Getting to Know You with Featured Author: Blair Bancroft

Welcome to our Getting to Know You

Featured Author Month

here at the Book Boost!

Today, we're learning about the quirks and works of author, Blair Bancroft.

TBB: How and when did you become a professional author?

BB:  I became an author twice. When my youngest entered first grade, I wrote a spy adventure (with some romance), based on my experiences traveling 10,000 miles in the USSR during the Cold War. It even had an agent and made the rounds in NY, but not only was it a serious “first novel” by an unknown, I think editors had a hard time wrapping themselves around the concept that there could be “good” Russians. In those days, long before word processing, revisions were really tough, and I was never a writer who got it “right” on the first draft, so I put my writing aside, along with the book.

I didn’t attempt to write again until the fall & winter of 1990-91 when PCs had made writing so much easier. And it was eight long years after that before I was finally published in December 1999.

TBB:  Which of your books is your favorite and why?

BB:  I used to reply to that question by saying: “Whatever book I’m working on at the moment.” But, truthfully, looking back after so many years, I have to say my very first romance, The Sometime Bride. I had no idea of the “rules” of romance and wrote it from the heart. It’s an epic spanning Britain’s entire Peninsular War against Napoleon, plus the final battle at Waterloo, all of it told through the eyes of two young people who are forced into marriage at a very early age.

TBB:  If you had to describe that book using ONLY ONE word what would it be?

BB:  Epic.

TBB:  Give me one quote (from yourself/by yourself) about being a writer.

“Don’t be afraid to break the rules.”--Blair Bancroft

BB:  I have to qualify this by saying that you don’t want to cut your own throat. So many times when editors say, “Write the book of your heart,” they really mean, Write the book of their heart, not yours.  But I believe there are editors out there who truly appreciate books that aren’t “cookie cutter” models of all those before them and it’s the “outside the box” books that will last, instead of fading into obscurity in a month.

TBB: Who, in your life, is your biggest source of inspiration and why?

BB:  My mother, Wilma Pitchford Hays, who was a successful author of children’s books, from first grade to teen.

TBB:  What song lyrics get stuck in your head most often?

BB:  Most recently, “Shall We Dance?” from The King and I.

TBB:  If you were a t-shirt, what slogan would appear on you?

T-Shirt Quote courtesy of Blair Bancroft.

TBB: Favorite time of year (or fave holiday)?

BB:  June or September on Cape Cod, Summer in England, April & October in Florida

Want More Blair?

Visit her on the web here: www.BlairBancroft.com

Pick up a copy of her book today!  Click here.