Hazel Osmond
I live in Northumberland; I'm married with two teenage daughters and for twenty years I've been an advertising copywriter. I have a clean driving licence, (apart from where I dripped nail varnish on it) and am not yet at that age where I've started to grow a moustache without realising it.
How did I get into writing stories and books? Partly because of a woman's magazine and partly because of a man in a cravat who proposed in my sitting room. The magazine was Woman & Home and I won their short story competition (sponsored by Costa) in 2008, and the man in the cravat was the actor Richard Armitage in Sandy Welch's adaptation of Mrs Gaskell's 'North and South' for the BBC.
Winning the competition gave me confidence; admiring Richard Armitage led me to one website in particular (C19) where I discovered plenty of fanfiction inspired by roles Mr A had
played and had a go at writing one myself.
Forty chapters later, having caught the writing bug, I was encouraged to try my hand at comtemporary fiction. I was following in fine footsteps - to date six others people who had that cravat 'moment' have become published authors - Rosy Thornton, Phillipa Ashley, Elizabeth Hanbury, Elizabeth Ashworth,
Juliet Archer and Georgia Hill.
“Jack shook his head. 'Books. What is it with women and books? My sisters were the same. They were always buying books for boys they fancied.'Ellie bent down and picked up the stone and put it on the table. 'It's like sending a love letter without having to write it yourself,' she said softly.”
“They've read too many of those romances with alpha males striding their way through them. They think that beneath all that granite they're going to find a tender, injured soul crying out for their healing touch. Whereas I see someone whose mother didn't tell him to "make nice" enough when he was little. If he ever was little.”
“Sometimes you have to realise that somebody is not coming back and there will be no happy ending. You don't get the prince, you get the frog. And sometimes after a while the frog doesn't seem so bad and you realise that the prince was not in fact that much of a prince.”