Angela Moor

I was an accident prone, day-dreamy child, the youngest of a large family from the north of England. Spending most of my childhood in the countryside - moving to a city came as a considerable shock. I hid myself in books and read voraciously. It's a cliché I know, but like many authors I wanted to write almost as soon as I could write. I won a prize for an essay at school and encouraged by a great teacher, who I mention in my first published novel 'Reflections of the old past', I continued to scribble: poems, short stories, anything with words, thankfully few of which have survived.

I wrote my first novel in 1989, a period drama, "Of a finer ruth" (one of these days I'll explain why my titles are so obscure) as yet unpublished; hopefully in 2017. I even got an agent. Whilst at the University of Texas in Austin Texas USA for five months pursuing my day job, I was introduced to Cheryl a Literary Agent from LA who could have walked out of the script for Dynasty or Dallas with her 'big' hair and shoulder pads. She liked my book and signed my up immediately; I couldn't believe my luck. However, back in London (prior to the internet boom) long distance relationships were fraught with problems and then with as much melodrama as those TV scripts the Agency folded and my book got lost in the shuffle.

I was disappointed but didn't pursue it. I am fortunate to have had and still have an interesting and challenging career working with historic books, manuscripts and photographs, which was all consuming, however, I kept writing. I write for pleasure, some people paint, dance, run marathons me I write. Even if I didn’t publish I would still write. My blog https://loveslanguage.wordpress.com is me trying different scenarios, genre and styles it’s a great discipline and learning ground. I have three partially written novels, including a sequel to ‘Reflections of the old past’ , and a number of scenarios which I am determined to get around to finishing one of these days. I still love to read and listen to authors talking about their work.

The seed for 'Reflections of the old past' germinated when away for a weekend in the country. It poured with rain, night and day. I hadn't brought a book so I devoured the papers and read an article about J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown. So 'Reflections of the old past' is a kind of ‘homage’ to their amazing imagination but in a very different genre. It's another cliché but 'Reflections of the old past' almost wrote itself, I loved every minute, not just building the story lines and the characters but polishing and editing each sentence and word.

A broken fifth metatarsal in the south of France led to my latest book, ‘Red Sky at Dawning: The Time Oak’. Sitting in the garden watching the sun go down the play of silver, lilac and peach light descending on the rough bark of the tree trunks conjured a picture which couldn’t wait to be written down.

It was another newspaper article that prompted me to publish on Kdp and I realized that this was an opportunity to let my writings go. Sometimes we have to let our children stand or fall on their own merits.