Tammy Robinson’s emotional stories are heart-warming and heart-breaking in equal measure and will appeal to readers of Jojo Moyes and Nicholas Sparks. Initially indie published, she’s now signed with an international publishing house and is set for world-wide distribution.

Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Tammy talks about the personal tragedy she had to overcome to keep writing and tells how living through her characters helped her overcome tough times.

Six

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

The tough road to emotional balanceOn just keeping on keeping onOn being indie publishedWhy cliches are sometimes rightThe writers she admires mostHow she got an international publishing deal

Where to find Tammy Robinson:

Facebook: @TammyRobinsonAuthor

Instagram: @TammyRobinsonAuthor

 Twitter: @TammyRobinson76

What

follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for

word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

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

Tammy: Thank you

for having me. I'm looking forward to it.

Tammy Robinson, heart break fiction author

Jenny: Yes, it's fun to chat to another Kiwi. In an interview that you did on National Radio last year you spoke of a series of personal tragedies tyou had to overcome. Enough to  fell a team of oxen, in my opinion. I'm amazed that you've risen so magnificently over the challenges you had and you've published all these books. Can you tell us if there was a catalyst that took you from that position of being emotionally low to the point where you could reach out and start writing

A tide of tragedy

Tammy: Yes, for sure. I actually I wrote my first book before it all started to happen. My husband and I got married in 2007 and then about three years later or so we thought 'well it's time to start a family. We'll have a baby.' So we got pregnant and then we lost that baby. And then it just kept happening. We had no problems getting pregnant but staying pregnant was a bit of an issue. My body never let me go naturally. I always had to have hospital intervention to assist with getting my body back to normal.

That was quite hard. So I think it was the third one, we actually saw the baby's heartbeat at about eight and a half or nine weeks we had a scan and we saw the heartbeat and we thought 'yes, we've got at this time.' And then we went along for the twelve week scan and took my parents. I'll never forget. She put the sensor on my tummy and then she said 'I need to get someone else' and she left the room and straight away we knew something's wrong.

Resilience sorely tested

She came back with the other person and they had a look and they said 'We're really sorry but the baby passed away at about nine and a half weeks. So you'll need to go again to hospital to have a medication to bring on labor.'

It hadn't worked for me in the past but this time a few hours later it started working. I started losing the baby but this time I hemorrhaged and wouldn't stop bleeding. It was the middle of the night and the nurse couldn't get hold of a doctor and I was bleeding everywhere and she was getting quite worried and so in the end she went over everyone's head and gave me the injection to stop the bleeding - which worked. I still had to go and have surgery as well and clear out the uterus and so I handled that.