Show notes
T.A. Williams writes highly entertaining, escapist romance and cozy mysteries. that take you to exotic locations without you having to leave your armchair. Great in a time like this.
Hi there. I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and T.A. or Trevor as his friends called him, came very close to getting published in his early twenties. And then he waited 40 years for the chance to come around again. When it did, he grabbed it with both hands and hasn’t looked back since.
This Week’s Giveaway
Our Giveaway this week is another BookSweeps Draw. This one is the Read and Reflect Literary, Historicals and Book Club Fiction draw – 40 books, $450 in value and a new E reader to the Grand lucky winner.
Take a chance and enter the drawer, get yourself a library of literary historical and book club fiction. You’ll have reading for the next season, including Sadie’s Vow, Book #! in the Home At Last series.
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Links to thing mentioned in this episode:
Cathy Rentzenbrink: thttps://cathyreadsbooks.com
John Le Carré: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_le_Carré
Agatha Christie: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agatha_Christie
Hilary Mantel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilary_Mantel
Via Francigena: https://www.viefrancigene.org/en/
Sigoric The Serious – founder of the Via Francigena:: https://www.onefootabroad.com/blog/explanation-via-francigena/
Where to find T.A. Williams online
Website: www.tawilliamsbooks.com
Facebook: @tawilliamsauthor
X: @TAWilliamsbooks
And remember if you enjoy the show, leave us a review so others will find us too. Word of mouth is the best way for others to discover the show and great books they will love to read.
Introducing author T.A. Williams
Jenny Wheeler: But now here’s T.A. or Trevor. Welcome to the show, Trevor. It’s great to have you with us.
T.A. Williams – (Trevor) Moves easily from romance to cozy mystery in escapist locations
T.A. Williams: Thank you, Jenny. It’s very kind of you to invite me on.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve been writing very successfully fiction for a number of years now, but you did have a very successful entrepreneurial career and it is a later in life thing for you. Tell us how you got into the writing
T.A. Williams: To be honest, my first ever attempt at a book was at age 14. It was called it was a shameless rip off of Arthur Ransom’s story, set up on Lake Windermere, Swallows and Amazons.
That obviously didn’t get very far, all 44 handwritten pages of it. But in my twenties, I wrote a thriller – I was quite into thrillers in those days.
And I still have a letter from Collins publishers before they became Harper Collins, where they actually read the manuscript that I sent them twice, and then came this letter saying, “We liked it a lot, but due to the parlous economic situation in the country at the moment, we can’t splash out on a new author.”
So that rather shot that one. So yes, had that all worked, then back in the seventies, I might have been a published author. As it is. I had to wait until 2013, 10 years ago.
A medieval trilogy which captivated him
Jenny Wheeler: Did you continue to write in that interim?
T.A. Williams: I wrote another couple of thrillers. They are just sitting there, gathering dust. But I got hooked, to be quite honest, on medieval history. And I wrote a series of three books set around the time of the Crusades.
And then – I don’t know if you’ve come across people called the Cathars in southern France. They were basically a Christian sect, but they were deemed heretical by the Pope at the time, mainly because they weren’t prepared to pay their subs to Rome. And as a result of which, he sent a crusade against them.
It was the only crusade called by Christians on Christians in Western Europe. I got hooked on that, and wrote the books.
Needless to say, nobody wanted to publish them, and it was over the course of years that I gradually changed from that to writing something more like romance, whatever.
Jenny Wheeler: You decided you wanted to go a bit more commercial, did you?
T.A. Williams: Yes. Basically, the story goes back in the beginning of January 2013. My wife went out and bought the newspaper, and I was reading the culture section in it.
And there was an interview with a lady called, I forget what her name was, anyway, she was the editor of the Bookseller magazine at the time.
Oh, Cathy Rentzenbrink, that’s her. She’s actually a writer in her own right now. And she was asked, what’s going to be big in 2013? And she said, quotes, in the wake of the success of the 50 shades phenomenon, I think erotica will do well. But not just any old erotica, but erotica with a twist for example, historical erotica.
T.A. Williams – Getting the writing bug again
So I thought to myself I’m not sure about the erotica, but I can do history.
I sat down one weekend and tried to write basically a dirty book and realized within a very short space of time, like about a day and a half that I had neither the experience nor the desire to write a dirty book.
I turned the whole thing on its head. And the first book that came out was basically somebody like me, a man trying to write an erotic novel, failing.
And in consequence he engages the help of a little group of female authors. to help him out. And the thing descends from there into a certain amount of humor.
The book never gets written, their book, but it’s the interplay between the characters and so on. A certain amount of humour.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s wonderful. And you returned to that theme with your first book in the Dan and Oscar series, Oscar at Armstrong, don’t you?
Because you have your retired detective attending a writing school in Italy in which it’s a fancy few days, a long weekend for authors to supposedly learn erotica and poor old Dan is sitting there feeling very uncomfortable.
Now that was so convincing that I did wonder if you’d been in that same situation yourself.
T.A. Williams: No, I’ve certainly never have been, I’ve never been on any kind of writing course actually, but no, the idea of a course to write erotica would frighten the life out of me.
Deciding on a gender neutral author name
Jenny Wheeler: You also decided at that point on a gender neutral author name. That’s how you came to be published as T.A. Williams when you’re very happy for us to talk with you as Trevor.
You felt that perhaps romance wouldn’t be so readily accepted by women because they are the main romance readers if it was a male seen to be the author.
Did you feel now that was that a reasonable assumption?
T.A. Williams: Yes. It was something we cooked up between me and my first ever editor that was at what started off, the how incestuous the publishing world is.
But I started off with one company, which was then subsumed into Harper Collins, and then moved on from there.
Anyway, the editor I had there, between us, we thought it was probably a good idea just to keep my gender vague, just in case.
And I still, to this day, I get reviews from people unaware of my gender. In fact, I was just reading reviews on one of the Italian versions of one of my romances, and the lady there was very complimentary about the book.
She ended up by saying, Oh yes, and above all compliments to the, and she used the Italian word, lady writer, because she just assumed that I was female.
Why should I disabuse them?
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Trevor’s long affection for Italy
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. And some female authors use the same tactic because they want to be taken seriously. Like some of the historical authors, for example. I’m thinking of one that I’m going to be interviewing in a couple of weeks, who writes medieval history under a name that’s two initials.
Your romance stories are all gorgeous escapist stories. And a lot of them, most of them certainly, take place in continental Europe, mostly in Italy. And you have a long affection for Italy. Won’t you tell us about your links with that country?
T.A. Williams: Very quick bio. I went to university to do French and German. And by the way, I don’t always sound like this. I’m just coming out of an attack of Covid at the moment.
So if I disintegrate into a coughing fit, you’ll know what it is.
I did French and German at university. And then when I came out, I couldn’t get a job. So I thought, Oh, I know what I’ll do. I’ll go and learn another language, make myself more marketable.
And the only way you could get a job abroad in those days – now it’s changed a lot more professional – was in English as a foreign language teaching.
I applied for these various jobs, and I was offered – in fact in the same week I was offered a job in Lisbon in Portugal, and a job just outside Turin in Italy, and both for the equivalent of 84 pounds a month. Which I was going to say in those days was a lot of money. It wasn’t, but never mind.
I took the Italian job simply because it came with a company car. The company car then turned out to be a Fiat 500 with no starter motor, but that’s beside the point.
That’s how I got into the Italian side of things. I then spent seven, eight years there. Ended up falling foul of the major hazard of adult education.
I married one of my students and we’ll be celebrating our 47th wedding anniversary in a week’s time. Oh goodness, that’s a thought.
A reminder of an important anniversary
Yeah, actually, that’s… hang on, 20… What are we today? 22nd. (of August, 2023) Oh my God, it’s tomorrow. 23rd. Oh, blimey. Anyway, yeah, no, we’re the 21st, so it’s the day after tomorrow. I’ve got time to find something as a present.
Anyway, that was the connection. When we started off, I was living up in the Alps to start off with. And then we moved down for four years after we got married to Florence.
I love Tuscany and Tuscany has really stuck in my heart. I think if I wasn’t married to the only Italian who would rather stay in England than in Italy, I’d be back in Tuscany now.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s lovely. And congratulations on that anniversary that’s coming up. I’m glad that you had a chance to remember it,
T.A. Williams: I’m right. It wouldn’t be the first time. In fairness, my wife is probably even less romantically inclined than I am. And she forgets as well, quite often. Which is why it’s so weird that I’ve been writing romances,
Jenny Wheeler: Yes.
T.A. Williams: Really.
Jenny Wheeler: One of your romantic coms To Rome with Love is set in a charity bike ride from Venice to Rome, and I understand you did a ride like that some years ago?
T.A. Williams: We did. Up until quite recently, actually, up until about three or four years ago, I was doing quite a few of these long distance rides.
We’ve been across Spain from right to left and left to right, and we did Venice to Rome, and then we did various other rides in Italy.
We did Pisa through Florence, Tuscany, Umbria, down into Rome again. Yeah, I did a lot of that, and it was quite nice to draw upon personal experience.
Chasing Shadows – a time slip novel on the Pilgrim’s Way
Jenny Wheeler: I bet it was. And also, another one of them, Chasing Shadows, which is actually a time slip novel, which is slightly different from what you’ve been mainly doing, is set along the Pilgrim’s Way.
Perhaps you haven’t walked that, but you obviously have done quite a lot of cycling in Spain.
T.A. Williams: That was the big trip that I did in 2006 when I finally gave up the day job, and I decided this is something I wanted to do.
With a couple of friends we set off and we cycled from the UK all the way down through France. We took the ferry across the channel first, all the way down through France, over the Pyrenees, turn right and across to Santiago de Compostela.
So, it’s 1900 kilometers. It was about three weeks, but it was a memorable achievement. And that really was what sowed the interest in my mind of wanting to write something set on that particular track.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. We haven’t got onto talking much about your books. We must get onto the books. But I’m sure that people have become convinced that you really know your stuff when it comes to the continent and all of them have got a most fantastic sense of the locations that they’re in.
The latest one for Oscar and Armstrong is Murder in Siena, number four in the series.
It’s just recently out. Tell us a bit about that one.
Ex DCI from London Police, now settled in Italy
T.A. Williams: That one is, as I say, I do have Tuscany very much to my heart, and so I started off with a general Tuscan one, then we did Chianti, then we did Florence.
This one is the story, by this time, book four, Dan Armstrong, the ex DCI from the Metropolitan Police, who’s now settled in Italy. He’s set up his own investigating agency.
He and his girlfriend and a couple of friends, one of whom is a husband as a senior officer in the Florentine murder squad, go for a holiday in a. country hotel just outside Florence and then all kinds of mayhem happens.
Dan and Oscar step in and solve the crime.
Jenny Wheeler: Oscar is there in all of the books, this beautiful black Labrador. And I see that he also even creeps into one or two of your other stories as well in the Dan and Oscar series.
He is there on the cover of all the books, he’s like a totem for the series. Tell us about your affection for black Labradors.
Have you had one yourself?
T.A. Williams: That all goes back to good old Merlin. Merlin, the best dog who ever lived, in my humble opinion.
We got him as an abused child and the vet said he’d be lucky to live for six years. He lived to 13 and a half. That’s pretty good. And he was just a lovely dog. When he died, I was all set to get another one, but my wife said no, I can’t go through that again.
We haven’t had a dog since, and in consequence, I put a black lab into all my books. It’s as simple as that.
Seeking a change from romance
Jenny Wheeler: That’s gorgeous. I had a white German shepherd called Taha that I have a similar kind of relationship with. I’ve still got her ashes and I plan to have them buried with me.
T.A. Williams: Yeah. They are fully paid up members of the family. No question about it.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s right. You started by writing romance with one publisher. So how many romances did you do before you turned to doing the cozy mysteries? Roughly.
T.A. Williams: I have to look up on the wall in front of me I’ve got all the covers of the books. I think I’ve just written my 30th romance, something like that. It might be 29 or 31. And then s year and a half ago, I j felt I needed just a bit of a palate cleanser, really, and a bit of a change.
I wrote a thriller and sent that into my publishers and they said, nah, it’s not really what we want.
I thought, all right, fair enough. So I wrote A Murder in Tuscany, the first of the Dan and Oscar series, and sent it to them. And they had to think about it and said, nah, we’d rather have something based in the UK.
So fair enough. I sent it to Boldwood Books, which is another publisher. And bless them, two days later I got a response from them offering me a six book contract. That’s how it happened.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. So you’re now continuing in parallel lines with the romance and the cozies?
T.A. Williams: Exactly yes. I’m probably writing four books a year now. Probably one romance and three Dan and Oscars, something like that.
Jenny Wheeler: Gosh, that’s a quite a production. Tell us a typical working day. What does it look like?
A typical working day for author T.A. Williams
T.A. Williams: My typical working day is, I tend to get up, the older I get, the earlier I get up. I have some breakfast, and come and sit down in my study.
And on and off probably most of the morning. Because I’ve got a dodgy back mainly caused by all the cycling, by the way. I because of that, I have to keep getting up and walking around and moving around.
But basically, most of the morning is spent writing. The afternoon, I either get the bike out and go for a ride or go for a long walk. We live here in the wilds of Devonshire and there’s lots of little lanes you can walk around. And then come back, maybe reread what I wrote in the morning, and then six o’clock sit down and watch The Simpsons on TV.
That’s my regular schedule.
Jenny Wheeler: You say that writing has become like a drug for you. Tell us about that and your perhaps your changing relationship with your creative life. Has it always been like that?
T.A. Williams: On and off. The day job, which was, like you were saying, I was running a language school, was very much a full time job, particularly in the summer when we had something like about 500 students with us at any one time.
But writing was a relaxation in the evenings while I was working. And then when I retired, I thought I’ll do something to occupy my time.
I have a very low threshold of boredom. Ask my wife. As a result, that’s how it started. I just finished writing book number seven in the Oscar and Dan series at the end of July.
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Between plotters and pantsers…
And I’m now pretty seriously into planning the next one, but I haven’t actually started writing yet, and I’ve been feeling quite almost bereft for the last three or four weeks.
It’s something that’s taken me over, and I’m not complaining. It’s wonderful, it gets me out of bed in the morning, it’s a real new lease of life from that point of view, but it is, yes, it is a drug to an extent, but a nice drug.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes. And you mentioned about the planning, how much outlining do you do before you start writing?
T.A. Williams: Yes, you know as I’m sure. What people have told you over the years is there are two types of writer. There’s the plotter and the pantser. The plotter plots everything in advance.
The pantser writes for the seat of the pants. I’m definitely the latter. When you’re writing a romance where you know that it’s going to be a happy ending it’s not really quite so important because you know where it’s set, you know who the main characters are going to be and you work it out as it goes along.
With a whodunit, it’s quite important for the author to know who’s going to get killed and who the murderer is.
Having said that… I find now, I don’t actually make up my mind who the murderer or murderers is or are until at least halfway through the book.
Trevor is as surprised as anyone by outcomes
Now, the advantage of that, is it means that from the point of view of the reader, there’s no way they can accuse me of deliberately feeding them lines or whatever that they’ve missed out on.
The fact is, I don’t know myself, and then when you gradually work through that… Then you can, because that’s a lovely thing, writing on a computer rather than, when I first started writing, I was writing on a manual typewriter, where basically what you’ve written more or less stays unless you rewrite the whole darn page.
Whereas with a computer, of course, you can copy and paste stuff and move it around. Yeah, I’m definitely a seat of the pants merchant.
Jenny Wheeler: Oh, that’s interesting. Yes. In Murder in Sienna, there were multiple possibilities and in the end, as you suggest, more than one culprit in the end.
T.A. Williams: That’s just, the way that it worked out in my mind. I got through one murder and then thought, who the hell did that? All right, hang on a minute. It sounds a little bit Heath Robinson, but that’s pretty much the way that I do it. It seems to work for me.
Jenny Wheeler: And have you any sense how long Dan and Oscar might go on or Oscar and Armstrong as we should call them? That’s the name of the series.
Oscar and Armstrong have a strong future
T.A. Williams: I’ve just signed another six book contract with Boldwood. And I’ve just written book number seven I’m just about to start book number eight.
I think I would be disappointed if I didn’t at least finish this series, this set of six books. And who knows?
When I read the reviews, and I really do read every single review that I get for Dan and Oscar, particularly good old Oscar, they seem to have hit a chord and a lot of people really like the characters.
One thing, by the way, for me, it’s been very liberating writing Dan and Oscar because whereas with my romances, I was writing everything through the eyes of the main female protagonist, which is a risky business for a man to try and think himself into the head of a woman.
With the Dan and Oscar books, I’m writing it in the first person through the eyes of a man who’s not that much younger than I am. And that’s really has been a liberation for me to be able to pretty much use my own voice in terms of what Dan actually says.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s very nice in the first book in the series that Dan, at that point, his marriage is pretty much broken up. He’s facing divorce. His wife is the one who has exercised her right to say she wants out. And he’s lingering in hope that they might be able to patch things up, even though he suspects it’s not going to happen.
And you feel as if you are really getting a male viewpoint in that character, which is a nice thing.
In a lot of romance, the men are considered to be less sensitive emotionally, and I suppose when it’s written from a woman’s point of view, maybe women are more inclined to think that.
You really get a fresh idea of the male experience in that first book in the Dan and Oscar series, even though it isn’t technically a romance.
Writing from the female perspective
T.A. Williams: I think you’re right, certainly from my point of view, the other thing is, I don’t actually read much in the way of romance. I don’t really have anything much to judge myself against. From that point of view, what I’m doing with the romance is very much a Trevor Williams attempt.
Like I say, thank God you reminded me I almost forgot the t anniversary in two days’ time.
But my wife and I, she’d be the first to agree. We’re not really terribly romantic people. And it’s so nice to be able to write something because I think you lot, this is women of the female persuasion – you do tend to overthink things a bit somehow.
That’s the impression I get. I may be totally wrong. I might be screamed off the internet for this, but I think with a man you’re probably, particularly, let’s face it, the guy is 56 going on 57. He’s seen life 30 years with a murder squad in London.
He’s pretty savvy as far as what’s going on inside the human brain is concerned. He certainly, I think is able to say to drill down to the how do I feel about this woman.
Yes, I still love her. I’ve got to do something about it. Whereas quite possibly she probably would spend two or three pages saying exactly that.
That’s my feeling anyway.
Jenny Wheeler: And in the Siena book the policeman that you’ve mentioned, the Florentine detective.
He’s starting to have a few niggles in his relationship, which Dan recognizes are symptoms that his own marriage went through where the wife is getting sick of police duties taking up so much of their lives.
So that’s also a very interesting little twist on that.
The wonders of the human imagination
T.A. Williams: I have no background in policing whatsoever. This is all imagination. That’s the wonderful thing about the human brain. I can think myself hopefully reasonably successfully into the mind of a woman, but at the same time I can also think myself into the head of a former detective chief inspector in the murder squad.
It’s definitely the way that I try to go about it is to basically, in pragmatic terms, what would this guy feel in these circumstances, whether it’s trying to sniff out who the murderer is, or whether, in fact, it’s how he feels about people, things, his life, marriage, and so on?
Jenny Wheeler: One other thing that I’m interested in, the books have a very strong sense of geography, and you go into a lot of detail about village streets and shops on village streets. Is that entirely imaginational, or do you actually journal when you go overseas traveling?
T.A. Williams: Oh certainly, I don’t like to write about anywhere that I haven’t visited. And as I say, we lived in Tuscany in an 11th century convent. We rented a flat for a couple of years in the hills outside Florence. And in consequence, I know that area pretty well.
I feel I’ve got quite a handle on the locals. I have some very good friends over there still.
When we go over, if we can, we go and see old friends, pick up old friendships. I do have certainly a lot of Italian connections, and, of course, through my wife.
She’s from the very north of Italy, up to the north of Turin, in the pre Alps, really the foothills of the Alps.
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Catching Covid on the way home
In fact, we just came back. I caught this Covid after a week spent with the family in the Alps, and I obviously caught this on the plane coming back.
They give me a lot of experience, a lot of things to draw on. And of course, my wife is invaluable, except for the fact she’s now been 40 odd years in England.
She probably knows less about modern day Italy than I do.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Turning from the books to looking at your wider career, you’ve mentioned about running the language school. Did you simply get to the point where you felt it was a good time to step aside from that and try something different?
T.A. Williams: It was really a combination of circumstances. The way that it worked out, the language school, I won’t go into the details of it, but I ended up running the school. And when the time came, I had the option to sell up and I thought, okay let’s do that and see what see what life can produce.
I then spent a couple of years doing property development, which was, according to my physiotherapist, not the most sensible thing for a 60 something year old to do.
And when I finally knackered my back for the last time, I decided I’d better do something a little bit more sedentary.
Jenny Wheeler: If there’s one thing as the “quotes” secret of your success in your creative career, what would it would be.
Secret of success? ‘Sheer blind luck’
T.A. Williams: Quite simply sheer blind luck. Don’t under underestimate luck. Oh, yes, plus a fair shot of I think perseverance because I say I’ve been writing since I was 14.
That took me until I was 60, 64 before I found a publisher. But yeah, luck. As I say, I, when I left university, the two things I knew with absolute certainty were, one, I didn’t want to be a teacher.
And two, I didn’t want to marry a foreigner because language is so important, blah, blah, blah. So, what do I end up doing? I marry an Italian and I become a teacher.
It’s just sheer blind chance is so important. And that’s why if you’ve got people listening to this, you’ve got kids who are trying to make up their minds, what they want to do in life?
Don’t worry. It’ll happen. One way or another, it’ll work itself out, I’m sure.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Turning to Trevor, as reader, we always like to ask our authors what their own reading tastes are and whether they’d like to recommend anything to our listeners. What do you like to read and what would you like to recommend?
T.A. Williams: I went through a stage of being very interested in one of the greatest authors I think of the 20th century. It has to be John Le Carre.
I love his stuff. But also. the other series of three books, but the ones that I particularly like Hillary Mantel. Bless her, who died quite recently Wolf Hall has to be an absolute classic, followed by the next one, is it Bring Up the Bodies, then the third one them certainly. For my own purposes, I’m currently reading my way right through the whole Agatha Christie canon, and there’s no getting away from it, there’s a reason why she’s outsold virtually everybody else apart from Shakespeare, the woman knew what she was doing.
Agatha Christie’s special gift as a writer
Jenny Wheeler: Expand on that a bit. What is it specifically she does that’s made her, virtually immortal?
T.A. Williams: I think yes, I think it’s the way that she manages to involve the reader in the story, so she doesn’t lay it on with a trowel, she doesn’t say, oh, this man looks seriously suspicious. I wouldn’t trust him with that.
No. It’s just things she slips in comments, she can, describe somebody in a sentence and you immediately get the measure of that person.
So that I think is very important. And also, it then keeps you fully riveted because you find yourself.
Looking, as you read along, looking for the clues, because the thing that I do find, because I watch quite a few Midsummer Murders and things like that on TV, and there’s some very good whodunnits going around.
But some of them, rather in my mind, they cheat by introducing literally in the last 10 minutes, bring in this sort of deus ex machina thing where suddenly we discover that, ah, but she wasn’t married to him at all. Was she?
You can’t really do that and still involve the reader all the way through, because the reader can quite rightly turn around to you and say I didn’t know that, so how can you expect me to work out who’s who?
Jenny Wheeler: That’s lovely. Looking back down the tunnel of time. If there was one thing in your creative career that you’d like to change, what would it be?
Turning point – the Collins letter back in 1973
T.A. Williams: I suppose it would be that famous letter from Collins back in 1973 or four, whatever it was, because had they taken me on as a, as an author then and thrown their resources at it. Who knows, maybe I might have been able to live my life as an author. Having said that, I’ve been a very lucky man really.
I’ve had a very enjoyable life and the work I did with the language school. I’ve traveled all over the world trying to promote the English language courses. I’ve had a chance to see and meet some fascinating people, visit some lovely places. So no, I’m not complaining.
Jenny Wheeler: Yeah, that’s great. Give us an idea of what’s next for you on the next 12 months. What’s coming across your desk? You have indicated about the new contract with Boldwood. What are you doing
T.A. Williams: The next 12 months? There’s another romance coming out in early November, and then there’s another romance coming out next May.
Both of them, I’m pleased to say, I’ve already written, and I don’t really like deadlines, so I always like to be ahead of myself, so I’ve written those two already, so that’s done.
That means I can concentrate now for the next few months on the whodunnits. We’re off in October, hopefully flying over to Pisa and be able to spend 10 days or so in Italy, and there, I’m going to check out Verona, which I have been to before, actually on a bike ride, but you get there after 100 kilometers on a bike and have that much time for sightseeing.
I’ll go up and check Verona, maybe might think about Murder in Verona. And then also I think probably go down to the south of Tuscany, and check out – I don’t know if you ever heard of a thing called the Via Francigena, which is Italy’s answer to the Camino.
Waling the Italian version of the Camino Way
basically, it was back in 900 and something or other.
I forget his name Bishop Ethelrick or something from traveled all the way from Canterbury to Rome and back. And this is the route that he followed and it’s pretty much now been redeveloped and espoused by the various regions of Italy and there’s some beautiful scenery there. I think I might do that.
And then I’d also like to go back to Elba. I’ve only been once on holiday 40 years ago, I’d like to go to the island of Elba. So, my next 12 months will be a certain amount of research trips and then writing them up.
Jenny Wheeler: The two romances that you’ve got coming out, have they got titles yet?
T.A. Williams: That’s a very good question. Yes, the one coming out in November is going to be called Change of Heart. And I would just say, I don’t choose the titles these days. The publisher more or less says, Oh yeah, why don’t we call it that? And, generally speaking, I go along with it. And the next one after that, coming out in May, is going to be called Far From Home, I think it is.
I quite like it.
T.A. Williams: I thought it would have been nicer to call it So Far Away, but anyway, it’s Far From Home.
Jenny Wheeler: Are they linked in any way? I see some of your romances seem to follow a series format where they have similar titles.
Where Trevor can be found online
T.A. Williams: Yeah, similar titles, but every single one of the romances is completely standalone. The characters are all completely independent they can be read in any order, unlike the Whodunnits.
They are also standalone books, but there is, as you mentioned, this thread in the life of Dan and Oscar, and Dan’s failed marriage, and then he finds his girlfriend, and things work out.
Does it get a bit rocky, will they, won’t they? There’s a certain amount of that coming in.
Jenny Wheeler: Now, the final question we always like to ask just to make sure that you have a chance to interact with your readers. Do you enjoy hearing from your readers and where can they find you online?
T.A. Williams: I love hearing from my readers. every now and then I get a a letter through or an email through via my website. I have a website, which is www.tawilliamsbooks.com..
If you Google TA Williams books, you’ll find page after page of it. Very happy for that. Also Twitter or X as it’s now known. I’m on there as well as TA Williams books.
Facebook? I’m on there but I don’t really post an awful lot. And I’ve been persuaded by my new publishers to have a presence on Instagram, but that’s basically all I’ve got, is just a presence.
So yes, I’m certainly not terribly clued up, but I’m very happy. And as I say, every single review that I get, I have a thing set up on the Amazon Reviews, that every time a new review comes in, I read it.
And because I do, particularly with the Whodunnits, which is a new kind of departure for me, I do learn from it, I really do.
And happy wedding anniversary
People, come along and they say, Ah, yes, but shouldn’t you have done so and you think about it, and think yeah, maybe I should have done that. Yeah, always delighted to hear from people.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s wonderful, Trevor. And thank you so much for being willing to take part today when you are recovering from this blessed virus. And happy anniversary for the day after tomorrow.
T.A. Williams: Thank you. I should now go off and make a note of it to remember to do something about it.
Jenny Wheeler: you’ll be one up in the marriage, won’t you?
T.A. Williams: Yes. Brownie points count,
Jenny Wheeler: Thanks a lot, Trevor. You’re going into your evening, but thank you so much.
T.A. Williams: Thanks once again for having me on and anybody who’s listening, thanks very much for tuning in. It means a lot to know that there are people out there, not least in the Southern Hemisphere as well as the Northern Hemisphere, who are actually interested to hear about the stuff I do.
Bye. Bye. Bye.
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