#GuestPost ~ Liz Taylorson writes about A Room of One’s Own @taylorson_liz @rararesources #TuesdayBookBlog

It’s my pleasure today to share Liz Taylorson’s guest post as part of the blog tour organised by Rachel’s Random Resources.

A Room of One’s Own.

The first thing I always want to know about any author is where they do their writing. People have writing rooms in summer houses, attics and converted garages. I have a desk in the corner of what used to be our dining room. Before that, the box room used to be my study, filled with books and clutter, but we decided that we really needed the box room for visitors to sleep in, so the study had to go, and instead my desk could go in the corner of the old dining room. We redecorated the whole space, renamed it “The Library” and painted it in a gorgeous (and very literary) shade of deep red, which adds to the gothic feel of the room. Most of the room is given over to shelving – my husband is a film buff, and so between us, the walls are lined with books and DVDs. He has a very comfortable film viewing chair which doubles as my cosy reading chair for the winter. Trouble is, it’s too cosy, so usually within about five minutes of sitting down there I’m asleep, no matter how engrossing the book is! 

My desk sits in the opposite corner of the room, behind the bookshelves and beside the fireplace. I’ve gone for style over comfort, with a reproduction Victorian kneehole desk, and a surprisingly comfortable Edwardian dining chair. Beside the desk, as you would expect, is a notice board covered in post-it notes which contains the plan of my current work in progress. I have another notice board with fun things and writing prompts behind my desk for inspiration when I start to flag. My desk used to overlook the street, and I spent far too much time looking out of the window. Now it’s less easy to be distracted by ‘to do’ lists!

Let’s look closer at what is in my desk. Firstly, I have a LOT of unused notebooks waiting for the right project. This is quite normal for an author – you have to match the notebook to the project, don’t you? That handmade leather-bound notebook has to be for a historical project, and the one decorated with fabric from a sari should be for a travel book …In addition to the notebooks, I have other stationery quirks. My paperclips are sentimentally kept in a 1960s Gee’s Linctus tin that used to be my dad’s, and at some point one of the children has made them all into a long chain. If I need a paperclip, by the time I’ve levered the old tin open and managed to unhook one from the chain, it would probably have been quicker to walk to the shops and buy some more!

You might notice above my desk there is a rather imposing clock which suits the gothic feel of the room. It looks businesslike, but the ‘bongs’ used to wake up the rest of the family in the night, so the clock hasn’t been wound for 15 years and it’s purely symbolic of the passage of time. Finally, here is Wally Dog, one of my bookends. I’m not sure who added the googly eyes, and how long they were there before I noticed them, but I can’t imagine him without them now. I hope you have enjoyed this tour of my writing space – not exactly ‘a room of one’s own’ more a room that keeps being invaded by family members who clip my paperclips together and bring bags of googly eyes …

Thanks so much for this, Liz.

A simple holiday just got complicated …

Single mum Amy has been struggling since her mother’s death and now her son, Harry, has been accused of bullying schoolmate Oliver — giving Amy’s dictatorial ex-husband yet another reason to criticise her parenting.

All Amy wants is the chance to spend time with her son. Where better to escape all her troubles than camping at the remote but beautiful Lake District farm where she spent idyllic summers with her mother when she was a little girl?

Her tranquil escape seems doomed when Oliver, and his widowed dad, Matt, turn up on the neighbouring pitch — but at Elder Fell Farm, unlikely friendships can be forged. Are Matt and Amy ready to fall in love again? And will their boys bring them together – or drive them apart?

Purchase Links ~ Amazon UK | Amazon US

Liz has always surrounded herself with books. 

As a child, she was always to be found with her head in one and she still has a bookcase full of her childhood favourites to this day. She went on to work in a library cataloguing early printed books – but as most of the books turned out to be volumes of sermons, she wasn’t tempted to read them all! Children interrupted her bibliographic career, and Liz started writing fiction and hasn’t stopped since, joining the Romantic Novelists’ Association New Writers’ Scheme in 2015 to try to learn how to write novels properly.  This led to publication of her first romantic novel, The Little Church by the Sea in late 2017, followed by The Manor on the Moors in 2019.

When Covid struck, Liz was working on a novel set in the 1990s, but sadly research proved difficult when she could no longer access the microfilm readers at the reference library. Instead, she wrote Summer Showers at Elder Fell Farm which relied largely on her own experiences of campervans, campsites and noisy children.

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