All the way from Wales . . . Gill Shutt

Author Gill Shutt is a Londoner now living in Wales. She met her husband while working at The Naval College in Dartmouth. Legends of Light, her high fantasy tale written in verse, has been favorably compared to Tolkien. The mother of three, Gill struggles daily with fibromyalgia. In her own words, “Reading and writing take me away from the pain, from the here and now and I can become someone else for a while.” One day, she hopes to retire to the seaside and live in a house where she can hear the sea from her window. Check out her blog, Fog on the Brain.

Welcome to Book Blather, Gill.

                                               

Do you miss London? How did the move to Wales come about?

I left London when I was 11 and moved to the West Country, I missed London then but now I’m not a city person. My husband and I moved here when we took over a local pub for a while, we just never seemed to make it back over the border.

Describe your journey to publication.

 How long have you got? I started with poems in magazines many years ago when my daughter was young then it fizzled out and I wrote for pleasure. I wrote Legends of Light for my niece and tried a few publishers but it’s poetry and fantasy which don’t mix according to most people. Then I decided to send Legends to some Indie publishers and Greyhart Press was my first try… bingo! Tim accepted it straight away and I’ll be getting my third book published by him in the near future.

I can hardly imagine writing an entire book in verse. What an accomplishment! How long did it take you?

 It was surprisingly quick, I don’t know why but my brain, once I click it into verse gear, just seems to take off. Each part was written separately but the first one was written in the car coming back from Essex.

What are you working on now?

 Alien Legends is coming out soon. It’s short stories for younger readers and up, there’s no upper age limit. We may start up a website for children to send in their own legends to go with the book. I’m currently writing an adult fantasy book which also involves a bit of an unsolved mystery from the early 1800’s. I don’t want to give too much away at the moment.

                                         

Any advice for aspiring writers?

 Write, write some more and then put it in a drawer and leave it for a while. Then get it out and look at it again. But whatever you do don’t give up, if writing makes you happy do it even if you can’t get published.