Penelope Haines is releasing her sixth novel, Blood Never Lies. Photo / Rosalie Willis
Penelope Haines is releasing her sixth novel, Blood Never Lies. Photo / Rosalie Willis
Life's too short for Penelope Haines to have just one career.
Penelope started out as a nurse at the age of 17 before going to university studying a Bachelor of Arts with honours in English Literature, afterwards becoming a management consultant, parent and farm manager, commercial pilot and flying instructor, and is now the chief executive of Home Comfort Ltd, a service providing rehabilitative care for accident victims.
But on top of that she has turned her hand to being a published author of detective novels.
The story goes that Penelope became a writer when she realised she could gaze out of the window with a cup of coffee or a glass of wine in her hands and claim to be working.
Publishing her debut novel, The Lost One, in 2015, Penelope is now onto her sixth novel, Blood Never Lies: Forged by History, Bound by Time, which comes out on October 1.
"I came to writing quite late and I came to it because I'm a reader and at some point I think all readers eventually run out of books and decide to write their own."
Finding she didn't quite have the compassion required for nursing, Penelope moved onto a job she was better suited for – being a management consultant, a job she enjoyed because she met many interesting people.
Giving her son flying lessons for his birthday and seeing him enjoy it, Penelope then trained herself and became a commercial pilot and flying instructor before running Home Comfort Ltd all the while juggling family life and many other hobbies.
"Life's kind of short, you've got to fit a lot in.
"I'm gradually becoming less hands-on with Home Comfort Ltd because I'm more interested in the writing."
Her writing career was inspired by the National November Writing Movement (NaNoWriMo), a movement which started in the United States and is now a worldwide phenomenon.
"You make a voluntary commitment to within the 30 days of November to write 50,000 words which is breaking the back of a novel."
Novels by Penelope Haines.
With the idea of being a writer often cropping up at the back of her mind this was the push Penelope needed.
"I never quite believed that I could sit down and write an entire book and finish it.
"It's about the commitment and everyday reaching your word goals and seeing the total go up on a little graph."
Publishing her first novel in 2015, Penelope has been writing around one per year ever since.
Promising to dedicate a book to each of her grandchildren, Penelope still has a few more to go to reach this goal, but is motivated by more than that.
"I love the introverted period of just sitting and writing but I also love working with all the other people who I've come to trust to edit and help with the production of it."
Blood Never Lies explores the ideas of epigenesis and how DNA forms and affects us all.
After getting a DNA test with her husband a number of years ago as part of a National Geographic Genographic Project for DNA, it was the findings from her husband's surprising results which inspired the book to be based around Scandinavian Vikings.
"Tied to every strand of DNA, borne in our blood and stamped into every cell of our bodies is a living memory of our ancestors," Penelope writes.
The synopsis reads, "A thousand years have passed since the Vikings raided the coastal villages of Ireland and an Irish healer rescued a Viking warrior from the sea.
"Now, a newly pregnant 21st century woman is reliving experiences from centuries earlier in her dreams. As past and present become inextricably entwined, a tale of violence a thousand years old threatens to repeat itself."
Penelope's historically inspired but modern whodunit novels can be found at Paper Plus, Unity Books and online from Amazon with Blood Never Lies available from October 1.
