Please welcome author Chloe Mayer, who will introduce her new UK release, THE BOY MADE OF SNOW:

How to write a chilling winter’s tale when you’re living in Los Angeles

Writers write anywhere.

They write whenever and wherever they can eke out a few moments of time to get down the words. Stephen King had the idea for Carrie while working as a janitor cleaning a girls’ locker room, TS Elliot wrote poetry while working as a bank clerk, and Fiona Mozley – whose novel Elmet was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize recently – wrote much of her book on her cell phone as she commuted to her intern job.

The wonderful thing about writing is that not only can you do it anywhere; it’s that by writing you can make wherever you actually are, become anywhere you like.

Although I’m British – I was born and raised in London – I wrote most of my first novel while I was living and working in LA. Most of the time, I loved the glorious Californian climate – with one exception.

For a Brit, Christmas in the sunshine, under hot blue skies and palm trees, doesn’t really work.

I became more and more homesick as the festive season approached; I missed soggy autumns, I missed cold winters, and I missed the snow. I began to fantasize about it.

It was around this time that I finally decided to do what I’d always promised myself: I’d try to write a novel.

I’d already decided my story would be about a little boy who told his mother a terrible lie that would lead to tragedy and murder. And I also knew that those characters would both be obsessed with fairy tales, which would affect the way they saw the world and have terrible consequences.

The Snow Queen was always my favourite fairy tale. But now snow had suddenly become my most longed-for weather. As I wrote my story, the cold seeped into the pages. The snow itself almost became a character, and – just as in the fairy tale – my novel saw a child battling with the snow in order to survive.

After four years in LA – and four sunny Christmases – I returned home to east London.

And now, just before a wintry Christmas this year, my book will be published. It’s called The Boy Made of Snow. But the truth is, the girl who wrote it was just trying to bring the snow to LA.

Chloë Mayer is a British journalist whose work has been shortlisted for several awards, including newcomer of the year and reporter of the year. She has lived and worked in Tokyo and Los Angeles, and decided to try her hand at fiction in the US, where the first short story she ever wrote beat more than 8,000 others to win a prize and publication in an anthology. She was so surprised and delighted that she immediately began work on her first novel, The Boy Made of Snow. After spending much of her twenties living abroad, Chloë returned home to the UK and now lives in east London, not far from where she grew up. She recently gained a creative writing diploma from the University of East Anglia, and combines freelance journalism with writing her second novel.

The Boy Made of Snow is not yet out in the US. But readers should be able to buy the book from the following UK websites:

Amazon

Waterstones

Foyles