Friday's Guest - featuring Renee Duke Who She Was Before #MFRWauthor

1. What were you in your life before you became a writer? Did this influence your writing?

I’ve been writing stories ever since I first became capable of doing so (round about age seven) and ‘self-published’ several tales. (Translation: hand wrote them, drew pictures for them, and had my mother sew them into little ‘books’, which, regrettably, I no longer have, as I binned them during a fit of adolescent ‘What silly, baby stuff’’ pique.) I started part-time professional writing in the late1970s, early 80s, working as a stringer for a local newspaper and penning articles and short stories for magazines in the UK, Canada, and the U.S.A. I didn’t really start in on books until I retired from teaching. I was a preschool teacher for forty years, and also worked with older children in Out-Of-School Care programmes and on World Peace & Development projects. Having worked so long with children, it seemed only sensible to write for and about children, whose ideas and opinions I still seek out and use.

2 Are you genre specific or general? Why? I don't mean genres like romance, mystery, fantasy etc. There are many subgenres of the above.

Most of my short stories had contemporary settings and subjects, but my books are mostly set in the past or future, or in current times but with a fantasy aspect.

3. Did your reading choices have anything to do with your choice of a genre or genres?

My own reading choices also tend to mostly be set in the past, future, or current times with a fantasy aspect.

4. What's your latest release?

Time Rose Book 4: The Tangled Rose, which came out in October, 2016. It’s set in Pre-WW II / WW II Germany, and deals with Gypsies, mentally and physically challenged people, and other lesser known victims of the Holocaust.

5. What are you working on now?

Time Rose Book 5, tentatively entitled The Volcanic Rose. It’s set in Herculaneum in 79 AD, but the eruption of Vesuvius is secondary to my characters’ set-to with their sorcerer nemesis as this is the final book in the Time Rose series. I’m about halfway through the first draft, and once it’s finished and gone to press, I plan to write a sequel to my YA Sci-Fi book.

6. Where can we find you?

In addition to being on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/renee.duke.author/, I have a website http://www.reneeduke.ca/, and a blog Time Travelling With Kids: https://reneeduke.wordpress.com/author/irduke/, which suggests way to get young people turned on to history.