Photo Interview: Helena Fairfax

EQ: Welcome to EQ! Tell us a little bit about yourself!

Helena: Thanks for having me, Exquisite Quills!

I write contemporary romances, and that’s the genre I love to read, too. I live in the north of England, close to the Yorkshire moors, the home of the Brontë sisters. Every day I walk the moors with my rescue dog, taking in the wildlife and the changing seasons. It’s a wonderful location for finding romantic inspiration - and for dreaming up my next hero!

EQ: Tell us a little bit about your most recent release.

Helena: My most recent release is The Antique Love, which is set around London’s oldest park, in Richmond-on-Thames. Here’s the blurb:

One rainy day in London, Wyoming man Kurt Bold walks into an antique shop off the King’s Road and straight into the dreams of its owner, Penny Rosas. Kurt certainly looks every inch the hero…but he soon brings Penny’s dreams to earth with a thump. His job is in the City, in the logical world of finance – and as far as Kurt is concerned, romance is just for dreamers.

But when Kurt hires Penny to help refurbish his Victorian house near Richmond Park, it’s not long before he starts to realise it’s not just his home she’s breathing life into. The logical heart he has guarded so carefully all these years is opening up to new emotions, in a most disturbing way…

My next novel is called A Way from Heart to Heart, and is due for release on 14^th December.

Photo One. Richmond Park in London is the setting for The Antique Love. There’s a great sense of history behind this setting.  It’s a Royal Park, and the oldest green space in London. I chose this location because my heroine, Penny, is an antique dealer.  She loves to immerse herself in the past, and to picture how the people and places must have been in those days.

My hero, Kurt, is from Wyoming, and misses the space and the great outdoors. Richmond Park is the perfect place for the two of them to get to know one another!

If you’d like to know more about this wonderful park, and some more photos, I have some more about its history here on my blog: http://helenafairfax.com/2013/08/16/richmond-park-incorporating-setting-in-the-theme-of-your-novel/

Photo Two. These are the Yorkshire moors, near where I live in the north of England, and where I walk every day. You can see from the photo what a beautiful place it can be. I took this photo in the summer. In the winter, the moors are bleak and harsh, but I love the dramatic landscape, which features so strongly in Wuthering Heights.

I’ve made the moors part of the setting for my next novel, A Way from Heart to Heart, which will be released in December. The heroine takes a group of disadvantaged teenage girls from London on a trip there. It was fun to write the location from their eyes, and it makes a dramatic backdrop to the hero and heroine’s growing relationship.

 

Photo Three. If I didn’t live near the moors, I’d love to live on the coast in England. I usually spend Christmas on the south coast, and this photo is of my step-daughter, walking along the Cobb in Lyme Regis, Dorset. The Cobb is a wall that protects the harbour, and it features in the film The French Lieutenant’s Woman, where Meryl Streep stares dramatically out to sea, and also plays a big part in one of the scenes in Jane Austen’s Persuasion – one of my favourite books of all time!

The seaside is the perfect setting for a romance, and I have a few ideas for stories going around in my mind that I’d really like to explore.

Photo Four. This is how I write, and this is my rescue dog, Lex. My constant companion whilst I’m writing and dreaming up stories, and my greatest fan :)

I hope you liked my photos. If you’re interested in seeing more, or finding out more about me and my books, please check out my blog at www.helenafairfax.com; or you can like my Facebook page, where I post lots of pictures of the moors throughout the seasons, https://www.facebook.com/HelenaFairfax; or else follow me on Twitter https://twitter.com/HelenaFairfax

I love to meet new people!

Thanks so much for having me on the EQ blog. It’s been a real pleasure sharing my photos!

The Genesis of a Book - The Silk Romance by Helena Fairfax

Guest author Helena Fairfax shares the creative spark that inspired her novel: The Silk Romance.

When I was a student I spent an unforgettable few months working as an au pair in Lyon, France. It was one of the happiest and most romantic times of my life. How different this hot and vibrant city was to the bleak English town I came from. Everything seemed to me intensely colourful: the two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône, gliding through the city; the market stalls with their exotic fruits; the cypress trees; the street cafés and the night-life. It was an intense experience, which stayed with me long after I left France.

When I came to write my first novel, The Silk Romance, I knew Lyon had to be the setting. And it was easy to picture my French hero. As an au pair I lived with my family, in a centuries old stone building overlooking the old town. In the apartment above mine, on the top floor, lived the most gorgeous man ever. Tall, tanned, with piercing blue eyes, a devastating smile and a confident way of talking to me whenever we bumped into each other on the shadowy stone stairs. Sadly, my handsome crush was already engaged to be married, and so my teenage longing remained from afar! Years later I brought my romantic Frenchman to life in the form of Jean-Luc, the hero of The Silk Romance.

As for the glamorous silk industry, which also plays a large part in my story, many years after I left France I took a job in a woollen mill in northern England. The weaving industry once played a major role in both my home town and Lyon, but is now sadly a dying trade. I thought it would be wonderful to revive Lyon’s once thriving silk industry, and so I made my hero the owner of one of the city’s few remaining silk mills, producing fabulous textiles for opera houses, theatres and fashionable people around the world.

As for my heroine, Sophie is exactly the type of female character I like to write, and to read about. A young woman who is self-reliant, who has seen her share of tragedy in this life, who is compassionate, but not afraid of letting the hero know exactly what she thinks.

I wasn’t very confident when I released my first novel on the world, but reviews so far have been great, ranging from ‘charming romance, and utterly delightful’ to one I particularly loved, which read ‘a cross between Pride and Prejudice and Cinderella, which is awesome.’

I had a lot of fun recreating my romantic time in Lyon, and I was sorry to say au revoir to my characters when I put down my pen!

Blurb:
Sophie Challoner has made her mother a sacred promise, and not even Jean-Luc Olivier can prevent her keeping it. On the night Sophie’s French grandmother throws a glittering party for her in Paris, Jean-Luc sweeps her off her feet, momentarily making her forget the promise she has made. The night she spends with Jean-Luc seems to Sophie like a fairy tale – a glamorous story, without the happy ending. Like a modern-day Cinderella Sophie runs away in the morning, afraid of the hold the Frenchman has over her.

Safely back home with her father and brother in London, Sophie tries her best to forget the encounter, but fate and Jean-Luc have other plans. He organises a student placement Sophie can’t refuse, and so, unwillingly, she finds herself back in France, working for Jean-Luc in the silk mill he now owns.

Thrown together for a few short weeks in Lyon, the romantic city of silk, their mutual love begins to grow. But it seems the fates are conspiring against Sophie’s happiness. Jean-Luc has secrets of his own. Then, when disaster strikes at home in London, Sophie is faced with a choice—stay in this glamorous world with the man she loves, or return to her family to keep the sacred promise she made her mother.


Links:

Website www.helenafairfax.com

Amazon http://www.amazon.com/The-Silk-Romance-ebook/dp/B00CYHVI1W/

Kobo http://store.kobobooks.com/en-gb/books/The-Silk-Romance/uPFeJzgxPEeI3shyPI-Mlg

Nook http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-silk-romance-helena-fairfax/1115399160