Carole Gill | Next Chapter

Jul 22

Jul 22 Carole Gill

Author biography

Carole has always loved books. As a young child she enjoyed knocking them out onto the floor to play with. She loved the slim green volumes as well as the pink. The green were Shakespeare’s plays and the pink were Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. Instead of a doll or teddy bear to sleep with, Carole slept with a book!

She has been writing since she was eight years old. Her first short story involved Martians coming to earth to take back children in order to replace their own. The storyline has been forgotten in the mists of time, however.

Sci-fi was an inevitable interest as Carole’s parents were sci-fi fanatics, dragging her to every sci-fi film that came out and recommending their favorites to her on television. Despite this, horror soon dominated her interests however, although she has written a few sci-fi short stories.
Living most of her life in Yorkshire shaped her writing. How could the moody, storm-filled skies not shape an impressionable writer?

Her interests have always been people centered and this is reflected in her writing as all of her seven novels and short story collection contain character-driven plots.

In between marriages, Carole went back to writing, wrote a radio play for the BBC, which wasn’t broadcast, although they ‘liked it.’ She had joined an excellent writer’s workshop and was encouraged to try anything. She did. She was selected by Northwest Playwrights of England for further development and learned to write stage dialogue. She will always be grateful for what she learned. Had she, she says, been closer to London, she’d have been submitting scripts all over the place. She concentrated on her fiction writing instead.

Her first published short story, Monster Inside was inspired by her first marriage. Despite her second marriage happily being the complete opposite, she continued to write dark horror.

In 2009, her husband suggested she go for it full time, and though it was difficult financially, she did. She was able to write constantly as in 12 to 14 hours a day at the laptop!

After many trips to the Bronte Parsonage and jaunts on Haworth Moor, she began writing book 1 in The Blackstone Vampire Series, The House on Blackstone Moor. She envisioned a house built on haunted moorland and when she began peopling that house with characters, she had her storyline. Three novels in the series follow upon that first one. Unholy Testament – The Beginnings, Unholy Testament – Full Circle and The Fourth Bride (of Dracula).

Justine: Into the blood, Circus of Horrors and I, Bathory, Queen of Blood followed. Carole Gill’s House of Horrors is the anthology of her published short stories.

The theme of good vs evil dominates her writing. As does the point that human evil is every bit as evil as ‘supernatural’ evil. She loved turning Matthew Hopkins, Witchfinder General of England into a vampire, for example in book 3 of The Blackstone Vampires Series.

Circus of Horrors also has human evil in it. And, being character-driven horror, it gives reasons for the monstrousness in the humans that make up the circus. Severe childhood abuse, for example make the clowns what they are.

When Carole was suddenly and unexpectedly widowed in 2015, she submitted the last manuscript that her husband would ever read to Creativia. It is I, Bathory, Queen of Blood.

It’s been very difficult for her to carry on but she is writing again. Her current work in progress explores the possibility of life after death. This is because that question dominates her thinking now.

She knew when she suffered the loss, what she wanted to write about next, as it was the main focus she now had.

As in all her fiction, the story is scary but poignant too. The storyline came to her quickly. It seems to be going well. She’s pleased about that but she’d be happier if she could only show it to her husband, John.