I'm February Grace, your host, and today I am thrilled to have my good friend and indie author visiting the blog: the lovely and talented Michelle Gregory!
Michelle, please tell us a bit about yourself.
MG: I’m a 51-year-old wife, mom, and writer of fantasy. I wrote my first novel in 2005 as part of NanoWrimo, and self-published it in 2007 because I wanted to have one copy to remind myself of my accomplishment. For the last few years, I’ve been slowly writing a sequel, but I keep getting interrupted.
Besides writing, I love to read historical Christian romances, take pictures of nature, do paper crafts (when I have a place to do them), play with our cat Pepper (when he lets me), watch movies, and spend time with my family.
Q1: How has motherhood shaped you as a person?
MG: 3 kids and 20 years after becoming a mom for the first time, it’s helped me become a less selfish person than I was before I had kids. It’s also taught me to laugh more at life and not take myself so seriously.
Q2: Country or city girl at heart? Or suburbanite? LOL
MG: I’ve lived in one city or another most of my life, but it wasn’t until I moved to Butte, Montana that I realized I’m really a country girl at heart. We live 20 minutes from Butte, but when I have to go into town, it seems too big, noisy, and crowded, and it has only 30,000 people. I like that I can come home and have space and quiet around me. The only thing I miss about living in the city is the convenience I had of getting what I needed at a moment’s notice, and all the choices we had for shopping and restaurants. That said, when we go to Phoenix to visit friends, I can hardly wait to come back to Butte.
Q3: Name one thing, person, or place that you would travel a great distance to see.
MG: I don’t really like traveling (there’s no bed like my own), especially internationally (the time change is hard on me), but I would put up with hotel beds and a ten-hour time difference to see Conwy Castle in Wales. The story behind that is (and forgive me, but this is writing related) that when I first started my novel, I needed a castle layout to help me map out certain scenes. I found one in a kids’ book on castles. Sometime in there, I discovered that the layout was of a real castle—Conwy.
Q4: Do you have a favorite Disney movie or character?
MG: My favorite Disney character is Belle from Beauty and the Beast (which is also my favorite Disney movie). I love how Belle’s love saves the Beast, and how both characters change from selfish to self-less.
Q5: *bonus question for everyone* Do you collect anything? If so, why?
MG: I collect sea shells (because I love the ocean), geodes (because I think it’s cool that something so plain on the outside can contain something so beautiful), and tiny jeweled boxes to remind me of beautiful things that have happened in my life.
~*~
Those beautiful things you collect remind me of your beautiful soul!
Thank you so much for visiting with us all today.
You can learn more about Michelle and her fantasy novel Eldala by visiting her website: http://www.michellegregory.blogspot.com
See you all on Thursday!
