What is your typical day like?
A day in the life of me consists of getting up early in the morning (5:45am) to make my beloved a cup of coffee and either go back to bed to snuggle for a few minutes, or go out for a run. After that, I shower, get my son up, if he isn’t already awake and arrange breakfast.
If I’m lucky, I’ll get some jobs done, like wash dishes, hang out washing, or clean the bathroom toilet and then walk with my son to his school. When I get home, I will either dust or vacuum and other major tidy jobs.
Morning tea occurs around 10:30 to 11am and I make a chai latte and sit down at the computer to catch up on social media, and if I’m having a bad day, I spend most of my day on it.
If I’m in the right frame of mind, I will write or edit, depending on where I am at with any of my projects and have a quick lunch about 1pm.
I try and be off the computer by the time my son arrives home and working on proofreading that I do for other people.
My husband, if he isn’t away, will arrive home about 5pm, we have tea about 6pm and we sit in front of the goggle box (television) for a couple of hours.
Recently I have discovered that I only need 6 hours of sleep, so trying to find things to fill in my evening, so I don’t go to sleep too early and wake up at 3am.
If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?
Easy – New Zealand – where I live!
Why? New Zealand is beautiful, and there is still so much I haven’t explored here. I have extensively travelled the South Island, but I haven’t been to Te Anau or Milford Sound, or any of the Fiords, and I would love to spend time there. The North Island I haven’t explored as much, and there are lots of amazing attractions and places up there. Our country is so new compared to the rest of the world – NZ was only civilised about 200 years ago (the Maori have lived here for about 400 – 1000 years, depending on their legends).
I love how so much of New Zealand is inhabited by animals, birds and plants that can’t be found anywhere else in the world, because we are so isolated.
The next place I would like to visit, would be the Pacific Islands. I’ve been to Fiji, and while it was lovely to visit, I couldn’t live there, the humidity would kill me!
Have you had other careers before becoming a writer?
Before I started writing and publishing, I worked for 14 years in the insurance industry. I started as a receptionist for a large international Insurance Adjuster company (independent Insurance Assessors) and worked my way through the ranks to become a Loss Adjuster, before leaving to become a contract Loss adjuster for another firm. Lots of experience was garnered from this, and was put into my Cursed Love story.
What genre’s do you write in and why?
I write romance. I love romance, as for subcategories, it is fairly broad. I love paranormal romance, science fiction, fantasy, contemporary, and I have stories planned in most of these categories to be released over the next couple of years.
I write romance because I love the idea of love that survives reality, a couple that live happily ever after, because we are in a world now days where happily for now seems to be the norm.
How did you get started writing?
I loved to write when I was at High School and wrote my first novella as part of an English Assessment -which I got an A for. Over the years, I have written stories in various exercise books, but it wasn’t until I mentioned to my husband that I wanted to become a published writer that he told me unless I started writing, I would never realise that dream. So about 5 years ago, I started rewriting my High School Novella into a 3 part story, but it was still rather simple and basic. About 5 novels later I have finally reached a point where I like my stories and think that they are worthy enough to be put out into the world. I have gone back and reworked one of my previous novels, and I am hoping to publish that in March. It is a Science Fiction piece.
What is your favorite part of writing?
I always wrote stories to escape the reality I lived in. It wasn’t pleasant, but at least I could escape for a few short minutes into a land that I controlled, a place where people were kind, loved each other, supported one another. Now that I am older, I still write for the satisfaction of escaping reality, but with the thought of how other people might like to join me in the land of my characters, to lose themselves in a story for a couple of hours, and just feel like they are part of the storyline, they know and recognise the places around them, and have the satisfaction of knowing that the romance has a happily ever after.
Where do you get the ideas for your stories?
I’ve always had a vivid imagination, and I have never let anyone try and remove that. I guess escaping reality was a part of that. Now days story ideas pop up out of the blue, either when I am asleep, or while I have been doing something, and I have seen something and thought “Oh, I like that, that would fit in nicely…” For example, Cursed Love is about a family curse, the legend of our family is that one of my great uncles had a curse put on him, and while lots of horrible things happened to him and his family, was it really a curse? Or was it just bad fortune? ‘ Shards of Ice’ was based on a dream of a group of females escaping from a planet being invaded. The story changed from that, but that is where it started from. My current WiP I plotted in a single day, on a 3 – 4 hour tramp on the Abel Tasman National Park after spying an isolated property in Awaroa Inlet. It got me thinking, why would people want to live there?
Do you write under a pen name? Why? How did you choose it?
Yes, I do write under a pen name. Silly as it sounds, I am a very private introverted person (unless I am on social media, and then I am rather extroverted), and I want to protect my privacy, along with that of my husband, who doesn’t like any limelight or social media, and my son, who isn’t old enough to understand social media. How did I come up with the name? My nanna’s first name and a variation on my married surname.
Blurb for Cursed Love
A family curse.
A lifetime of grieving.
Jinny Richards past and future are about to collide. Will she survive?
At 18, Virginia ‘Jinny’ Richards was a drug addict who fell in love with Dean Bradford. By 20, Dean was dead. Jinny believes the family curse is to blame, and never wants to fall in love again. She has worked hard to hide her past and now has a job as a successful Insurance Assessor.
Ethan Montgomery lost his wife to breast cancer. He’s mourned her for three years and now he’s ready to move on. He understands Jinny’s pain, but he wants the feisty Jinny and nothing, not even a curse, will stand in his way.
When work throws them together, loving Ethan is the farthest thing from Jinny’s mind. He’s tardy and egotistical, even if he is good looking and makes her weak at the knees.
Things get further complicated when Steven Bradford turns out to be the client, bringing up the heartache and pain Jinny has carefully buried for eighteen years.
Will she find love a second time around? Or will the family curse claim another victim?
BIO
Catherine Mede lives in a rural village in the South Island of New Zealand with her husband, son and two cats. She works when she can, doing whatever is available – within reason! When not writing, Catherine likes to read, draw and work in her garden.
Having developed a love for writing when she was at High School, it wasn’t until she was in her thirties she decided to really get down and dirty with the words in her head.
Romance and Speculative Fiction are what Catherine likes to write about because she understands the need to get lost in a love that sometimes seems mythical. And adding Fantasy elements just fulfils her needs to be creative in fanciful worlds.
When she was younger, she wrote to escape reality, now she writes to allow others to enter a world where love has a happily ever after.
Catherine has a short story published in a Masters of Horror Anthology, and recently published Cursed Love and attends writing seminars and groups in her area.
When she is rich and famous, Catherine intends to have a large library which will double as her writing space and own an Aston Martin Vanquish or Porsche GT3, whichever one comes first.
You can contact Catherine Mede
Web www.catherinemede.com and
Fb www.facebook.com/catherinemede
Tweet on @catherinemedeNZ
Pin – www.pinterest.com/catherinemede
email her catherine@catherinemede.com
