Tell Us Your Back Story with JA Low

 

Tell Us Your Back Story with JA Low

I’m not sure where my love of writing came from it was just always there, something that I had to do no matter what. Maybe it was growing up as an only child to a single mother in a family of adults that made me create stories to entertain myself or maybe it was my crazy family, who would tell me stories about our famous pioneering family, a history steeped in scandal and gossip, with stories that had been passed down through the generations that piqued my interest in telling stories.

My great aunty, she was the biggest character in the world, never married, because the men were never rich enough or handsome enough for her, even though she was proposed to numerous times. She was a career woman in an era where women were not welcomed into the work force, she was a lover of Mills & Boon romance books and a well-known bush poet she was the one that really fostered my love of writing, every birthday and Christmas card she would write a funny poem in it. She had books and books of poems that she wrote, she was always writing and encouraged me to do so. She was the first person to read my books years ago, she passed away before she got to see me realize that dream of being a published author but I think she would be pretty damn proud of me, even if the books are sexier than she would normally read.

I have memories of being a very active child, not just with sports but with performing. I couldn’t play a musical instrument or dance, but I could sing and act. My weekends were spent with the neighbourhood kids, writing scripts, and recording them on cassettes.

My Mum had me young, but I most definitely did not miss out on things. She loved to travel so she packed up our bags and moved us to Ireland when I was two, she wanted to do the whole backpacking experience everyone does at that age, the difference was she has a toddle with her. She took me everywhere, we explored everything there was to explore in Europe. I even got to start school at the age of four in a seaside town outside Dublin, where I had to learn Gaelic. As a single parent and working, Ireland didn’t have any after school care programs so the only place that would look after me was an Orphanage. We are talking the full on super strict Irish catholic medieval style orphanage, with the roughest kids on the planet and little old me with the funny accent.

Eventually, we came home but the travelling never stopped, I was taken away overseas every year to the craziest places in the world and I guess meeting many different walks of life filled my head with so much fodder for my books, there probably no other occupation for me, other than to be a writer.

I moved to London at 17, as my Mum has moved over there before I had finished school. I got a job working as a silver service waitress with a fancy catering company, and I was sent out to the exclusive homes of London’s elite, I had no idea about these worlds that I was thrust into and now if I could go back, I would have listened to the gossip better. I also moved to the Greek Islands when I was 17 for the summer chasing a boy, of course that didn’t last but the experience of working and living on the Mediterranean did.

Eventually I returned home by myself and decided to work in the Travel Industry for the next 12 years. Working from hotel reception in five star resorts (so much gossip goes on behind those luxury walls), organizing tour guides (finding out who was sleeping with who) to organizing peoples own holidays, until I met my husband, in a bar in Coogee.

After marrying my now ex-navy husband, we decided to go see the world together, we moved to my old stomping ground Ireland and after having a serious car accident which put our backpacking holiday on hold, we decided to run Bed and Breakfast’s in Galway which we did for the winter.

Having itchy feet is something we both still battle with today, just not as crazy with two little boys along for the ride with us.

So I guess the crazy adventures, interesting people I have met along the way, and getting myself into some dangerous yet now funny situations has given me a lifetime of research for my books. It’s probably the reason why my books are set in exotic locations like Ibiza, Russia, the Greek Islands, Paris and so on.

 

 

 

Sapphire
JA Low

An unconventional love is tested to its limits in this completely immersive dark menage suspense, for fans of JL Perry and Pepper Winters.

Mateo is used to being in the spotlight, he craves it in everything he does . . . except when it comes to his love life – that is firmly in the closet.

Tomas shuns the spotlight, the one he was born into, he wants nothing to do with it or his high-flying family who now reject him for his choices in love.

But Tomas’ and Mateo’s carefully constructed lives are turned inside out when they discover a beautiful, battered woman on their doorstep. The woman with the sapphire eyes has no memory of who she is or how she got there. She doesn’t know about the Bratva Jewels – the Russian mafia’s most desires escorts – or how her story intersects with theirs. Can Tomas and Mateo help her remember before the men who are after her find her first?

Hachette