Can you tell us a little about yourself? I know you as a freelance journalist and had no idea you wrote romance fiction. When did you start doing that?
Back in the dawn of time when I graduated from university I decided I was going to quickly write a Harlequin to make some money before embarking on a ‘serious’ writing career. Unfortunately Harlequin didn’t get the memo. They told me that while the story I submitted was well written it didn’t have ‘heart’. Ouch.
Then years later I went back to school to do my master’s degree and in the course of my defense one of my professors asked what I was going to do next. There I was finishing school again so I quipped I was going to write a dirty novel. The subsequent story wasn’t exactly dirty but it did get me back on that same track.

Previously you wrote under a pen name, but Home For Christmas is published under your name. What was behind those decisions?
I published it under the name Barbara Burke (my middle name and my mother’s maiden name) because Denise Flint was a completely different kind of writer. I didn’t want someone looking for a writer to do a serious business piece dismissing me as ‘just a romance writer’ and looking elsewhere. In other words, I completely bought into the whole stigma against romance. I barely admitted that I read romance novels, never mind wrote them.
I agonized over the decision to publish this book under my own name. It seemed a sensible thing to do since I was on my own turf, so to speak, in Newfoundland and I wanted to reach as many people as possible. But it was a big step. My publishers were tapping their fingers and waiting to send it to the printer while I sat around having an existential crisis. Finally I decided that if I was going to be ashamed of what I wrote I shouldn’t be writing it. And if I was going to be ashamed of the genre in which I wrote the same thing applied. So I basically stood up and announced, My name is Denise Flint and I write romances! And you know what? People have been lovely.

Are writing non-fiction and writing romance fiction completely different creative processes, or do they overlap?
I would call them complementary processes. Each one is the antidote for the other. I get a bit squirrelly if I’m just writing non-fiction and need the tempering effect of writing a bit of fiction. And that’s equally true the other way around. Every once in a while I’ll think to myself that I’m just going to concentrate on fiction and leave the rest behind but then I find myself craving that whole process of researching and putting down as accurate an account of something as possible. But too much non-fiction writing sends me screaming into a world I can make up.
I generally write historical fiction, which takes a tonne of research (which is the best part of writing), so they overlap in that sense.

When I read the outlines of the four novellas, I kept thinking, ‘oh, I’ll read that one first – no, that one – ok, that one.” You know how to hook a reader. Can you share a little about the technique of getting the reader quickly into a high-stakes situation?
As far as the outlines of the four novellas are concerned you’ll have to thank my publisher. That’s not what I wrote when I pitched the stories, but I’m glad you found them compelling. I completely panic when someone asks for the elevator pitch. I’ll just shrug and mutter I dunno.  I’m more the kind of person who will sit you down with a bottle of wine and tell the whole story.
I don’t think I have a technique for getting the reader quickly into a high-stakes situation. The story goes where it goes. No tricks.

Christmas wreathe graphic created by Hotel Vedome, New York (1899) taken from Vendel Hotel in New York.

The stories are set in four quite distinct time periods – 1918, 1948, 1978, 2010. What kind of research did, say, setting one in post-WWII Gander, with an aviator heroine, entail?
A sidesways kind of research. A few years ago I wrote a story about a WWII ARP warden. I did a tonne of research for that and during the course of writing it I discovered that she had a cousin who was in the AKA (Air Transport Auxiliary) ferrying planes. She started demanding a book of her own and so I did a lot of research on women pilots in WWII. I haven’t written that book yet, but the research I did for it was the starting point for Kitty Hawk Flies Home. Then I visited Gander and toured the Aviation Museum and the Airport. Naturally I went online to dig up as much information as I could about post-war Gander and I pestered the librarians at the A C Hunter Library for any resources they had. After that I just plunged right in. Tempting as it is you can’t do too much research or you end up not writing the book.
I was more worried about 1978 St. John’s, the setting for The Christmas Tree Wish, because I knew there would be readers who remembered what the Avalon Mall was like then, for example, and who would call me out if I misplaced a store or put one there that didn’t open until the 1980s.

What advice would you give someone interested in writing romances? Are there any absolute no-nos to the genre?
I don’t think there’s any specific advice that applies to writing romances. Good writing is good writing so the process is exactly the same as it is for writing anything else. Put words down as best you can and then keep going over them and improving  the writing as often as necessary until you think you have a finished product. Spoiler: again, just as with any other piece of writing, you don’t really have a finished product. Someone else, or maybe many someone elses, needs to read it first.
There are lots of books and online sites and courses happy to give advice specifically about writing romances and I’m sure many of them are valuable, but I’m kind of old school. I think the best way to learn how to write a romance is to read a lot of romances and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t.
Absolute no-nos? I can only think of one. You need to have a happy ending. Without that it’s not a romance (although it can be a great love story – I’m looking at you Casablanca).