Thanks for dropping by, Kirst. Kirsty Maclennan hales from the West Midlands and is the face behind 'The Love of a Good Book'. http://theloveofagoodbook.wordpress.com/
So Kirst,  *settles back in chair*  tell me a little about your ideal man.

My ideal man would have dark hair, gorgeous eyes, toned muscly arms, maybe a tattoo or two. Someone with an amazing sense of humour, who loves their family. A man who likes to read and travel, someone who will love me for me.
   Okaaay...

 Reading this back, I can see now why I'm single, although I do live in hope of this answer falling into a spell like in the film Practical Magic and this man turning up at my door.
     Getting drunk on Tequila would also help, oh and a pulse!  
    No! Keep the faith Kirst. Hold out for the dream. 

    So who did you have up on your wall as a child/teen, then?
    This is soooooooo embarrassing but since I promised to answer these I will.
     When I was younger I liked the older man and I don't mean a few years older. I mean OLD! There was Michael Ball, I used to call him dimples (I'm visibly cringing at myself) 
    Still rocking the Michael theme!
    Sean Connery, although I have to admit, this one I haven't grown out of. A dirty phone call with that voice would make my day!
    Perfectly reasonable. 
And I may possible have had a grandad complex when it came to
Michael Parkinson.
    *Stunned silence*
 It appears I've gone from one extreme to the other. OAP's to make believe (see ideal man).
    Well it definitely sets you apart from the crowd ;-).  Unique taste. But we may need to add some spermatozoa to bring down the average age here :-)

    *Clears throat* Shall we move on? What about your ideal job at age 11?
    I wanted to be a journalist, I loved going to the library and picking a topic and then researching it. When someone on careers day told me I didn't have what it takes, I changed my plans.
    Oh to Hell with careers advise, Kirst. I sat at a computer at one of my careers days at high school and typed in that I liked animals and science (naturally thinking it would suggest training to be a vet) and it told me I would be well suited to being a butcher! - I did end up becoming a doctor, so I suppose it was half right. ;-)

    Okay final thing...What 3 books were important to you through your
childhood or teenage years?
The Jolly Postman,
Matilda by Roald Dahl,
and Summer Sisters by Judy Blume
I still gush about these books, they are timeless! 
    Brilliant! Thank you Kirst. Thanks for dropping by and for letting us into that part of your life you had probably hoped you had buried. ;-) I had a blast.     
    You can find Kirsty at @loveofagoodbook and @minionsofbooks on Twitter and on Facebook at Love Of A Good Book.

Good morning. This is going to be a new series of posts where I ask a few questions of different authors or bloggers and find out a little more about what makes them tick. 
    But today I thought I would kick the whole thing off by answering those questions myself. So...

Question 1:  Ideal man? - Well hubby, of course... Is he out of the room yet?... Okay. For me this is going to have to be Richard Armitage's portrayal of John Thornton (North and South by Elizabeth Gaskell): Noble, hard working, devoted, I could just go on and on. *big dreamy sigh*

Question 2:  Childhood crushes? - Strangely enough, my walls seemed to have been covered with Michaels. Michael Praed as Robin Hood (big poster, right by my bed), Michael J Fox (moving rapidly on before anyone reads that) and Jan Michael Vincent as Airwolf.   *Embarrassed blushes* - I was young!

Question 3:  Ideal job at age 11? - Policeman.  The stubborn, judgmental side of me still thinks I would have made a great policeman... apart from the whole 'being afraid of confrontations and the dark' thing. Unfortunately I was too short. (And the world breathes a sigh of relief!)

Question 4:  3 memorable books from my childhood? - 
    The owl who was afraid of the dark, by Jill Tomlinson - Must have read this a hundred times.
    The Moomins books by Tove Jansson - Read loads of these.
    Audrey Rose  by Frank De Felitta- This book introduced me to the possibility of reincarnation at a time when I was very curious about religion.

So there you have it, a glimpse into the things that helped shape the way I turned out today. Next time I'm hoping there will be somebody else in the hot seat, so I can point and laugh at them instead.

At the age of 18, I made the decision to be a doctor and go to medical school to
learn my trade. I was young and naïve and not even considering the social side
of things, I was told, 'Wehay! Can't go wrong. All the guys at medical school are hot. (My husband is nodding furiously!) And the parties... They have orgies all the time at medical school'. The girl was older than me. She had already started at university, so she ought to know what she was talking about, didn't she?
    Well if there were any orgies, I wasn't invited to one of them. Maybe I was
too dull? Who knows? The nearest I got to nudity at parties was when the ruggabuggers stripped off after getting incredibly drunk. No different to any other university course there, let me tell you. So if you are 18 and this is one of the things that is helping you to decided which course to go for, think again. Mostly it was exams, revision, lectures, drinking and more exams.
    But then I qualified and, I am truly sorry to disappoint, but unlike most of the medical dramas on film and TV, in real life, doctors and nurses aren't always falling into bed with each other. Mostly we're too bloody tired to do so, together anyway. They examine bodies inside and out, all day long (Not particularly beautiful in the cold light of day). Not once did I walk in on a doctor or nurse in an amorous clinch in a store cupboard, or getting hot and heavy on an examination couch.  
    Now, however, I am a romance author and suddenly I am mistress of
temptation. My words of passion obviously come from my many adventures in real life. My thoughts are wicked and my every waking moment suffused with mental images of hot men. Absolutely. And I have a magic fairy to deal with
the house and kids while I lay back on the sofa, from dawn till dusk, dreaming
dreams and eating chocolate! What do you think?

   

Another passion of mine, for as long as I can remember, has been photography. I have millions of family albums, but also pictures of nature. Today I thought I'd share with you some of my best ones of Autumn, my favourite time of the year. I will start with the battle of life and death playing out across the ground.

It is the time to gather in the harvest.

Colours begin to change as the season takes its toll.

And bonfires burn on a night when fireworks split the sky.

And as the nights begin to draw in and the sky turns to rain, drops of water trail their merry path downwards, over leaf and twig and find their way slowly back to the land.

I saw this cake a few months ago on Facebook and thought it would be great idea to make for my hubby's birthday. Now I'm no great baker, but yesterday I stood in the kitchen with all the ingredients lined up before me and, bravely, I began. 
    I needed 2x11inch cake pans...I had an 8 and a 9 - good enough, I thought. Step 1 sift the dry ingredients into a bowl. Easy. Done. Step 2 cream together the butter and sugar...Hell! The sugar was, by now, underneath a mountain of flour, cocoa powder and baking soda in the other bowl. I'm sorry; it was DRY!So I grabbed a spoon and started bailing out my flour to recover the (now very powdery) sugar beneath. Okay. I'm good. I followed steps 3, 4 and 5 and bunged them in the oven, along with a little one for the left over gloop as my tins were too small. I looked up. Apart from the chocolate, fondant icing, millions of KitKats and cream for the decoration, I was left with an unopened bottle of vanilla extract. Hmmm. I scoured the pages and... No, nothing.
    So today's task is to decorate my cake, with regular sized KitKats (as we don't have super sized ones in UK) and work out what to do with the $@#>! vanilla. If you don't hear from me again, I will probably be drowning my sorrows in cider, plastered head to toe in chocolate ganache and stinking of vanilla. Nobody mention the cake!

I thought it fitting that I kick this site off today. Remembrance day. Having done a considerable amount of research for my debut novel, The Songbird and the Soldier,  I learned a lot about Afghanistan and what the men serving there were going through, but to understand the fear and the loss... that was something I had to put my mind to and still probably got nowhere near. I think I watched every documentary Ross Kemp ever made and every other DVD on the conflict I could find. I hope I have been true to their efforts whilst staying within the context of fiction and am grateful for everything they do for us.
    And by an extraordinary coincidence, it was only today that I discovered the name behind the face of the man that inspired my character, Sgt Andrew Garrington. His name is Raoul Bova, an Italian actor, who just happened to have served his country in the army years before. Well there you go. A glimpse into my world. I hope you enjoyed it.