Celebrate the release of WHERE THE RIVER BENDS with author Elsa Winckler!

Thank you for the opportunity to be on the Tule blog today, it’s such a privilege for me to be talking to all of you about my new release, Where the river bends.

First of all, a heartfelt thank you to the Tule team and the lovely Jane Porter who were willing to publish this story. I live in South Africa and was fortunate to meet Jane and her husband when she attended the conference of the Romance Writers Organisation of South Africa last year as our keynote speaker. She spoke from the heart, taking us all on her writing journey. It was such an inspiration to listen to how she persevered and how she triumphed. We all found her so down to earth and easy to talk to. So when looking for a publisher for this story, I decided to contact her – and I’m so glad I did.

I grew up listening to stories about the unexplained and when browsing around in a bookshop one day, I found a book on South African ‘ghost stories.’ I was immediately intrigued and a vague idea began to take shape.

It was also during this time that our beautiful daughter had the courage to walk away from an abusive marriage. It was a difficult time for us as a family, we were all bewildered and hurting and this story was a way for me to try and deal with what our child was going through.

While online looking for something completely different, I came across an article about the Canadian involvement in the Anglo Boer War and the nurses who accompanied the regiment on a boat to South Africa.

At school, we did a little bit of history about this war in which so many young, brave men on both sides had died, but I wanted to know more and started reading about this sad part of our history again. I found the Battle of Paardeberg particularly interesting. It had such a heartbreaking ending but so many ‘what if’ questions wouldn’t leave me alone.

When trying to come up with a hero worthy of our heroine, I made him an extreme sports athlete – with a weakness.

So all these seemingly unrelated things came together to become part of Kalinda and Zach and Suzie’s story.

My sincere hope is that you will enjoy reading about their journey as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I have been reading love stories for as long as I can remember and when I ‘met’ the classic authors like Jane Austen, Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James The Brontë sisters, etc. during my Honours studies, I was hooked for life. 

I married my college boyfriend and soul mate and after 43 years, 3 interesting and wonderful children and 3 beautiful grandchildren, he still makes me weak in the knees. We are fortunate to live in the picturesque little seaside village of Betty’s Bay, South Africa with the ocean a block away and a beautiful mountain right behind us. And although life so far has not always been an easy ride, it has always been an exiting and interesting one! 

I like the heroines in my stories to be beautiful, feisty, independent and headstrong.  And the heroes must be strong but possess a generous amount of sensitivity. They are of course, also gorgeous!  My stories typically incorporate the family background of the characters to better understand where they come from and who they are when we meet them in the story.