New Books by Johanna Neild

In real life, I’m a wife, mother, sister, daughter, grandmother. I work full-time, and I’ve just completed six years of part-time study with the Open University which earned me a First-class Honours degree in English Literature with Creative Writing. I love writing, reading, Doctor Who, photography, and chocolate (not necessarily in that order). My love for my husband and family comes before all else.

I began writing for pleasure around the age of ten, when a beloved English teacher introduced us to the concept of Creative Writing, which was added to the school curriculum at that time. By my early teens I was spending most evenings writing at the dining room table while the rest of my family watched TV. I wrote short pieces of prose, poetry, short stories, and what would today be recognised as fanfiction, but I never shared my work with anyone other than a school-friend with an interest in one of my ‘Bonanza’ stories.

I began writing my first novel in my mid-twenties. My battered typewriter – a mid-teen birthday present – was in storage at that time, so I wrote it long-hand in a series of cheap exercise books. After I’d finished it, I made several attempts to type it out, and to edit it, and much later to update it as well, but for the most part it has languished in a box file marked ‘Novel’ ever since. It has a title – “Lost and Found” – and I’m still quite proud of having written it, but I doubt it will see the light of day again. I’ve continued to write, though, and I’ve started several other projects in recent years, but they remain incomplete. Life has a tendency to get in the way, and my life has provided enough interruptions and distractions to provide material for a novel in itself.

“New Beginnings” is the first of three books that began to take shape during 2008/9. The trilogy is entitled “Mine, Yours, Ours” and ideally I’d love to publish it as one very long story, but for now it’s divided into three separate volumes. The idea for it came out of nowhere. A song, a snippet of dialogue, and some observed events were the catalyst, but then Tasha just seemed to take over my mind and wrote herself, and her blog, through me. Once we’d written a few entries of her blog, I sent her off shopping and sat down and thought about this new world that she’d opened up to me, and I wrote out a time-line and plan for the whole story. Somewhere around the middle of part two, Tasha wrenched control from me and the story ended up in a completely different place from that which I’d envisaged. I wasn’t at all happy, but I feel it makes better material for a novel.

Because I’m still unhappy with the way that “Mine, Yours, Ours” comes to an end, I have since started work on parts four and five. One is a sequel, the other is more or less the same story but from a different point of view. These people just won’t get out of my head!

Writing is, and always has been, a joy. Even if no-one reads my work, even if no-one enjoys it, I still enjoy the process and the escapism of emerging myself in new worlds and following these people – the people that I’ve created – along their paths. I hope you do, too.

All three titles in the trilogy – “New Beginnings”, “New Beginnings: Moving On”, and “New Beginnings: Starting Over” – are available in paperback and digital format from Amazon.

Find more information and updates, including details of where else the books are available, on my website: http://www.johannanield.co.uk

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