Borders author releases two books in two weeks

Lisa Hobman started writing in earnest after she and her husband Richard moved to Swinton in 2012.

“I was meant to start a business up,” she recalls, “but there was this story working its way into my head, and eventually Richard said, ‘Why don’t you just write it? Try doing it for yourself at first’. So that’s what I did.”

That idea became Bridge Over the Atlantic, her debut novel.

With Bridge Over the Atlantic, Lisa has already been named as a bestselling author on iTunes and Amazon, but her latest writing ventures could not be more different from each other.

Following a similar publication last year, Lisa is returning to the characters and situations of her romance novels with a Christmas novella, ‘Last Christmas’, which is due out in a festive anthology on November 5.

“I did this last year, going back to some of the characters and plots from my romance novels, and adding them to a Christmas story,” said Lisa of the story, which is featured in the collection Unwrap the Romance.

“I left some unanswered questions in the novels so I hoped I would be able to go back and answer them.”

Lisa adds that being a novelist in this day and age is different to previous eras, mainly due to the influence of fans on social media.

“I love it,” she said. “It was a great way of being in touch with your readers, and it’s a two way thing.

“They let me know what they liked or not in the novels, and what characters they might want to read about again in the Christmas stories.”

Shortly after the anthology, there will be a stocking filler of a different kind when her second piece of erotica is published on November 17.

Six, written under the pen name Lissa Jay, is the follow up to Bad Company. So, does writing erotica – with an age warning that it is suitable only for over-18s – differ from writing romance novels?

Lisa says so: “Obviously there are similarities - there are still romance elements, because I didn’t want to write just smut!

“But there are major differences.

“For instance, I’m writing these in the first person, because I think that it’s the best way of having the reader see things through the characters’ eyes, you couldn’t do that any other way.

“It’s important to have their senses, their impressions of the world, in that way.

“But, really, it’s about having the confidence to try a new genre and go with it.

“Last year, my parents were clearing out their loft and they found several notebooks containing all the stories that I wrote when I was younger, when I was first trying things out.

“They were pretty different to what I’m doing now - I hope that I’ve improved a bit since then! - but there all sorts of things in there, lots of teen romance fiction.

“I used to write poetry, as well, and as a singer I write songs, so there were a lot of different things going on.

“It was interesting reading back to how very naively I wrote back then, compared to now. And it was nice to look back on, reaffirming that this was in my blood, so to speak.

“It’s all about having the confidence, it really is.”