Camille Di Maio found inspiration for her first best selling historical fiction in a Beatles song - and then had the good fortune to meet the song's composer and tell him about it!

Hi there, I'm your host Jenny Wheeler and today Camille talks about how history found her - rather than the other way round - and her latest book, based around the Marilyn Monroe classic Some Like It Hot and with another the ghost in story - the ghost in the Hotel Coronado!

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

Her fascination with the 1950'sHow Marilyn Monroe features in her new bookWhy she's set her next book in Rome Balancing writing and family life with four childrenThe surprising number of books she's read in 2018Who she's binge reading now

Where to find Camille Di Maio: 

Website:https://camilledimaio.com/

Facebook: @camilledimaio.author/

 Twitter:http://@CamilleDiMaio

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/camilledimaio__author/

What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word forword but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny: But now, here’s Camille . . Hello there Camille and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Camille Di Maio - author

Jenny: Beginning at the beginning – was there a “Once Upon a Time” moment when you decided you wanted to write fiction??  And if so what was the catalyst for it?

Camille: In grade school, I spent a lot of recesses in the school library. I read through a lot of the Nancy Drews, and the Trixie Beldens. I was just captivated by getting into these stories and interested in who the authors were. This was way before the internet and social media, so the authors were especially mysterious people. They were just names on these books, so that really intrigued me. I had the idea of wanting to be like them some day.

Jenny: Yes, that sounds great. You mention spending time in the library at play time - I know you've talked a little about how you naturally are an introvert, but you've done a lot of very extroverted things - we'll get onto that. Being a Real Estate Agent for one is not something you'd think an introvert would take kindly to. But you've obviously managed to straddle the personality spectrum. 

Camille: Definitely. I like to think I'm the person who steps up to do what they need to do. The introvert side of me definitely recharges from coming home and being quiet and reading especially. I'm a very avid reader; I think I'm up to 105 books for 2018, so that is really where I get my energy back and then I'm ready to go and do whatever I need to do. 

Jenny: Fantastic. You’ve chosen historical fiction as your genre – what attracted you to it? 

Camille: When I look back on a lot of my reading, especially in my young adult life, I was really interested in historical fiction without really even realising that it was a genre. It just seems to be what I look back and find what I was reading. Historical fiction really found me as a writer, because the particular story idea I had for my debut book The Memory of Us, had to take place in a historical period, and that's the story I wanted to tell. So it more sprang from that. 

The Memory of Us - Camille's first.

Once I wrote that book, I found that I enjoyed the research process so much, especially the historical research that every new book idea that came to me just happened to be historical in nature. So here I am. I'm working on book five that way right now.