Like a lot of writers, I think, I  have to juggle being a novelist with another ‘day job’ - in order to pay the mortgage and feed the kids. Sometimes this can be frustrating, when all I want to do is hide in the garden shed (where I write) and live in my head! But I’m lucky that my parallel life is often great fun. Last Saturday was one of the best of those times.

I help with publicity for the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Opened just eight years ago, the Arboretum comprises 150 acres of trees, gardens and memorials, including the towering Portland stone walls of the Armed Forces Memorial, honouring the 16,000 servicemen and women who have died on duty, or as a result of terrorism, since shortly after the end of the Second World War. It is an extraordinarily dramatic and moving monument and the arboretum itself is a beautiful and tranquil place.

Though there is one day a year when it’s a little less tranquil!

It has become the destination for Ride to The Wall – the event that involves several thousand motorcycles converging on the site for a special memorial service.

When the organisers floated the idea of having live music at the event, I suggested my husband’s band, so he, me and the whole family headed up to Staffordshire at the weekend.

The band set up outside the chapel. The weather was perfect, soft, golden autumn sunshine. The band’s guitarist arrived just after ten o clock and said that it was a rather scary experience driving up the M6,  and looking in his rear view mirror to see a fleet of Harley Davison’s on his tail! The bikes gathered at Drayton Manor and, escorted by the police, began arriving from eleven o clock.

It was a truly awesome and surprisingly very emotional  sight (and sound) to see  (and hear) them cruising in, flags flying and engines rumbling. I am not a biker, (though my biker jacket is my favourite  fashion accessory) but there is something very stirring about the sound of a Harley!

Last year, the first Ride to the Wall, there were 2,500 bikes. This year more than twice that number were expected, and over 7,500 turned up. They kept coming …and coming.  By midday there were bikes lined up as far as the eye could see, parked along every path, avenue and verge, the sun glinting on chrome for miles.  And leather and tattoos everywhere. This could have felt rather threatening but it was the loveliest, friendliest atmosphere imaginable. It was a moving sight to wander amongst the oddly incongruous crowd - bikers mingling with soldiers in red berets and aging war veterans displaying their medals.

The service, on the steps of the Armed Forces Memorial, led by TV celeb Lionel Fanthorpe, was followed by a Spitfire flypast.

Maybe it’s because my Dad was a Lancaster bomber navigator and my strongest childhood memories revolve around air shows and aircraft museums. Maybe I have watched too many black and white war movies of the Battle of Britain , but the sound of a Merlin engine makes me want to cry.

The spitfire flew amazingly low.  I had never seen an airborne one up so close, and it sent a shiver down my spine. The Harley and the Spitfires have much in common, I think  – machines with soul.

And a fitting tribute.

Like a lot of writers, I think, I  have to juggle being a novelist with another ‘day job’ - in order to pay the mortgage and feed the kids. Sometimes this can be frustrating, when all I want to do is hide in the garden shed (where I write) and live in my head! But I’m lucky that my parallel life is often great fun. Last Saturday was one of the best of those times.

I help with publicity for the National Memorial Arboretum in Staffordshire. Opened just eight years ago, the Arboretum comprises 150 acres of trees, gardens and memorials, including the towering Portland stone walls of the Armed Forces Memorial, honouring the 16,000 servicemen and women who have died on duty, or as a result of terrorism, since shortly after the end of the Second World War. It is an extraordinarily dramatic and moving monument and the arboretum itself is a beautiful and tranquil place.

Though there is one day a year when it’s a little less tranquil!

It has become the destination for Ride to The Wall – the event that involves several thousand motorcycles converging on the site for a special memorial service.

When the organisers floated the idea of having live music at the event, I suggested my husband’s band, so he, me and the whole family headed up to Staffordshire at the weekend.

The band set up outside the chapel. The weather was perfect, soft, golden autumn sunshine. The band’s guitarist arrived just after ten o clock and said that it was a rather scary experience driving up the M6,  and looking his rear view mirror to see a fleet of Harley Davison’s on his tail! The bikes gathered at Drayton Manor and, escorted by the police, began arriving from eleven o clock.

It was a truly awesome and surprisingly very emotional  sight (and sound) to see  (and hear) them cruising in, flags flying and engines rumbling. I am not a biker, (though my biker jacket is my favourite  fashion accessory) but there is something very stirring about the sound of a Harley!

Last year, the first Ride to the Wall, there were 2,500 bikes. This year more than twice that number were expected, and over 7,500 turned up. They kept coming …and coming.  By midday there were bikes lined up as far as the eye could see, parked along every path, avenue and verge, the sun glinting on chrome for miles.  And leather and tattoos everywhere. This could have felt rather threatening but it was the loveliest, friendliest atmosphere imaginable. It was a moving sight to wander amongst the oddly incongruous crowd - bikers mingling with soldiers in red berets and aging war veterans displaying their medals.

The service, on the steps of the Armed Forces Memorial, led by TV celeb Lionel Fanthorpe, was followed by a Spitfire flypast.

Maybe it’s because my Dad was a Lancaster bomber navigator and my strongest childhood memories revolve around air shows and aircraft museums. Maybe I have watched too many black and white war movies of the Battle of Britain , but the sound of a Merlin engine makes me want to cry.

The spitfire flew amazingly low.  I had never seen an airborne one up so close, and it sent a shiver down my spine. The Harley and the Spitfires have much in common, I think  – machines with soul.

And a fitting tribute.

I have written a diary almost every day since I was about 8 years old,  but it seems I’m not nearly so prolific when it comes to blogging! It’s a habit I suppose, and one I’ve not quite got into yet. I can’t believe my last update was about a month ago - a lot has happened since then.

There was a party to launch Lady of the Butterflies to start with. It was held at Jaffe and Neale bookshop in Chipping Norton and I can’t thank Polly and Patrick, who own the bookshop, enough for making it such a lovely and enjoyable event. The shop looked so pretty, decorated with butterflies and we had butterfly cakes to eat too! It was totally overwhelming to see huge displays of Lady of the Butterflies, not least because I think Preface have done such a wonderful job with the jacket. The onscreen image of it does not do nearly enough justice to the lovely glitterly gilding round the edge, nor to the gown. (I think I first fell in  love with history as  a child partly because of the pretty dresses, so this is very important!) My own little daughter dressed up as a butterfly for my party, complete with wings, ‘feelers’ - and a wand! A fairy butterfly, then.

I was persuaded to do a reading, which I’m normally completely happy to do, but it is slightly more daunting when faced with a shop full of familiar faces.  Rosie de Courcy, my editor at Preface, made a lovely speech, which I found very moving because she very kindly compared Lady of the Butterflies to Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘The King’s General’ which, as you’ll see from my first blog, is one of my favourite books. I still have the original copy which my Mum bought for me for £1.35 in 1974. Rosie also told a very amusing story about how she had to read ‘Lady of the Butterflies’ against all adversity, battling with a printer which would only churn out ten pages at a time. It was a long manuscript of  660 pages, so perseverance was required! 

It was lovely to see people at the party who have played such a part in giving Lady of the Butterflies wings. Rosie, and my agent, Broo Doherty, who gave me so much support  and encouragement while I was writing it, and then was responsible for finding it such a wonderful home at Preface. Also Louise from Butterfly Conservation, with whom it is my great privileged to work to help raise awareness of the plight of Britain’s butterflies and make sure that future generations can enjoy them just as Eleanor Glanville did.

A couple of days after my launch, I went to Bath, since Somerset is where the book is set, and signed copies in Toppings and Mr B’s which are wonderful independent bookshops in which I was quite happy to browse for hours.

What else? I went to BBC Broadcasting House to record an interview for Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, which is due to be transmitted this week. This was a rather surreal experience for me, because I worked at Broadcasting House (or BH as we called it) for 10 years when I was in the press office at Radio 1. In fact, I slept there on a regular basis! The great thing about BH is that since the BBC broadcasts through the night, the building is open 24 hours, which  meant that when me and my friends and fellow Radio 1 rock chicks went to gigs and missed the last train home, which we often did, we were not left wandering the streets. We became well known for keeping duvets stuffed under our desks for just such an occasion. Those were the days! I’m still a rock chick at heart, and I think it’s my leather biker jacket that must have prompted Jane Garvey, who interviewed me for Woman’s Hour, to comment that I didn’t ‘look very Cotswold’! The interview was fun. Though I think I talk too much!

Which is just what I’m doing now, probably. So I shall end, by saying that I did another signing in the Cotswold Bookstore in Moreton-in-Marsh on Saturday. I was made to feel very welcome by Tony and all the staff. We enjoyed more butterfly cakes, made by loyal customers, and there beautiful butterfly decorations that had been cut out and painstakingly hand glittered by Nina.     

Now I am off to do a talk in Perton, which is near Wolverhampton, I think!

I’d not been to the Isle of Wight since I was about seven, when my family regularly holidayed in Ventnor, but now I have been back twice in one month!

The reason for these visits is that I have written a novel about  Eleanor Glanville and the butterfly that is named after her is only now found (in the UK) on the Isle of Wight.  And….it is only to be found there during a few short weeks in early summer….when the sun shines, and if the colony does not decide to shift itself overnight, that is!

Both of my trips involved a BBC film crew.

One of the other writers looked after by my agent, Broo Doherty, is Stephen Moss, whose beautiful ‘Bumper Book of Nature’ was launched in the Spring, and it was Broo’s brilliant idea that I should come along to Stephen’s launch party at the Natural History Museum to meet him. He is also a producer at the BBC Natural History Unit, works on The One Show, and was interested in taking me over to the Isle of Wight with a film crew to ‘meet’ Eleanor’s Glanville Fritillary for the first time.

I had a lovely time at the launch party, and when I went to Bristol to discuss the film with Stephen. There then followed various discussions with an Isle of Wight butterfly enthusiast, Ian Pratt , as to when the butterflies were likely to emerge and when would be a good time to film them.

 A date was set and ferry tickets were booked. The Isle of Wight has more hours of sunshine per day than anywhere else in the UK, apparently, but we happened to have picked a couple of days when the weather forecast was dire – solid heavy rain. So the trip was postponed to the following week.

Fortunately, the sun then came out, gloriously, as did the butterflies. Given that they are one of the UK’s rarest species, I’d been expecting to see one or two, if we were lucky. I was totally unprepared to see swarms of them, mating, basing and generally flitting about as butterflies do. Nor did I expect them to be quite so pretty. I’d seen pictures, but they failed to convey their exquisite delicacy and the vibrancy of the colours – orange and black with an almost luminous rim of white, and a shimmery, silver underwing.

 They performed beautifully for us, and I had the best time I’ve had in ages. As a writer, I don’t get out much, but I used to work for the BBC in a former life, so it was a particular treat to hang out by the sea at Wheeler’s Bay with the film crew, and with presenter, lecturer and explorer, George McGavin, who is The One Show’s resident bug man. He was a delight to work with, funny and charming, enthusiastic and passionate and wonderfully eccentric -  just how I’d imagined Eleanor Glanville being when I was writing about her, in fact.

 There are no portraits of her (that I know of), so her butterflies are the closet we can get to her in a way. And thanks to George, I was able to get really close! He clearly has a way with insects (just like Eleanor, he has several named after him after all) and he cajoled one of the little Fritillaries to sit obligingly on his finger!

 I was undecided whether or not just to move to the island for the month, since BBC Inside Out, the regional news programme for the south, had also contacted me wanting to film a piece about the Glanville Fritillary, and  date was set for the week after the One Show filming.

This time the presenter was Matthew Oates, National Trust Conservation Officer and butterfly expert. We found a colony of Glanville Fritillaries on the cliffs at Compton Bay, but when we came to film the next morning, they had vanished. Butterfly collectors in Eleanor’s day were viewed with great superstition and suspicion, accused of sorcery and witchcraft and necromancy, because butterflies were thought to represent the souls of the dead and were put forth as proof that alchemy was possible. Matthew decided that there must be some witchcraft at work! But we did find one pretty newly emerged butterfly to film at Compton and returned to Wheeler’s Bay to film some more. This visit coincided with a rather spectacular immigration of Painted Lady butterflies and I also saw my first Clouded Yellow.      

 After the filming was over, my husband three young children - one of whom is the same age I was when I last visited the Isle of Wight - joined me on the beach and we had a lovely time body-boarding and building sandcastles.

 The One Show feature will be broadcast on 27 July and Inside Out in September.

My novel Lady of the Butterflies opens with the lines 'They say I am mad and it must be true. Look. can't you see? There are butterflies, bright, orange butterflies, even though it's night, even though it's November?' Which is funny, as I was challenged with the task of filming butterflies in winter to promote it!

My publishers said it would be great to have a short promo trailer on youtube and my website, which sounded a great idea. My husband Tim is a video producer and he is also a composer so that meant we could have some clever camerawork and lovely atmospheric music. He also plays in a band with a rocking rector who was happy to give permission for us to film in his lovely old seventeenth century wool church, AND to play the part of the vicar on scrreen! So far so good! Only trouble was, you can't have a trailer about a book about a lepidopterist without featuring any butterflies. Existing footage of them flitting about on flowers was OK, to a point, but what we really needed was some interaction with them.

Thanks to the wonders of Google, I tracked down a company called Gribbly Bugs who supply butterflles for release at weddings. Obviously they had the same seasonal issues, but had some red admirals and painted ladies living in a heated barn and very kindly dispatched them to me. They performed beautifully, bless them, sitting on my hands and fluttering about by our own rather picturesque mullion windows. The best thing was, since it was way too cold to set them free, we got to keep them as house pets, feeding them sugar solutions and pieces of fruit until they died a peaceful death. I felt like a 'lady of the butterflies' myself.

And we had great fun shooting the rest of the movie too. The owner of Eleanor Glanville's real manor house on the Somerset Levels gave us permission to film in the house and on the land, and in a real Hitchcock moment, I got to star...in my wedding dress. (I have always had a thing about period costumes, fortunately, and since I married on Christmas Eve, I chose a midnight blue gown rather than white, which came in very usesful.

You can view the results on youtube - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lhCa5lKpwic

And at www.fionamountain.com. 

Hope you enjoy it!

Xx Fiona

As my new novel is called Lady of the Butterflies and is being launched in the summer, I was thrilled to see that Female First have flagged butterflies as THE fashion trend for the season. Apparently Barbie's New York Fashion Week show was awash with them, and where Barbie goes, the rest of us follow, apparently! Other celebrities taking to the wing include the TingTings' Katie White who wore a butterfly embellished top to the Brit Awards and Liv Tyler who was seen sporting a butterfly print dress.

Butterflies have long been regarded as symbols of hope, which makes them the perfect pick-me-up and antidote to all the doom and bloomin’ gloom that we are currently confronted with everywhere we turn – so wear butterflies on your dress or escape to another world with a lovely romantic novel about a great seventeenth century butterfly collector (can’t resist the shameless plug).  Good on you Barbie, I say! 

I’m a historical novelist, not a children’s author, but as I have four young children, I am sometimes approached (or kindly nominated by my kids!) to visit schools and talk about writing…or history, when the syllabus happens to focus on one of the  periods in which my novels are set.

Last Thursday, being World Book Day, I was invited to the local secondary school to talk to an English literature and language class of pupils from Years 9 and 10 (which I think makes them about 13-14). They’d all prepared questions beforehand and since the questions of children are famous for being direct (sometimes brutally so!), wide-ranging and for coming at thing from a fresh angle, the answers seemed as good a theme for an introductory blog as any.

Did you always want to be a writer?

I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to be Kate Bush or Emily Bronte – knew I wanted to write ‘Wuthering Heights’ but wasn’t sure if it should be as a pop song or a novel! My husband is a musician, and reliably informs me that I’m tone deaf, so song writing was a bit of a non-starter.

How old were you when your first book was published? 

29. But I started writing my first book, ‘Isabella’, when I was 25. It is about the Mutiny on the Bounty and  I loved the story so much that I kept re-drafting it until it was good enough.

Where do your ideas come from?

Real events or people form history are usually  my starting points. My latest novel, ‘Lady of the Butterflies’, is the story of Lady Eleanor Glanville, who lived in the seventeenth century. She was mentioned in a footnote of a book I was reading about butterflies – all it said was that she had her will overturned by her family on the grounds that she was insane for being interested in butterflies. And that she found happiness from natural history in the midst of great personal sorrow. I knew immediately that I had to write her story.

Do your family ever appear as characters in your books?

Not as themselves exactly. But I think most writers use elements of people they know as the basis of characters for their stories.

Roald Dahl wrote in a shed. Where do you write?

In a shed also. But it’s nowhere near as pretty as Roald Dahl’s. Literally a garden shed, and for a long time I shared it with the kids bikes and scooters.

How many hours a day do you write?

Normally about 8, but if I’m feeling particularly inspired I have been known to do 17! My children kindly bring food and drink to the shed to keep me going. 

How important is a first line?

Very. Mainly because it gets you over that scary situation of having a blank page. But from a reader’s point of view it can hook you straight away. One of my favourite books has a really famous first line. Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’ …..’Last night I dreamed I went to Manderley again.’

Do you judge books by their covers?

I think everyone does, which is why publishers are so keen to get the cover just right. Book jackets need to let readers know what kind of book they are going to be reading. My new novel has the most beautiful cover, dramatic, romantic and mysterious.

What is your favourite novel?

I’d have to name about ten. ‘Rebecca’ would certainly be one. And ‘The King’s General’, also by Daphne Du Maurier.  ‘Wutehring Heights’, ‘Gone with the Wind’ and ‘Katherine’ by Anya Seton too.

Do you write in silence or listening to music?

In silence. But I listen to music for inspiration and every book I write has a kind of soundtrack of music that I listened to constantly while thinking about scenes. I used to work for Radio 1 and am still a bit of a rock chic. There’s a Scandinavian symphonic rock band called Nightwish who I find particularly inspiring as their songs are extraordinarily dramatic and powerful.

Have any of your novels been made into movies?

Not yet sadly. But two of my books have been optioned by Leonard Goldberg (who produced Charlie’s Angles) so here’s hoping.

How much money have you made?   (Told you kids were blunt!)

Not enough to mean I can retire!

How do you do your research?

Reading books, online, visiting places where scenes are set, talking to experts.

Do you do a story plan before you start and do you know the ending?

I try to. But my plans are very flexible. I change them as I go along.

Why do you write?

Because there’s nothing else I can imagine doing and because it makes me a much nicer person to be around!

Do you have to be interested in the subjects you write about?

Definitely. I couldn’t have written ‘Lady of the Butterflies’ unless I was interested in butterflies and the seventeenth century. You have to love your characters too.

Does your book have any passion and death in it? 

Lots of passion. Death by poison and from ague (seventeenth century name for malaria which killed loads of people in England during this period.)