**AUTHOR POST** SJI Holliday
It is my honour to welcome SJI Holliday to my blog today! Susi has written a trilogy set in Banktoun, each focuses on a different murder although there are also several threads running across the whole series as well.
Black Wood and Willow Walk are available to buy now and The Damselfly publishes on 2nd February 2017 by Black and White Publishing.
Today Susi is treating us to a guest post about her writing and the setting for her fictional Banktoun series. Thanks so much Susi!
BANKTOUN
When the Setting Takes on a Life of its Own
When I
started writing my first book, Black Wood,
I already ideas for another two books to be set in the same small town: Banktoun. Three would be just right, I
thought. You can’t kill off too many people in a small town unless you’re
writing a series of Midsomer Murders!
I call
Banktoun a fictional town, because I’ve taken a few liberties with the street
names, cut off a chunk on the other side of the river to make it smaller and
changed a few other things about, but it’s not really 100% fictional. It’s
based on the small town where I grew up – about 15 miles south east of
Edinburgh. I lived there until I left to go to university, and I worked in my
dad’s shop from a young age, followed by our family pub and B&B – so I got
to know a lot of interesting characters! In a town like this, there are always
deep-rooted family secrets. People tend to know each other’s business, and
there’s not much you can do to escape that – especially if you work in one of
the town’s busiest pubs! I loved growing up there. I loved the feeling of
community, the quirkiness of some of the people who lived there, the gossip… But
it was suffocating too, and I left to seek out the bright lights of a big city
(but I go back several times a year, and I still love it!).
By setting
my first three books in this version of my own town, I was able to explore the
secrets and lies of the community as I imagined them – taking snippets of real
life events and mashing them up in my imagination. In Black Wood, a face from the past comes back
to haunt an already damaged girl; in Willow
Walk, the fair comes to town, and with it brings an undercurrent of unease,
a stalker, and the horrors of herbal highs; and in The Damselfly, a young girl is murdered,
whipping the town into a frenzy and leaving it bruised and damaged once more. I
always thought that Banktoun had a shelf-life. A trilogy meant there would be
enough time to develop the main character, Davie Gray (who was never even meant
to exist, when I started writing the first book!) – but now I’m not so sure.
It’s not just Davie. It’s the whole town, and the people who live there, and
all the offshoots of them and their lives. So maybe three books aren’t enough,
after all.
I might just
have to write about Banktoun again.
*
* *
Thanks so much Susi! It's so interesting to hear about the inspiration behind Banktoun! I for one (but I am certainly not alone) am hoping that Banktoun does not just stop at a trilogy!
To read my reviews of Susi's books please click on the links below:
Susi will be appearing at Criminally Good Books on the 18th Jan 2017 (which is part of Bibliomaniac's Book Club) so please stay tuned to this blog to read more from the criminally good authors. To find out more about the Bibliomaniac's Book Club please click here:
S.J.I. (Susi) Holliday grew up
in Haddington, East Lothian. She spent many years working in her family’s
newsagent and pub before escaping to St Andrews, Dundee and Edinburgh to study
microbiology and statistics. She has worked as a statistician in the
pharmaceutical industry for over sixteen years, but it was on a six-month
round-the-world-trip that she took with her husband in 2006 that she
rediscovered her passion for writing. After abandoning her first attempt at a
paranormal thriller, she wrote hundreds of crime and horror short stories
before finally sitting down to write the book she was always meant to write.
Based on a true-life creepy event, Black
Wood is the first of a loosely-linked series set in the fictional town of
Banktoun. She lives in London, except when the magnetic pull of Scotland
attracts her back, and she can usually be found in cafes, pubs, hanging around
at book festivals and on Facebook and Twitter (@SJIHolliday). For more information please visit her website: http://www.sjiholliday.com
For more reviews, recommendations, author interviews and Bibliomaniac's Book Club material please follow me on Twitter @katherinesunde3 or sign up on this blogsite to receive future posts via email.
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