My guest today is author Vivien Brown, who writes dramatic and relationship based novels. Vivien is going to talk to us about her writing journey, and her latest book. So grab yourself a cuppa, get cosy and let’s get chatting to Vivien.

BIO:

Vivien is a past winner of the annual Mail on Sunday ‘Best Opening to a Novel’ competition and reached the shortlist again three years later. She has sold around 170 short stories to UK women’s magazines and written more than 250 articles for childcare magazines, based on her former highly rewarding career introducing the magic of reading to the under-fives and their families in libraries and children’s centres through the Sure Start and Bookstart programmes.

Now writing full-time, Vivien has had seven women’s contemporary novels commercially published. She is a fellow of the Society of Women Writers and Journalists (SWWJ), a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association and a reader for its New Writers Scheme. She has also had a book about ‘cracking’ cryptic crosswords published, and several humorous children’s poems included in school anthologies, and is a creative writing tutor, most recently at the Swanwick Summer School.

Away from writing, Vivien loves playing with her grandchildren, watching and occasionally taking part in TV quiz shows, reading and reviewing women’s fiction, and enjoys the challenge of both solving and compiling cryptic crosswords.

Welcome to my blog, Vivien. You’ve had a long and varied writing career. Can you tell us about your writing journey?

Every journey has to have a starting point and mine was writing poetry in my teens, a time when emotions run high and pouring it all out onto the page is a great way of putting all those feelings about boys and fledgling love into words.

Although I do still pen the occasional poem, I much prefer to write fiction these days. I still love dipping into relationships, whether it’s falling in love and raising a family or exploring all the heartbreaking effects of betrayal, abandonment, infertility or divorce.

I was attending a creative writing evening class and working part-time while my twin daughters were small, and didn’t really take my writing seriously enough until I was around forty, when I entered the annual ‘Best opening to a novel’ competition run by the Mail on Sunday. It was such a thrill to reach the final six and be invited to lunch with the famous judges, John Mortimer, Fay Weldon and James Herbert, and to then be told that my brief 150-word entry had beaten all the other 5000 and taken first place. That small stroke of luck led to me finding my first agent and finishing the novel, although that one sadly never did get published. What the win did provide was the confidence boost all writers need, the one that tells you that your writing is actually good enough and that others might enjoy reading it.

Time was still tight and the thought of trying to write another full-length novel was a bit daunting, so I turned to short stories and was soon finding success with the women’s magazines. My first sale was a Christmas story to Woman’s Weekly in 1993, and I have had very many published since, again concentrating on romantic and family themes. Without doing it consciously, a lot of grannies seem to feature too! Perhaps because I was so close to my own grandmother, or perhaps because I couldn’t wait to be that loving granny myself (I now have six grandchildren). I also drew on my day-job of working with the under-fives as a basis for producing regular non-fiction pieces for the childcare and parenting magazine markets. But fiction was my one true love!

When the chance of early retirement beckoned, the urge to write a full-length novel popped up again. By then I was a member of the Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA). I took two manuscripts to one of their conferences where I had one-to-one meetings with editors, and both books ended up with publishing deals! Within months of each other, ‘How to Win Back Your Husband’ (written as Vivien Hampshire) came out in e-book, and ‘Lily Alone’, in paperback, e-book and audio. Since then, I have had a further five novels published, all contemporary women’s fiction with emotional issues at their heart.

I still belong to the RNA and to the local writing group that evolved when my adult-ed evening class ended all those years ago. I am also now heavily involved in the Society of Women Writers and Journalists (SWWJ) where I organise their writing competitions and take care of social media. I occasionally teach creative writing classes or offer to critique works in progress too. Being part of a community of writers really helps. Where better to get advice, support and encouragement than from others who have ‘been there’ themselves or are in exactly the same boat?

Thanks so much for dropping by to talk to us today, Vivien. I hope you new book soars.

Follow Vivien:

FACEBOOK: https://www.facebook.com/viv.hampshire

TWITTER:  https://twitter.com/VivBrownAuthor

Vivien’s Latest Book

First introduced in the earlier novel ‘Lily Alone’, widowed Geraldine is now financially secure, happy and about to marry second husband William. She has come a long way from being a motherless fourteen-year-old giving her baby up for adoption, and has done all she can over the ensuing decades to support vulnerable girls in order to compensate for her lingering guilt.

Beth has endured a painful divorce and the death of her adoptive mother, and now faces kidney disease. A transplant means waiting indefinitely for a stranger to die – unless someone volunteers as a living donor. She will not consider putting her three children, one still a schoolgirl, at risk. Could the time finally be right to seek out the birth parents she knows nothing about?

When biological mother and daughter meet, the emotions that accompany the reunion are complicated by haunting questions: Is Beth driven by selfishness as much as (or more than) the need to reconnect? Will Geraldine’s urge to help Beth by being tested as a potential donor jeopardise her new life with William? What does she owe, and to whom?

Thought-provoking and absorbing, this novel explores the meaning of family, the nature of guilt and regret, and the conflicts raised by the miracles of modern medicine.

The novel is dedicated to Joe Rees, the real-life ‘hero’ who, when no blood relative proved to be a match, stepped up as a living kidney donor and saved the life of his mother-in-law Lynn.

Buy it from Amazon:  https://amzn.eu/d/iXZOLmQ

Or read it for free on Kindle Unlimited

More of Vivien’s Books

What sort of mother would leave her all alone… a gripping and heart-wrenching domestic drama that won’t let you go.

Lily, who is almost three years old, wakes up alone at home with only her cuddly toy for company. She is afraid of the dark, can’t use the phone, and has been told never to open the door to strangers.

But why is Lily alone and why isn’t there anyone who can help her? What about the lonely old woman in the flat upstairs who wonders at the cries from the floor below? Or the grandmother who no longer sees Lily since her parents split up?

All the while a young woman lies in a coma in hospital – no one knows her name or who she is, but in her silent dreams, a little girl is crying for her mummy… and for Lily, time is running out.

Buy Link: Amazon

Over twenty years ago, Kate’s dream came true. After years of struggling, she was finally pregnant after pioneering IVF. But the dream came at a cost. Neither Kate nor her husband, Dan, could have known the price that they would have to pay to fulfil their cherished wish of having their own family.

Now, years later, their daughter Natalie is getting married and she’s fulfilling her own dream of marrying her childhood sweetheart. Natalie knows she won’t be like most brides in her wheelchair, but it’s the fact her father won’t be there to walk her down the aisle that breaks her heart.

Her siblings, Ollie, Beth and Jenny, gather around Natalie, but it isn’t just their father who is missing from their lives… as the secrets that have fractured the family rise to the surface, can they learn to forgive each other before it’s too late?

Buy Link: Amazon