Anna Jones Buttimore

I love writing. I have only recently come to realise quite how much I love it, and quite how grateful I am that writing is my talent. I used to envy those people who could sing beautifully, or who were musically gifted. If I could sing and play the piano, my party piece would be singing "My Melancholy Blues" by Queen, a beautiful and haunting tune. But I can't sing. Well, not well. My friend, who never says a bad word about anyone and is musically gifted, charitably says I have a good choir voice. In other words, it might sound OK if 100 others were singing along with me to drown me out. I can't dance either. I did ballet as a child but gave up because I didn't like all the French words and was sure I'd never learn them. Languages, you see, are something else I'm not good at. It took mew 17 years of living in Wales to get any kind of fluency in Welsh. I have some artistic ability, but I think artistic ability is something that can be learned to a certain ...

My last post on the V-Formation blog ( www.vformation.blogspot.com ) created quite a bit of controversy, but having now read almost all the Twilight saga, I stand by what I said. They inspire me. Stephenie Meyer, in turn, was inspired (appropriately) by Muse and various other rock bands. I haven't got into Muse yet; I suspect they may be a bit grungy and emo for my tastes. This got me thinking about what inspires us. My books have come from various sources, but strangely, rarely my own head. Haven was suggested to me by my editor at Covenant, Valerie Holladay, who asked for a book set in Wales with a variety of different characters. A B&B was the obvious solution. A World Away was the sequel to Haven. I had never intended writing a sequel, but publishers like sequels to successful books by new authors; apparently they establish the name and the market. Christmas at Haven (as yet unpublished) is the third in the trilogy. More of the same, but with a difference in that Haven bu...