Wedding Bells by the Creek: A Coorah Creek is the new novella by Janet Gover and to celebrate we asked her to tell us a little bit more about the woman behind the books.
Janet Gover
http://janetgover.com/
I grew up in a town smaller than Coorah Creek
I grew up in a small bush town in Queensland, Australia. The population was somewhere around 28 people. In a town that small, everyone knows everyone else… and it’s pretty much impossible to keep a secret. But at the same time, there is a wonderful sense of community. I have tried to capture that sense of community in my Coorah Creek books.
I was on television.
I worked as a television news reporter and producer in Australia and Hong Kong and the UK. I covered everything from crime to politics to natural disasters and celebrities. I was on a first date once with someone who didn’t know I was on television – and he was very shocked when, in the middle of dinner, someone came up and asked for my autograph.
I have spent a night in a jail cell.
No… I hadn’t been arrested. I was reporting on floods in outback Australia. We had flown our helicopter into a town that was cut off by road. When we finished filming, it was too late to leave, so my camera crew and pilot and I had to stay the night. Other people trapped by the floods had taken all the hotel beds, so the local policeman let us sleep in the empty cells. The doors were left open!
I was once trapped with a gun toting taxi driver in Iraq
I was on my way back to the airport in northern Iraq, after working there. As we approached the security checkpoint at the airport gates, I realised my taxi driver was holding a hand gun hidden under his shirt. It seemed HUGE! The security guards at the airport gates had even bigger guns! They forced my driver to pull over to their security building and they left me in the car while they took him and his gun inside. I sat there for ten minutes, alone, too afraid to do anything. Then the driver returned, without his gun, and took me to the terminal. He was not in a very good mood. I thrust all my local currency at him and hurried inside the terminal building. I was very very pleased when that plane took off.
I wrote my first book when I was 11.
As school homework, I had to write a story. The teacher wanted at least two pages. I borrowed a manual typewriter and wrote 12 pages. Then I copied some drawings out of a book for a cover and as illustrations. I found some cardboard to bind it and handed it in. It was called ‘Sunbeam’ and was about a girl and a pony. I got an A.
All my books have at least one horse in them – except one.
The odd book out has several million penguins in it instead. It’s set on a boat trip to Antarctica. And before you ask, no. I haven’t been there. I did take a cruise around the top of Scandinavia when I was researching the book. Of course, there are no penguins up there, but I did get to drive a dog sled across a frozen lake.
My favourite food is tomatoes.
Seriously. I would rather eat tomatoes than chocolate. Well… may not, but I’d rather eat tomatoes than almost everything else. And the best tomatoes I have eaten were in a funny little eatery in Lebanon, where they had grown in donkey poo in two thousand year old terraces built into a sandstone cliff face.
I knit.
When I was about twelve, I was taught to knit and crochet by a lovely elderly neighbour who often asked for my help around her house. It was her way of paying me back. I gave it up when I was a teenager because - well, I was a teenager. But I came back to knitting a few years ago, and now I am seldom without needles and yarn. I’m not particularly good at it, but it helps with the RSI in my hands from typing. And I love wearing the things I knit. I have a LOT of woolly scarves.
I have stood in the crater caused by the world’s first atomic explosion.
The Trinity site, in the middle of a US military base in New Mexico, was the site of the world’s first atomic test. Twice a year it’s opened to the public, and under military escort you can drive into the desert and stand in the middle of the blast crater. Yes, there is radiation – but I didn’t stay long. I have also visited Hiroshima, which I found very moving.
You wouldn’t want to read some of my books.
As well as writing romance and women’s fiction, I write computer training guides. High-end techie stuff. I’m not quite sure how that happened, but writing the training guides has given me a chance to develop one other skill that I have. I am very good at finding software bugs and breaking things.
