A Little About Annie Cook
Annie has always loved to read and write, and she learned to do both before she even started school. Right from when she was little, Annie's parents gave her the wonderful gift of books, and she would lose herself for hours in other people's adventures. Annie's home life wasn't always great, and she readily admits that she can't imagine what it would have been like, if she hadn't had those incredible portals to escape into, to interesting places with fascinating and inspiring characters that have fired her imagination ever since.
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WHAT IS ANNIE WORKING ON RIGHT NOW?
She is currently working on a connected series of eight novels; 'Stories With A Little Bit Of Magic.' These stories are aimed mostly at older women, as there are themes of menopause and family challenges, that run through them all.
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The stories are fictional, and all based around a little holiday cottage, squirreled away in a quiet corner of in the Lake District of England. 'Teapot Cottage' has a very special energy within its walls that helps people who are on different journeys of recovery from devastating, life-changing trauma. Their time at the cottage helps them to come to terms with what's happened in their lives, and find a new way forward, often in the most surprising and unforeseen ways! Characters overlap and keep popping up, just to remind readers that each time they visit 'Torley town,' they meet up again with friends they've met before. There's a lot of kindness in Torley, and a lot of fun to be had, too!
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Annie says:
"It's tremendous fun, writing these stories of hope and recovery from trauma, and the realisation that behind every dark cloud is a silver lining that's sometimes so bright it hurts the eyes. But it always gladdens the heart. Most of the people who arrive at Teapot Cottage in a 'screaming heap' end up in a far better place, even though it might be one they never imagined for themselves. The cottage has its own ideas about where people should be going, and what they should be doing, and that is always surprising me, as the author! There's many a time when these characters will take on a life of their own, charge off in a different direction than what I had in mind, and I feel like I'm running to catch up with them, saying; 'hold on a minute! This wasn't what I had planned for you!' That's how I know these characters are authentic. They simply won't do as they are told! But usually, if I let them develop in the ways they want to, the stories are always much better for it!"
The first four stories in the Teapot Cottage series; (No Small Change, The Power of Notes and Spells, When It's Meant To Happen, and Ruin, Reins and Redemption) are now all available on Amazon and other book platforms, with the fifth novel in the series (The Stuff You Fail To Notice) set for publication at the end of October 2024.
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Annie has also written a separate novel, which is not part of the series. A Moral Swerve is written in a very different (and much darker) genre, but it does actually put a little 'meat on the bones' of one of the main characters in Book Three of the series. Readers are recommended to read A Moral Swerve between Books two and Three of the Teapot Cottage series. A second alter-genre novel (Thicker Than Water) which offers the back-story to one of the central enduring characters in the Teapot Cottage Series, is set for publication on 7th October 2024 and the E-book is available here for preorder now.
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In My Own Words . . .
​I've always loved to read and write, and I've grown up with a big appetite for
adventure and a sense of 'if you can imagine it, you can find a way to do it!'
That probably stems from my early influences of going on adventures with
Mary Tourtel's and Alfred Bestall's beloved Rupert Bear and Bill Badger, and
then with
Enid Blyton's Famous Five!
When I wasn't drifting over Nutwood in a hot air balloon with Rupert, or wandering through the ruins of Kirrin Castle with Julian, Dick, Anne, George and Timmy, other characters were inspiring and captivating me with equally vivid escapades. I adored Louisa May Alcott's Little Women, and the sheer brilliance of C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia. I still can't look at a free-standing wardrobe without imagining what could lie behind it!
I still have almost all of my favourite books from childhood, and I love to spend time in musty, dusty old second-hand book stores trying to find the ones I somehow lost along the way!
I've worked as a psychologist, in the prison service, in the private sector and and with the NHS, and I now run my own business helping people with long-term insomnia to sleep properly again. I'm married to an engineer who also loves adventure, and we're both keen motorcyclists. We both grew up in New Zealand, but now divide our time between the UK and Italy.
For most of my life I've been too busy to devote REAL time to writing, but I've always written stories. Lately I've been feeling ever more compelled to paint pictures with words that might spark the interest of others who'd like to escape for a while too, from the normal daily grind.
Sometimes, my characters take on a life of their own, and set off at a gallop, and I end up feeling like I'm running along behind them, trying to catch them and regain control of where they're going! It can be a bit frustrating at times, when I feel a story going in a different direction than where I first intended, but mostly its exciting, because it usually means we all end up in an even more interesting place.
Few things are better than curling up with a good book and "running away from home" for a while, and what I off theough my work is a 'private portal' - a temporary, exclusive escape - to a fascinating place filled with positive people and interesting situations where, "with the help of a little bit of love and magic," almost anything can happen!
So watch this space, because stories of love and magic are on their way, and I hope that when they arrive, you'll enjoy them. I hope that reading them will captivate you as much as writing them has captivated me.
Annie
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