Archive for December, 2006

December 31, 2006 | 8 Comments

Only 12 hours left of 2006 and what a year it’s been. Probably the most exciting of my life of the past 20. Out of the blue, when I was least expecting it, my life has changed.

January - I set aside my first novel, Decent Exposure, unsure what to do with it. No idea of if it will ever be published. In the meantime I write a real weepie romance that makes everyone who reads it, cry, and I get even lower. Am I deluding myself about this writing thing?

February - persuaded by a friend to send Decent Exposure to a top London literary agent. Regret doing so as soon as I’ve sent the email. How did I dare do such a thing?

March - receive email one afternoon. OMG. The literary agent loves my work and sends my book to Headline. EXTREME stress of waiting. Husband takes me and daughter shopping to Oxford to cheer us up as she is fed up and stressed doing final A level study at school. She needs three As and a B to get into Oxford. While we are there, I open book it random in Blackwells to find it has been edited by my *prospective editor*. Eeeeek! Is it a sign or a warning?

April - OMG. Headline buy the book for funky, sexy, super-cool Little Black Dress series. Yayyyyyyyyy!!!!!! I just, to quote Victor Meldrew, ‘don’t believe it’. tell everyone in world. Duckface and Flairy call me. C19 start huge thread. Rosy, Duckface and many others send cards and champagne. I finally realise that Gerard Butler is the hero of Decent Exposure, Will Tennant.

May - off to RNA party in London with (cough) ‘my agent’ and meet cyber-pals Nell and Jess . (Dress: black silk Jigsaw skirt and pink top). After dinne with C19 London posse and one of Richard Gere’s brekkies, I meet my new ed for the first time. She’s great fun, very encouraging and gives me loads of books to read. Leave Headline office in a daze and have to be taken to Starbucks, Euston for coffee and muffin. I go abseiling as research for revisions. My friends raise £150 for LAMRT. (Dress code - see below. Now i know why I NEVER wear purple leggings. my butt is HUGE).

June - daughter takes 5 A levels. Major stress all round.

July - invited to Headline 20th anniversary party in a sweltering HOT London. Take three days to get ready at my age. FYI, I choose teal/bronze Monsoon dress, Jones Bootmaker pointy bronze slingbacks and Betty Jackson beaded clutch, the latter purchased by my daughter from Bullring. My agent (in slinky red cocktail frock) meets my C19 friends before the party which is lovely but surreal. At party am completely awestruck until wine kicks in then can’t shut up. I am introduced to Catherine Alliott, Lorelei Mathias, Martin Neild, Jane Morpeth, tons of agents, editors and booksellers. Everyone is shiny and glam and sparkling (or maybe that’s the wine). I fall out of party to be scooped up by Dulwichgirl in Piccadilly Circus. Party guests shove in me back of her Jag, thinking she is a cab. How she laughed… Dulwichgirl makes tea at 1am as I try to come off the high.

August - Daughter is v poorly with virus/severe migraine and has to go to casualty. Sick with worry. Then tension mounts as we wait outside school for her results. I am quietly confident in her, as she has worked incredibly hard for years for this.

Then

Hurrah! Daughter gets 5 grade ‘A’s, two AEAs and achieves her dream of going to Oxford.

September - see my book for the first time. I am in the bath when Bookpoint courier arrives and I shriek through window, naked and dripping wet. “Waaaittt!” Then I make a fool of myself by bursting into tears when he hands me the box. ( I have clothes on by time I open door to him).

October - launch book with talk at Lichfield library and wine tasting in cellars. Def one of the best days of my life surrounded by family, colleagues, old friends and new C19ers who supported me all the way. Signing over 100 books is a weird experience. Teachers from school, people from running club and many more turn up and I am totally gobsmacked.

Then… daughter goes off to uni. V proud but also major sniffling. House is empty without her and I am here alone a LOT, editing a new book. Somehow, my confidence has hit a post-launch low. As the nights draw in, I am a pain to live with and quite depressed for a variety of reasons, personal and professional. Also have what I think is writer’s block. I wonder if everything has been a fluke. I have had chronic tendonits for six months so can’t exercise or run or even shop by order of physio - my major sources of mood enhancement are denied me and I put on over half a stone by sitting on bum and eating biscuits.

November - bright spots - seeing Decent Exposure on shelves and attending Rosy’s launch party in Cambridge. But generally still making a nuisance of myself to poor OH. Try to visit gym more as tendonitis improves. (Dress code: old trousers with top button undone/old fleece/odd socks and a scowl)

December - daughter home, progress being made in other areas and it’s Christmas. Yay! Reassess my year and try to start 2007 without putting ludicrous pressure on myself. Also plan lots of events, visiting friends in Jan/Feb to get out of house/get a life/ avoid SAD and not get down on myself all the time. Have a variety of book ideas which I am playing with and planning some research. I hope to hear some news in a few weeks but until then, vow to think positive for a change.

New Year’s Eve - Tonight off to a New Year Ball with my OH. (Black velvet Per Una dress and jade sparkly Jigsaw shrug) Let me say that my OH rocks. He’s supported his wife and daughter through a tremendously exciting and stressful year. I love him and my daughter very much and in the end, nothing else matters.

Hope you all have a peaceful, exciting and fulfilling 2007.

December 20, 2006 | 3 Comments

I’d just like to wish everyone reading this blog a very happy Christmas and/or happy holidays. I’ve finally written my cards, done the shopping and we now have a real tree that is way too large and keeps toppling over. Well, it wouldn’t be Christmas without it, now would it?

Meanwhile over at the Little Black Dress site you can win 12 Little Black Dress books in the new competition and also receive free books just by taking in part in the LBD questionnaire.

Nell tagged me with a Four Things which I will get round to doing over the holiday. In the New Year I hope to have news of my next book, scheduled for summer 2007. I’ve got some exciting (for me) research planned too which involves a horsebreeding farm, a sports car maker, a hospice and this man (again).

 

“Well, hello there, vicar… come inside and let me fill your stockings… I hope they’re cotton ones.”

If you are in the UK or can get BBC TV by Satellite, please look out for the Vicar of Dibley last ever episode on Christmas Day. Some of my lucky, lucky C19 friends went to see the filming and I have a sneaky preview here of The Reverend Geraldine’s new neighbour…

So - have a fun, peaceful and happy Christmas and New Year, however you celebrate the season. Don’t forget your LBD’s - and that’s a special request to all the guys who’ve read my book and told me what they think. One I know looks particuarly fab in a frock and heels.

 

Love

 

Phillipa x 

 

PS Visit here now - this is so cool, I think I have frozen knickers.

December 12, 2006 | 5 Comments

Things are looking up this week after a month or so when I feel I’ve shuffled around under a dark cloud. I keep getting new ideas, some of which I have found out recently, may not ’suck’ after all. I have been inspired to book a new year visit to a horsebreeding farm and a very special ‘factory’ by way of research. Also I am still getting lovely comments about Decent Exposure, many from Australians though I did have a saucy  e-mail from my wine merchant and a slightly confused note from the president of the running club. I’m also enjoying seeing the book paired on Amazon with the other LBD’s and Rosy Thornton’s book.

And I finally plucked up the courage to take Julie Cohen ’s first page challenge. Not that anyone is listening now which serves me right for being a coward. Julie said:

I’ve been emailing a friend of mine, an aspiring romance writer, and we were talking about how to create character and conflict from the very first lines of your book. To show her what I meant, I took the first page of two of my books and added notes to show how I tried to portray from line one what these characters were like, and what their problems were.

I thought it might be kind of interesting, and could maybe help other people, so I’m posting them below. I challenge any other writers reading this blog to do the same thing with their first few paragraphs–post them on your blog (or, if you don’t have one, in the comment section of mine, below), and comment on how you create character and conflict right away.

So here goes. I suppose I ought to add a note that Decent Exposure is a single title romance not category and I guess that affects how the opening lines are written. You don’t need your hero, heroine and conflict on the first page (there is a conflict teased in here, but it is only one of the things that keep the hero and heroine apart) but you do need to grab the reader’s attention.
DECENT EXPOSURE

Copyright: LIttle Black Dress Publishing

Excuse me, love,’ said the bearded man in the front
row, ever so politely, ‘did you say naked?’

(Get that word naked in the first line. And bearded? He can’t be the hero, can he? And ever so politely? Could that be a British colloquialism and some extra emphasis to boot? Is the polite man a bit unsure of himself?)

Emma Tremayne clutched her folder of proposals
tighter and smiled a smile that went no further than her
cherry-scented lipgloss.

(She’s nervous and she likes lip-gloss, maybe a bit of stone fruit too.)

‘That’s right, Bob. Naked.’

(She’s not scared of Bob, whoever he is. Or she isn’t going to let on that she’s scared.)

Bob, bald, ruddy-faced and fifty-something, nodded as
if she’d just confirmed the price of a cheese scone in the
local café.

(Time to break the rule of not using too many adjectives in the interests of alliteration and rhetoric. The cheese scone reference tells you that this is the UK and I think that may be bathos – the juxtaposition of manly nudity and scones.Or burlesque because it’s intentional bathos. Or maybe it just shows that this Bob guy doesn’t sweat the small or big stuff: he just might be a hero after all, if not the one we’re waiting for. Note that I haven’t specified the type of cheese though. Too much detail.)

‘You mean without any clothes on?’ murmured a
whippet-like lad whom Emma recognised as a local
builder.

(Whippets are like mini-greyhounds therefore small and lithe. Also slightly timorous, hence the murmured. They have humorous connotations in the UK. You can’t put one down your trousers though, that’s ferrets.)

‘That’s the general idea of a nude calendar, Jason, yes.’
Smiling sweetly, she fixed her eyes on him, then regretted
it as a blush spread to the roots of his hair, competing with
his red curls for colour.

(This lad - a ‘colloquial’ term for young-ish British guys, esp Northern - is hoping the floor is going to open up and Emma is trying and failing to reassure him. Perhaps her good intentions are sometimes ill-advised.)

Now that was odd, she thought, as a dozen faces tried
terribly hard not to look in her direction. If she’d known
how easy it was to turn a roomful of hard-bitten men into
quivering jellies, she’d have tried it years ago. Unfortunately,
right now it was exactly what she didn’t want.

(I’m using Emma’s voice in her pov here. She’s quite posh and earnest so a few Mallory Towers type phrases there. She’s scared them as much as they’ve scared her. And of course, by this point I hope the agent, editor and reader are wondering what on earth she’s up to with all those um… buff guys quivering like jellies - that’s not jam, by the way. Jam doesn’t quiver unless you have got the recipe badly wrong.)

Shortly after this, someone speaks up from the corner. He’s tall, dark and gruff therefore most romance readers will realise he is an Alpha hero. He also likes washing up, listens to Meat Loaf’s Greatest Hits and drinks an obscure brand of Cumbrian beer. So they’ll probably guess he’s not going to arch a cruel eyebrow, pin her to the bed, command his entourage to throw her in his private jet and whisk her off (cruelly) to his Ruritanian shag-pad. Not just yet anyway.
That’s it. XX

Posted by Phillipa in Uncategorized @ 5:23 am

December 8, 2006 | Comments

If you are an aspiring romance author and would like to write for LBD, there are some new submission guidelines on the Little Black Dress site now.
I’ve spent the whole day shopping in the Bullring, Birmingham and picked up some gorgeous Arran Aromatics sets and a pink Elle Sports T-shirt for the gym at TK Maxx, a DVD in Borders and some things I can’t reveal on here.

Oh..and Mitchell and Webb were outrageous, hilarious and we asked their ‘boffins’ a question.

Sr Digby Chicken Caesar and Ginger - two typical British ‘characters’ who run around the streets righting wrongs and searching for extra-strength lager to the tune of The Devil’s Gallop.

Posted by Phillipa in Uncategorized @ 1:14 pm

December 7, 2006 | Comments

I am really excited because I am off to see Mitchell & Webb Live tonight with my student daughter. These young comedians/actors came up through the Cambridge University Footlights and Radio Four and now have a BBC 2 show. Hard to describe what they are: satirical, barmy, hilariously observant and just plain fun. They have a madcap cast of characters, rather like Little Britain but without the gross-out factor and IMHO, they are far wittier. They are also quite cute, in a v. British way. Watch them with a well-developed sense of irony.

When I was a teenager, post Not The Nine o’clock News, I used to think I’d love to write comedy and satire. I feel that kind of moment coming on now. A satirical romance would be fun. In fact, a lot of my writing starts out gently taking the p*** then turns serious, often against my will. Can you have a satirical romance? Wendy Holden anyone? Jenny Colgan? Un petit peu de Rosy Thornton?
Anyway here are the boys

Posted by Phillipa in Uncategorized @ 8:46 am