Author Archives: hcannam

Problematic romance?

Posted on January 26, 2014 by hcannam

Times have changed, thank goodness. It’s no longer acceptable for a man to grope a woman, or even to make suggestive remarks to her. Some still do, of course, but they know (I hope) that what they’re doing is wrong; … Continue reading →

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Laura Ashley – Bowes Museum

Posted on January 17, 2014 by hcannam

This is a talk I gave in November 2013 at the Bowes Museum in Barnard Castle, to accompany the Laura Ashley retrospective exhibition held there. That’s now finished, but my Laura Ashley minidress is still on show in the costume … Continue reading →

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Romantic ‘Ghost’

Posted on December 19, 2013 by hcannam

I loved that coat. I found it in a little shop in Darlington, back in the early spring of 2006. As the mother of the bridegroom, I’d had a vague idea what I was looking for, but this was nothing … Continue reading →

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Juvenilia

Posted on December 9, 2013 by hcannam

I was coming up to fourteen at the time, I think. A good friend and I fancied ourselves as a writers. So we set ourselves a challenge: we would each write a story, of which only the title was decided. … Continue reading →

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Writer’s Block

Posted on December 3, 2013 by hcannam

It all comes back to me now. It’s not just the story you revisit when you edit a novel for conversion to an ebook. It’s also the emotions, thoughts, experiences, everything that was tied up with the writing of it. … Continue reading →

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Writing against the grain

Posted on November 27, 2013 by hcannam

New writers are often told: ‘Write about what you know.’ It’s a fair point – except that it doesn’t leave much room for the imagination. And isn’t imagination at the root of all creative writing? I guess the central characters … Continue reading →

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‘A Thread of Gold’

Posted on October 16, 2013 by hcannam

Well, I’ve given in. Faced with 650 plus pages to scan and edit, I found I just couldn’t face it. Nor, I felt, could my scanner. By the end of scanning ‘Candle in the Dark’ the cover of my printer … Continue reading →

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‘Candle in the Dark’

Posted on September 2, 2013 by hcannam

It’s an odd feeling revisiting a novel you wrote many years ago. But that’s what a writer has to do when preparing a book for digital conversion. It can be a painful process, because all the book’s faults leap out … Continue reading →

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‘Amelia’ the phantom novel!

Posted on July 31, 2013 by hcannam

If you google Helen Cannam’s novels (I do it just in the interests of research, you know…), you sometimes come across one called ‘Amelia’, lost in the further reaches of the internet. It looks genuine enough – it has a … Continue reading →

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On to the next…

Posted on June 23, 2013 by hcannam

Six down, fourteen (I think) to go… And now for the historical novels: the seven romances and the seven middle-brow historicals. That’s ‘all’ I have left to scan, format, edit and find covers for, so as to convert them into … Continue reading →

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