Guest Post by Justine John - Author of Gilding The Lily

Yesterday The Very Pink Notebook hosted the Gilding The Lily blog tour by author Justine John.  Today I am very excited to share a guest post from the author about her inspiration behind the book.

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My Inspiration Behind The Book

By Justine John

Much of the story is based on some things that happened to me during my father’s death which was very sudden.  That process of his illness and death, seemed to put me in a set of circumstances that challenged me greatly.  Organising a funeral in a foreign country is challenging, but because I wasn’t expecting it, I felt as though I was in a dream and the things that happened around me were almost fictional.  It was a coping mechanism I suppose. I came out of that process with a story.

I tried to begin the book too soon – I knew I had to get something out, and I wrote Chapter 1, but couldn’t go any further.  I just didn’t know what to put next.

It wasn’t until I came through the grieving completely, about three years later, that I began to write again.  In 2013, a health issue took over, and a major operation loomed.  I was advised that I would not be able to work for a minimum of eight weeks – probably more like sixteen.  I had begun to resent some of my work projects (life was too short), and I was feeling almost shackled; only a sense of duty, not ‘earning’ a living stopped me from giving up.  But now I was being forced to stop for a while – so stop I did.  In my tracks.  Here it was – my chance to get that story in my head on paper.  So the day I was home from hospital, I began Chapter 2.  And I never looked back.

Amelia, the main character, and I have much in common.  We both come from a divorced parentage, and experienced difficulty and abnormality in our upbringing.  And we both have a massive internal need to please our fathers.  As all good writers do, I took some personal experience and whipped it up with a lot of fiction and made it into what is hopefully a good story.

Now I’ve started I very much want to continue.  I will begin my second Novel in early 2017 and hopefully continue with the same characters but in a different way, using a similar formula.  Hopefully this time it won’t take me so long!