Meet the Book Blogger

[Note: over the next few weeks, just so you know, the blog posts are going to take the form of book reviews. Earlier this week, I joined a mailing list which sends people who are interested in reading and writing books review copies of different manuscripts from different genres.

Their goal is “to match readers like you with up-and-coming novelists in the genres you like the most”. The process is also beneficial for the author as it helps expand their reading audience.

To take that an extra step further, I figured that once I’ve read each sample copy, I’ll review it on here, and hopefully that will help the authors expand their audience even further.

I’ve already started reading my first book for them, and I have a few others lined up that I’m excited to start reading.

If the idea of this interests you, just comment down below or DM me on Instagram (@roxyelle01) and I’ll give you all the details so you can get involved yourself :)]

It feels as if I’m writing this post later than I usually would after posting last week’s post a day early. It’s quite surprising how easy it is to fall out of habit, I guess.

It’s been a busy week for me; meeting up with various people, arranging different things, getting back into the headset of and beginning to pack for uni. A week can pass by quite quickly when your mind is boggled with multiple things I find.

So, as promised in last week’s post, today signals the beginning of a new era for this blog. Or rather, a new theme of blog posts which I hope you will enjoy.

Over this week, I’ve been wondering what post I could do to start this theme. I follow a lot of book bloggers, so figured the best way to be inspired what to do was to have a bit of a nosey into what they did to start off. The most popular first post is an “meet the book blogger” kind of post.

Now obviously that’s slightly redundant for me given the fact I’ve been blogging for three years and by now most of you know me really well. That being said, I thought that a good place to start would be an introduction as to why I’m passionate about everything to do with books. It's not something I've gone into detail about before, so here goes:

I’ve always loved books. The reading of them, that is. And the collecting of them. The writing of them was slightly more of a journey, as if you’d asked anyone when I was younger, I think they’d have all said I wasn’t any kind of born writer.

In fact, when it comes to academic or creative writing, I’ve always been a less-is-more kind of girl. So much so that when my high school teacher discovered I had not only written a novel but was having it published, it’s safe to say she was pretty astounded. Whenever she’d tasked me with some kind of creative writing, I’d never excelled, suffice to say.

I remember having a go at writing a story when I was in primary school. I don’t really remember how old I was, but I remember that it stemmed from a game I used to play in the garden with my imaginary friends. It only ever reached a page long, given the fact writing pages and pages has never been my forte.

But reading? That I’ve always loved. Some of my earliest memories are of reading the Beatrix Potter and Thomas the Tank Engine books with my mum. Even to this day, those books hold a special place in my heart. I read all the Harry Potter books, a load of those fairy novels with the green goblins (anyone remember those?) and plenty of other young reader novels.

Eventually I found a series of novels set in an 18th century London theatre, which I fell in love with. That series was probably the first one that set me on the course of being an avid reader.

When I started high school, my reading tastes began to define themselves into the forms of historical books, murder mysteries and romances. Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie novels were (and are) among my favourites, but a series that changed my life was the Daisy Dalrymple mystery series. Those books inspired me to start writing my own murder mysteries and if I hadn’t read them, I don’t imagine I’d be writing now.

Aged 12, I wrote my first murder mystery. I don’t know what I really thought was going to become of it; it was rough around the edges to say the least, but after much editing and refinement, that’s the novel I am now having published.

I’ve always enjoyed collecting books, particularly those with aesthetically pleasing covers or old editions of some of my classic favourite. I have a beautiful (and ever expanding) collection of second-hand Shakespeare quarto plays which is one of my prize possessions.

When I was in high school, I started to love English literature. My best friend and I were constantly debating about some book or another; she was the Elizabeth to my Jane, the Nerissa to my Portia (even in a play once). I remember one year we even discussed dressing up for World Book Day as Elizabeth and Jane; we were, and are, geeky and proud.

And when GCSE came around, I discovered my passion for the classics like Austen and Shakespeare – I’d always enjoyed performing Shakespeare, but it was only then when I figured out how amazing studying Shakespeare could be that I knew how much I loved his work.

I can’t tell you at what point in A Level I decided I wanted to study English at uni – originally I’d wanted to study History, as by that point I was writing lots of historical stories and thought that the best way to help my writing was to learn more about the periods of history I was writing about.

Maybe it was when I studied Othello, or maybe Gatsby, or even just when I had the amazing experience of a studying with a group of people who all want to be there. In terms of studying, there’s nothing better than working with people who are as passionate as you are about whatever the subject is.

Now I’m at uni, writing more than ever, reading whenever I can, and loving being able to study and produce work with passionate people. I don’t have a plan for the future, but I know that it will have some link to my love of books; whether I end up writing them, or editing them, or something else, I know it’ll be really good.

To finish up, I thought I’d give you a little flavour of what I’m currently writing:

- The Summer (working title – I haven’t come up with anything better yet) - essentially a romance novel but I want the main plotline to demonstrate not just falling in love but everything that comes along with it. All the lessons about who you are, the highs and the lows. Unlike stereotypical romance novels, Morwenna (the main heroine) has already been in love. I hate the cliché of this phrase, but she would probably describe her past relationship as the “epic love”. The trouble is, she falls for the wrong guy (typical I know) – I won’t ruin the story for you by telling you precisely what’s wrong with him, but let’s just say he’s her “prince charming” barring a rather insurmountable obstacle. Over the course of the story, Arthur (the main hero) tries to convince Morwenna to open up her heart once more after her past heartache. And maybe she does, or maybe she doesn’t – you’ll just have to read it to find out ;)

- If She Could See - the sequel to my popular Inkitt novel “Just A Moment”. If you haven’t read the first novel, it’s on my Inkitt page (link below) and I’d love it if you could read it/maybe review it. In this novel (which is quite close to being finished), Joe finds himself with some more-than-friends feelings for Hope. Unfortunately for him, Hope meets and begins to date Nathan. When the pair take a weekend away for Joe’s dad’s birthday, Hope realises that her feelings are not so simple as she hoped, and struggles with the idea of risking her friendship/partnership with Joe. [When I wrote “Just A Moment”, I had a lot of feedback around Hope and Joe’s relationship and whether it would turn romantic, so this novel is an exploration of all those questions I received at the time - I hope you like the answers ;) ]

- Murder at the Opera/ Dark Shadows - these are the third and fourth books in my Serena Blackwood murder mystery series (the first of which, The Past Never Dies, is being published in paperback very soon!). I’ve written Dark Shadows (book 3) already, but I’m currently in the process of a major edit/rewrite; there are many elements of the plot I’m not exactly happy with. Murder at the Opera is still a major work in process, but I think it’s a good mystery which will be worth all the time.

- Laura and Nico - I decided when I had the idea for this novel a while back that although it’s not one of my usual genres, I could have a go at a supernatural kind of novel. It’s proved a lot harder than I thought, given the fact there’s a lot of lore and myth surrounding the supernatural races and before constructing a plot, you have to settle on which mythology you’re going to use as a framework for your novel. The prose of the novel is coming along steadily (even thought I don’t yet have a title for the novel) but I’ve still got a few mythology loops to work through.

If there are any of those novels you’re excited to read, comment down below and I’ll send you an extract :)

I hope you enjoyed my “meet the book blogger” post. I like to think it shows you why I’ve chosen to make this change in my content and demonstrates that there’s no such thing as a “born-writer”. I fell into writing naturally, and now I can’t imagine a version of myself that doesn’t write. It’s my favourite form of expression and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

And as for reading, well…

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. The man who never reads lives only one.”

- G. R. R. Martin

#roxyelle #bookstagrammer #bookblogger #readingandwriting