Last night the City of Kawartha Lakes Public Library (CKLPL) hosted Virginia Winters as part of the Spring session of the Local Authors Series.

The evening began with an introduction by Diane Lansdell of the CKLPL, and then Virginia Winters took the stage and spoke about her newest book, how she writes, writing advice, and the book she’s currently working on.

Virginia Winters has always had a love for literature, but she began writing in 1998 after being disappointed in the latest offering from a favourite author. She thought she could do better. Though the result was terrible, she’d been bitten by the writing bug and decided to learn to revise and make her story better. The final product was her debut novel, Murderous Roots, published by Write Words, Inc. in 2010.

Despite what you may think about authors, or even how other authors might work, Virginia doesn’t sit in front of a keyboard for eight hours a day. She rises early and begins her day with a cup of coffee, the Globe and Mail, Facebook and Twitter. Then, once caught up with reality, she reviews the writing she completed the day before and plunges in. On a good day, she’ll accumulate 1000 words, but when the writing is not flowing, she finds other writing-related tasks: submitting a manuscript, or working on a short story. Though she stops writing at noon to carry on with her daily life, the book is always on her mind no matter the task at hand. She enjoys reading every afternoon, usually mysteries, literary fiction, nonfiction for research and books about writing.

Virginia makes a daily commitment to write and in this way has been able to see three novels to publication. While she is happy with her publisher in general, she didn’t feel the covers of her first two novels adequately represented the books, so for her third book in the Dangerous Journeys series, No Motive For Murder, she designed the cover herself.

At last night’s event, Virginia read a passage from No Motive for Murder, a book for which she received the following compliment from an audience member: even though the book is part of a series, No Motive For Murder reads well on its own. A reader doesn’t have to read all the books in the series to understand what’s going on in the story.

At the moment, Virginia Winters is not working on the next book in the Dangerous Journeys series. Her latest project has an art historian for a protagonist and involves theft, art history and restoration, centring around a painting lost in 1945 in the last days of the War.

Visit Virginia Winter’s website and find her on Facebook.

Read our biography of Virginia Winters.