Elizabeth Player thought it would be a cinch to write a romance novel.

She’d read a lot of them, and done tons of research. To her, the plots seemed pretty formulaic.

And then she tried to put pen to paper.

“It was really hard!” she said. “I cut and rewrote the bedroom scenes, over and over. It was so awkward. There are two sex scenes in my novel — and I agonised over them.”

The 64-year-old’s book, Frog Chorus, came out last October. It follows Bella, an English woman who moves to the island and has an affair with her Bermudian landlord.

The novel is loosely based on the two years Mrs Player and her husband Ray spent here, beginning in 1974.

“We were working in Cornwall, England at the Lamorna Cove Hotel and we met a guy who’d lived and worked in Bermuda in the Sixties,” she said.

“He gave us a list of hotels on the island to apply to and the rest is history.

“Ray was a qualified chef garde manger [pantry chef] and Castle Harbour had an opening.”

Her husband spent a year at the hotel before moving to the Royal Bermuda Yacht Club, where she worked as a secretary.

The Players left in 1976 for Coventry, after their work permits expired, and had two children, Charlotte and Matthew.

They returned to Bermuda for their 30th wedding anniversary, in 2003.

“People warned me that it was going to be very different,” said Mrs Player.

“I didn’t find it changed all that much. The only changes I saw, like the development of the Dockyard, were improvements.”

A decade ago they moved to Penzance, Cornwall and she started a part-time dog grooming business out of a shed in her back garden.

“The children had flown the nest,” said Mrs Player, who writes as Francesca May.

“I finally had time to write. I’d always enjoyed doing it when I was younger.

“I took a writing class. I think everyone has at least one good book in them.”

She started Frog Chorus in 2012.

“It took me about six months to write the first draft,” she said. “Since then it has gone through many changes.

“I sent it off to various publishers and it was rejected about four times.”

She let it languish in a drawer, then resurrected it again in 2015, encouraged by the publication of a few short stories.

“I saw a lot of technical errors, I’d made,” she said.

“So I revised it.”

Then she saw an advertisement by Melange publishers.

“I was interested because lots of places don’t take unsolicited manuscripts,” she said. “It was ages and ages later when I got a letter back that said yes, we’d be interested to see the whole manuscript.”

At the same time she sent a novella, The Girl Who’s Never Had A Valentine. It was published in September, a month before Frog Chorus.

She had little energy to market the book, however. Her husband was diagnosed with tonsil cancer in May; he started chemotherapy last September and is now “doing better”.

On Facebook, she found a site devoted to Bermuda writers, Books Bermuda.

The Bookmart in Hamilton ordered copies of Frog Chorus after seeing information about it there. The novel is also available on Amazon.

So far, sales have been on the slow side.

“I am just happy the book is out there,” she said.