I’ve always been a storyteller, ask anyone that’s ever heard me tell them what I had for breakfast. It wasn’t until 2013 that I started writing down the stories in my head.

My first book was Love is a Fire and it was published May 2014.

Well, I was brainstorming with my friend, Dawn, about a Christmas story which led to The King and the Pawn. As I started writing Frankie’s story, her brother and sisters were introduced and I knew they each had to have their own stories as well.

Frankie is definitely like me. We’re both loud, independent, and tell it like it is!

Schooldays.

“The Torch”

In 2011 when American Seal Team Six hunted down and killed Osama bin Laden on presidential orders in Operation Neptune Spear in Abbadabad, Pakistan it was the final act in an ultra-secret CIA operation hailed by US president Barrack Obama as a huge success and was seen as the crowning achievement of his presidency. Yet according to Brigadier Shaukat Qadir who investigated Operation Neptune Spear for the Pakistan government, this was only achieved through Bin Laden’s betrayal by Al Qaeda itself, which, by completely deceiving the CIA, received the $25,000,000 cash bounty America had placed on their ailing leader’s head.

I’ve loved writing since I was a little girl. I didn’t just enjoy writing stories at school – I was always writing them at home too, letting my imagination run riot. When I became a journalist for my ‘day job’ it was like I wasn’t working at all because I enjoyed it so much. And then a friend of mine in the UK (also a journalist) got a two-book deal with a major publisher from out of nowhere and that made me think: “I wonder if I could do that too?” And so I started to write my first novel…

Lover in Law was my first published novel and actually, at the moment in both the US and the UK it’s still my bestselling book! I’m hoping that my current release A Call to Heaven will do better still, because this one is definitely the one that’s most special to me.

My mother (who sadly died way too young) came to me in a dream a couple of years ago. In that dream she gave me the premise for A Call to Heaven as well as its title. It was the most brilliant and inspiring way to come up with an idea and I really hope I’ve done my Mom proud.

I identify with the lead female character Amy in this book, but she really isn’t anything like me. How we’re similar is in our love for our lost mothers and how we’d do anything to be able to speak to them again. Amy’s also a great mom and I like to think that I am too. After that, Amy’s nothing like me. She married a man so odious that I don’t think I could have stayed with him. She’s also a great cook whilst I, by contrast, am woefully incompetent in the kitchen!

I started as a child telling stories to my younger sister. I remember staying up late at night with her, weaving tales of princesses and fairies. Then, as I matured, my stories evolved to include other subjects. I worked as a training manager in a corporation for twenty years, and often created stories (situational scenarios) to include in part of my classes. In my thirties, I had a hysterectomy and was homebound for six weeks. To help pass the time, I started writing my first novel. I haven’t stopped writing since.

My first story published was a short story for True Romance Magazine called The Princess Dress. Turns out, the stories in the magazine aren’t exactly true. LOL. But I was so ticked seeing my story in print. I ended up writing several stories for the magazine before contracting with a publishing house.

Fifty Shades of Grey. I have friends who are deep into the BDSM lifestyle (I am not.) When Fifty Shades came out, I overheard many conversations about how the book wasn’t quite accurate. As someone who isn’t in the lifestyle, I wondered what it would be like for two characters who also know little about the lifestyle to dip a toe into that world. One character, my hero, would be a stripper whose stage name is The Dom. My heroine would read erotic books and trying a little BDSM might be something she really wants to do. But I also wanted to educate the readers, just a bit, on what the lifestyle is about. I had several of my friends give me guidance regarding that education. In the end, I think the lack of knowledge/experience of my hero/heroine and the education they receive, made Unmasked Secrets a fun, great read.

Hannah Armstrong is the most like me. She’s a high school principal (something I actually went to college and got a Master’s degree to do), and she’s a bit of a type-A personality. She’s organized, proficient, smart and determined – all traits that I identify with, though I’m not as organized as I used to be.

Since I was a little girl, I’ve always dreamt of writing love stories. That was my only possible destiny. But never would I have dared imagine that I would spend so much of my time so close to the place where the most famous love story of all time unfolded. Every morning, at dawn, I walk by the gate and look at the bronze statue of Juliet, then gaze at her balcony, thinking that love really has no limits.

The atmosphere in Verona during San Valentino is absolutely unique. Verona is among the most visited European cities during the days of the “Verona in Love” festival, when it truly breathes happiness. It’s amazing to see all the people in love, smiling, it’s something that stays with you for a lifetime.

I’d tell them what I’ve told myself throughout my whole life. Love can bring you many shadows, and lead you to very dark places, but you have to keep on shining. This is why I enjoy dressing in bright clothes so I can shine!

I don’t really worry that much about what my readers think of my novels. Of course, it’s very gratifying when they write to me to say that they spent the whole night reading my novel, unable to put it down. However, I feel my destiny is not to sit around waiting for people to judge my writing, but to keep building something greater instead.

This will actually become a reality on Valentine’s Day in Italy since the “Verona in Love” Festival will be gifting novels by Sarah Mathilde Callaway to some of its thousands of international visitors. The English version of The Tulip Garden will be released in paperback on that day, so it will be the perfect gift: like a delicate flower, but passionate, thoughtful and bright, like the book’s cover. The day the English translator received my novel, she also got a bouquet of tulips as a present from a friend. Her friend knew nothing about my book so my translator saw this as destiny.

From the time I was eight years old, I loved telling stories.

To My Senses, Book 1 in The Nicci Beauvoir series was my first published book.

I love ghost stories and it is one of my favorite genres, that this was a series with a ghost seeking redemption intrigued me.

First, I want to thank you for hosting me today.

I’ve always made up stories in my head, but I didn’t start writing seriously until later in life when I went back to school to do a science degree. My course load was heavy, and I was managing a household with 3 young kids. To lighten the load, I took a course on creative writing. Small class sizes and the professor read beautiful prose to us. I fell in love with storytelling.

I ended up doing a minor in professional writing and when I finished my degree, I missed writing classes so much, I found a correspondence course to take with a college in the states. From there, I realized this is my passion and I am forever hooked!

My first novel was a romance published by Crimson Romance. Love of Her Lives was the first book in The Magical Matchmaker series.

One day I watched Dave, my cat, drinking from the pond in my garden. The goldfish seemed fascinated by this intrusion into their world, but there was no way they understood Dave was a cat on planet Earth just inches from their world. As Dave lapped water, the fish hovered just under his nose, his tongue, his teeth. Lucky for them, he wasn’t hungry.

The fish made me wonder about perception. A story idea started to percolate that became the premise for the series. What if there was another world just one step away that we don’t perceive?

In Trick Me Once, Aiden MacAuley returns to Earth after being trapped in Alfheim, an Elvin world, for over a century. The gateway between Earth and Alfheim is guarded by the MacAuley clan, and like the fish in the pond, Alfheim is only a step away. Unfortunately, it was a step Aiden couldn’t take until the story begins.

I wanted to pair Aiden (born in the nineteen hundreds) with a contemporary woman who would never believe in elves.

I think on some level, I was always interested in telling stories, or being a part of them. I started actor training when I was 12, and did that all through high school and it started as my major in college. But by the time I went to uni, I had found some young success as a playwright and really loved creating characters and telling stories. I think that was the pivot point, so at age 17.

My first published work was one of my plays, when I was in college. After that, it was Hell’s Belle. I took a professional detour as a magazine writer/editor and then entertainment publicist.

It’s the third book in the Hell’s Belle series, so Hell’s Belle (book 1) and Tainted Blood (book 2) for sure! Otherwise, I think the driving force behind the books is figuring out what makes a family, that it’s not about blood relatives, but about the people you gravitate towards over the course of your life who become the people you rely on the most. It’s also about living in the gray zone. So much of life is presented to us as a dichotomy: black and white, good and evil. The shades of gray are important. Can you be a good person but still drain the blood from someone’s body? And, how do you rectify that in your mind?

When I was a little girl, I was a rather shy, quiet girl who went unnoticed by my peers and teachers. I was never disruptive, but I never shined or stood out either. I was invisible, and I accepted my invisibility. When I was in the 6th grade we had to write about a time in our lives when we felt challenged and explain how we got through it. I wrote about my parents’ divorce and how I coped. This was a controversial topic back then, as there were very few kids with divorced parents. My teacher, Mrs. Stockman, loved it and she had me read it in front of the class. I can still remember how my feet stuck like glue to the floor in front of the podium where I had never been asked to stand because I had never done anything worthy of standing at the front of the class. I talked about hearing my parents argue, missing my dad, and wishing that the divorce was just a bad dream. At the end of it, everyone was looking at me, seemingly mesmerized by my words. Even the noisy boy in the back corner next to whom the teacher sat me every year was watching me and listening. I wasn’t an athlete. I wasn’t popular. Boys were not interested in me. And I had never had a lot friends. But somehow my silly words had gotten everyone’s attention. I was noticed. It was a terrifyingly exhilarating moment. I didn’t understand it at that time, but looking back that was a moment when I realized that I wasn’t just scribbles on the page. I could affect other people with it, if I used it.

Back in 2009 an online magazine, Mamazine.com, published a piece I had written about the day I found out my husband had cancer. It explored the sad and gritty emotions that plagued me as I digested the news – all while diapering my six-week-old son and my twenty-month-old daughter. I had always kept my writing to myself, so seeing it in on the internet was as frightening as the day I read my sixth-grade essay to the class. I felt like the whole world was watching. I received kind-hearted responses, but they were more about my difficult situation than about my writing. I savored the first step towards admitting out loud that I was a writer, but I knew that my heart lay in telling other people’s stories, rather than my own.

While putting my daughter to bed one night, I read the tale of Rumpelstiltskin from the yellowed pages of my childhood book. The first page’s illustration showed a demur girl bowing her head dutifully before a king who pointed his jeweled finger at her and, as the story goes, ordered her to spin a whole room full of hay into gold - all because the girl’s father had bragged that his daughter could turn anything she touched into gold. While she was left alone to cry over the futility of her task, a little man with magic showed up and said he would help her if she promised to give him her first born child.

After I put my daughter to bed, I kept thinking about this poor girl in the story who had been cornered and tricked by every man she came across in her life: Father, King (eventual husband), and magical little man. Every feminist bone in my body was annoyed, and I found myself imagining all the comebacks I would have said to these men if I were her. You know, the kind of stinging rebuttals you always think about after the argument is over.

Like an itch in my brain that I couldn’t quite reach, this girl’s predicament kept nagging at me until I got out of bed at 5:30 the next morning and snuck past my two little kids’ bedrooms and out the door to a coffee shop with my laptop under my arm. I spent every Saturday and Sunday morning getting up at the same un-Godly hour to drink coffee and figure out what really happened to this girl until the last page was written and rewritten and rewritten again and again.

My wife and I’s first cruise was our honeymoon back in 2005. We were instantly hooked and have never looked back. After our fifth cruise, we discussed making notes/diaries of our cruises for our own memories. I started thinking about taking this a stage further and soon I was thinking about plots and characters!

Surprise Sailaway, the first book in the Sailaway Trilogy.

Amazon; Author's Website

I had thought about a Sailaway trilogy at the outset & was keen to develop the story further after I wrote Surprise Sailaway. This book follows on from the first one with a bigger book, longer cruise, more characters and a bigger adventure.

Most like – Gavin (Sarah and Megan’s uncle): Business Professional with a witty sense of humour and who knows who the boss is between his wife and himself! Least like – George (Youngest brother): ‘Street-wise’ and confident, but sometimes ‘cocky’.

Megan is looking for a relaxing afternoon sunbathing and meets Rebecca who she has befriended. As two brothers watch from the bar, Rebecca is visited by 3 other characters with their own separate agendas.

I’ve always been scribbling, ever since I was old enough to hold a crayon. I didn’t believe, until a few years ago, that other people would want to read what I wrote. It’s incredibly exciting to hear from folks who’ve enjoyed the stories I tell.

The first book I wrote was an urban fantasy, EMBERS, through Pocket Books in 2010. It could be summed up as “Ghostbusters in Detroit with dragons and arson.” Since then, I’ve written in both contemporary fantasy and YA, but always about the monsters hiding under the stairs.

Several years ago, my husband and I took a trip to the Yellowstone area of Wyoming. The landscape was larger-than-life and perfectly magical…I knew I had to write a story in the vein of a contemporary weird western. Once I started asking the questions, the story came quickly: What if an alchemist founded a town here a century and a half ago? What happened to his failed experiments? What creatures might still lurk in the shadows?

I’m an actor by trade, so writing was just a natural extension of that love of storytelling. My direct interest in writing came from seeking an outlet where I could choose which story I wanted to tell. The chance to create characters from nothing instead of building upon what is already in a script was too in alluring to resist.

The Tethering—a young adult Urban Fantasy novel—was published in 2014.

The original appeal was in blending genres. I didn’t want to write a straight dystopian or sci-fi. I wanted to play with vampires, but not the supernatural world that goes with them. Finding the niche I wanted to explore made the world of Girl of Glass. Once I knew what landscape I wanted to work in, I knew that I didn’t want to look at the end of the world from the bottom up, but rather from the upper 1% down. What would it be like to know that you’re safe and secure but that the people through your window are suffering? If you see them in need, what would you do to help them? How long would your conscience let you watch people die before you needed to do something, anything, to help?

Since I was young, I’ve fallen in love with fantasy stories; books like ‘The Enchanted Forest’ by Enid Blyton had me wishing I could be a part of their adventures and meet characters such as Silky and Moonface. Then, when I moved on to C.S.Lewis, I tried so many times to get my wardrobe to transport me to Narnia and wanted to be a part of that world! With so many stories out there set in mystical lands, I spent a lot of my free time day-dreaming of journeying to these other-worldly places; I just loved the idea that maybe there was something else out there and wondered what it would be like to find out you were the special one chosen to go save another world or were more than just human. That’s what first inspired me to become a writer and create my very own mystical worlds.

The book I’m on this tour with, Enlightenment, (#1 in the Driel Trilogy), a Young Adult Fantasy Romance. Without giving too much away, the story revolves around a girl called Thea who gets thrown into the unknown realm of Faey. Here she is forced to determine the difference between reality and fantasy, in a world ruled by a dark elite and a society wracked by intolerance and prejudice. On this journey, she has the support of her new friends to help her as well as a mysterious dark haired, blue-eyed guardian who watches her every move.

I’ve always loved reading especially the paranormal and fantasy genres, and with so many talented authors out there, over the years they have helped provide inspiration for my own story. I also have a vivid imagination which helps!

I’d say that my personality is similar to Thea’s, the protagonist in the story. Her determination to face what’s thrown at her head-on, and to fight for what you believe in, are ideals I totally agree with.

I knew in 5th grade I wanted to be a writer. It wasn’t until 2002/2003 that I sat down and did it.

Norse Jewel, a Viking romance in 2013

The book is two stories in one. The Proper Care and Feeding of a Broken Heart came from a brothel I’d heard about in my old hometown of San Diego and some of the escapades I’d heard.

Anything But Safe was inspired by an intersection of an Alicia Rasley workshop and a chance encounter in a parking lot years ago.

My interest in stories is lifelong– I think this is so for all of us, part of the human condition if you will. If someone says to us “I want to tell you a story,” we pay immediate attention. We are curious by nature. All of us have a story to tell, some of us have many. To me they are all part of the same story – the story of the journey we all share. This story has many chapters, many paragraphs, many twists and turns in the plot line. But all of it serves to document who we are, where we have come from and where we are going.

In the last century I wrote for business. But even back then the books I wrote incorporated stories and attracted readers who saw themselves in those stories and wanted to learn from them. It’s the same with creative writing. We are all drawn to stories in which we can see ourselves – in which we can relate to the characters. The stories that attract us most are those we identify with – where we can position ourselves, as it were, in the story. In this way, each reader makes the story their own story.

My first published creative book was If It Wasn’t For That Dog, the story of my first year with my Hearing Dog, Matt (so yes, I’m deaf). Published in 2008, the book still sells well and is now entering its second edition. The late Sir Anthony Jay (writer of Yes Minister) described it as a ‘hugely enjoyable true life story of how an assistance dog changed a life.’ Bruce Fogle MBE described it as ‘a humorous and heartfelt chronicle about two individuals learning to dance together in perfect harmony.’ I think those two quotes aptly sum up the book.

Goblin Child evolved slowly over 15 years. It’s a short story collection and even I didn’t fully understand the link between the stories while I was writing them – not until the book was drawn together by the final story in the collection – Circling The Moon. Circling the Moon is a story of interracial love in a racist age. Set partly in Antigua, the inspiration came when I was on the island in 2007. Positioned as the Swansong of a dying poet, The Goblin Child is his collected stories looking back over the journey that has been his life.