Love and Freedom won the Best Romantic Read Award 2011 at the Festival of Romance and Dream a Little Dream was nominated for a RoNA in 2013. She received three nominations at the Festival of Romance 2012, and is a Katie Fforde Bursary Award winner.
Sue is vice-chair of the RNA and editor of its two anthologies. She also writes short stories, serials, articles, writing 'how to', and is a competition judge and creative writing tutor.
I’m not one
for resisting soft and fluffy animals, and if they say ‘Mmmm’ a lot, have great
liquid eyes, punk rock topknots and a ‘Huh?’ expression, I definitely need to get
involved. Having made some friends who own an alpaca farm, I could see it was
only a matter of time before these appealing animals made their way into one of
my books. So when I created Emilia, a secondary character in Is
This Love? who’s married to a wealthy man, I wanted something over the top
for her to possess. I gave her a starter herd of alpacas. (They don’t like to live
alone.)
What I had
to do, obviously, was get myself off to the alpaca farm with my camera and my
notebook to be introduced to about thirty of them, to see their field shelters,
their feed, their halters, even their feeding bowls. I was fascinated. Alpacas
are all colours from ash blond through fawn and brown to black. Their fibre is
incredibly thick in winter and when they’ve been shorn you can see the tracks
of the clippers. They look as if they’ve been neatly combed.
In this
country, alpacas are bred for their fibre, which is spun and knitted like wool.
I consider it itchy but the most exclusive of shops attach eye-watering price
tags to the resulting fine garments. Alpacas are camelids, smaller than their
llama cousins. They’re used to low temperatures but like to be able to get out
of the rain (wouldn’t you, with all that hair to get dry?) and their babies are
called ‘cria’.
I learned a
lot more but one thing was overwhelmingly obvious - alpacas are cute. They have a funny walk, their heads pop up like
periscopes with devil horns on top whenever anything excites their curiosity.
And they make the most soothing humming noise.
Heroine
Tamara has a sister, Lyddie, who’s an adult who needs care, having suffered an
accident as a teen. (The alpacas may be soft and fluffy but not all of the
themes in my books are.) Lyddie loves animals and the alpacas and their cria
draw her towards Emilia and the odd household at Lie Low, where Jed Cassius
happens to work. Those four characters are essential to the plot and, in the
middle of them? Alpacas.
Some
research is hard work, some is uncomfortable, but learning about alpacas was
just fun. Mmmm. Mmmm-mmmm.
Is
This Love? will be out on 7 November 2013 in paperback and is already
available across all ebook platforms. It has been nominated for the Readers
Best Romantic Read Award.
Blog http://suemoorcroft.wordpress.com/
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Twitter @suemoorcroft
Thanks for a fascinating - and educational - interview, Sue. We wish you all the best with Is This Love, and all future novels.
Liv
Interviews on the RNA Blog are carried out by Freda, Henri and Livvie. They are for RNA members only. If you are interested in an interview, please contact: freda@fredalightfoot.co.uk