Author Spotlight no.74 – Alexa Bourne

Complementing my daily blog interviews, today’s Author Spotlight, the seventy-fourth is of Alexa Bourne.

Alexa Bourne is a teacher by day and a romantic suspense writer by nights, weekends, and all school holidays. She was born to an English mother and an American father and grew up in Rhode Island. She’s been fortunate enough to travel to various countries such as Thailand, Australia, Fiji, and several European countries. She’s visited Britain on a number of occasions to explore her heritage and to spend time with her relatives.

She received a Bachelor’s in English Literature and a Master’s in Education before turning to teaching children as her day job. She also teaches online classes for fiction writers. She has been writing for as long as she can remember and has always been fascinated with suspense stories. When she’s not concocting sinister plots and steamy love scenes or traveling and exploring new cultures, Alexa spends her time reading, watching brainless TV and thinking about exercising.

Her first novella, Her Highland Champion, was released from Decadent Publishing on March 30th.

And now from the author herself:

I remember writing plays for my friends and me to perform during grade school. My first completed story was fan fiction where my teenage heroine helped save the day during a hostage situation. At the time, being a professional writer was not even a consideration. I just wrote for fun. But when I got to college, my best friend talked me into looking into getting published. She had enough faith in my writing that she was sure I’d succeed.

So I began to seriously write my first romantic suspense story. I chose to use Scotland as the setting so I could share what I love about the UK with readers. For me, it was a way to give back to the people and places that had settled into my heart.

Unfortunately, the story wasn’t very good because I still had A LOT to learn about the craft of writing. But those characters and the beauty of the setting stayed with me, and I knew I’d eventually pull that story out of its file for revisions. Sure enough, twelve years later, it became my first published book, Her Highland Champion.

Yes, you read that right. Twelve years later. I guess I’m a late bloomer, but being a published writer eventually became so important to me I couldn’t give up. I believed my characters, my settings and my stories deserved to be shared. I’ve seen many writer friends give up for a variety of reasons. I’ve gone through several critique partnerships (until I got the AMAZING CPs I have now). I’ve had tons of people tell me they would’ve given up if they’d been writing as long as I had been without receiving a contract. But you know what? I’ve learned I’m a storyteller. It’s what I do. It’s who I am, and even on my worst writing day, it’s still the best job I could ever have.

Morgen: I agree! 🙂 Thank you, Alexa.

You can find more about Alexa and her writing via her website is www.alexabourne.com and her publisher’s website is www.decadentpublishing.com and her book will be available via www.amazon.com.

The blog interviews will return as normal tomorrow with non-fiction and religious / paranormal action-adventure thriller author Joanna Penn – the three hundred and thirty-third of my blog interviews with novelists, poets, short story authors, biographers, agents, publishers and more. A list of interviewees (blogged and scheduled) can be found here. If you like what you read, please do go and investigate further. And I enjoy hearing from readers of my blog; do either leave a comment on the relevant interview (the interviewees love to hear from you too!) and / or email me. You can read / download my eBooks from Smashwords, Sony Reader Store, Barnes & Noble, iTunes Bookstore and Kobo.  My eBooks are now on Amazon, with more to follow, and I also have a quirky second-person viewpoint story in charity anthology Telling Tales.

I have a new forum at http://morgenbailey.freeforums.org and you can follow me on Twitter, friend me on Facebook, like me on Facebook, connect with me on LinkedIn, find me on Tumblr, complete my website’s ‘Contact me’ page or plain and simple, email me.