to tell us how much she loved us when she was alive because, although she and my stepfather provided us with an interesting home, with no financial support whatsoever from my father, never once did she offer us any physical expression of her feelings.
I wonder what inspires other writers – is it an overheard conversation, a family photograph perhaps, or something else entirely?

Fenella J Miller

1 comment:

  1. I would reply if I know what you were commenting. Sorry. Thanks for dropping by.

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