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Love Me Tender
1. I have perennial wanderlust and am always open to the idea of moving to a new country to put down temporary roots. From the age of twenty-four, when I left the UK for the first time, my nomadic life has led me to the following places: South Africa, Gozo (Malta), France and now Spain, where I am currently living in a delightful village overlooking the Mediterranean. My daughter once pointed out to me that other people just go on holiday without feeling the need to up sticks and relocate!
2. As a result of my country hopping, I have attempted to learn several languages. With varying degrees of failure, I’ve tried to get my tongue round Afrikaans, Italian, Gozitan and French. I am now subjecting anyone I can pin in a corner to my appalling mangling of Spanish. Fortunately, Spanish people are very kind, but there have been many looks of consternation while they try to decipher my words.
3. I was in an abusive relationship for many years, but finally escaped and trained to be a counsellor in a women’s refuge. I incorporated some of my own experiences into the first D.I. Sterling novel. I found it very therapeutic.
4. I am a very slow but dogged runner and try to cover five kilometres five times a week. My partner convinced me (I have no idea how) that I could (and should) attempt a marathon. My brain heard my mouth agreeing to give it a go and almost shut down in shock! I haven’t yet managed the marathon, but in December 2020 I proudly completed a half marathon two weeks before my sixty-sixth birthday.
5. Although I am now a hard-boiled crime writer, I started out writing for children. Vlad the Inhaler – Hero in the Making gave me the opportunity to use lots of dark humour that would appeal not only to children, but also the adults who read with them. Vlad is a ‘hupyre’ (half human and half vampire). He’s eleven, asthmatic, vegetarian, scared of the dark and can’t turn into a bat, but it’s up to him to save the inhabitants of Malign Village.
6. I rarely write poetry, but in 2007 I won the humour category of The Petra Kenney International Poetry Awards with Menopausal Musings. At the time I was wildly veering between floating on clouds of euphoria and wanting to kill anyone who looked at me.
7. I have a faulty internal compass, which is out by 180 degrees. If I should turn left, I will instinctively turn right. If we go away for the weekend, my partner takes great joy in asking me to point in the direction I believe the hotel to be located. He never tires of seeing me point in the exact opposite direction. As he frequently tells people, I am the only person he knows who could get lost by going the wrong way on a straight road!
AUTHOR BIO
Born and raised in South East London, Lorraine lived and worked in South Africa, on the Island of Gozo and in France before settling on the Costa del Sol in Spain. She lives with her partner in a traditional Spanish village inland from the coast and enjoys sampling the regional dishes and ever-changing tapas in the local bars. Her knowledge of Spanish is expanding. To stop her waistline from doing the same, she runs five times a week.
When not working on the D.I. Sterling series of crime novels, Lorraine is engaged in many writing-related activities. She is a columnist for both Writing Magazine and Writers’ Forum and is head judge for Writers’ Forum monthly fiction competitions.
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