Archive for June, 2008

June 16, 2008 | 10 Comments

Well, I heard back from my agent on my latest, ISHBM (March 2009) and she suggested the odd tweak but on the whole, hurrah (I’m in a puddle of relief on the floor to be honest and think I might have to go out shopping to recover.)

I’ll leave you with a picture of my hero inspiration for ISHBM. After seven months of angst writing this one, I think I can allow myself a treat!

Pic: thanks to Richard Armitage Online.

June 12, 2008 | 2 Comments

You know that book I had a light bulb moment with yesterday - and have almost finished? Well, it’s a good job because it’s up on Amazon for publication March 9th 2009.

Catchy title eh?

June 11, 2008 | 4 Comments

..and one percent inspiration. I don’t think that’s always true about writing a novel. You never can predict the balance, I’ve discovered so far!

But I feel quietly satisfied this morning (for the first time in about six months I might add.) I thought of a way to resolve an issue in the book, that will also ramp up the tension between the characters even more. Just Say Yes, seemed to flow, fully formed from my mind. This book has taken twice as long to write and has gradually layered itself up, evolved and changed.

If you’re a writer, do you find each book develops in a different way or do you generally have a pattern?

On this very subject, there’s a brilliant post by Neil Gaiman here on Susan Hill’s site. Read it now for your own sanity.

June 9, 2008 | 3 Comments

I am still locked away, deep into my honing (ahem) of my latest wip. I sat in the garden all day, proof reading and revising the whole ms. However, I have been alerted to the fact that Nell Dixon now has her debut novel listed on the Little Black Dress website alongside Julie Cohen’s.

So hat’s Liz, Rosy, Nell and Julie and …I can’t wait for my turn with Just Say Yes. It might only be a few weeks before the extract goes up. My opening chapter is …unusual

Go take a look. The other great news is that as of July there are going to be THREE LBD titles out every month, rather than two. How good is that?

June 6, 2008 | 3 Comments

Next to your own book coming out, there’s nothing more exciting that a good friend’s book hitting the shelves. This month Rosy Thornton’s new paperback Hearts & Minds is published by Headline Review.

I read the hardcover last year and I still think and care about the characters and conflicts in this book. Beautifully written, with a finely drawn and memorable cast, Hearts and Minds would make a wonderful choice for a book club or a meaty holiday read. While not a ‘romance’ as such, it has strong romantic elements and if you’ve ever wondered about the weird world of Oxbridge colleges - you couldn’t possibly imagine what actually goes on!

I asked Rosy what it was like, writing about a world so close to home. Has she got into trouble?

They always tell you to ‘write what you know’, don’t they? But if you’re writing a novel, just how close to home is it sensible to go?

I’m lucky enough to work in a Cambridge college (where I try to be sensible during the day, teaching about restrictive covenants and trustees’ investment powers, before going home at night to my secret life writing light fiction). And Oxbridge colleges are the perfect setting for a novel, aren’t they? There’s a long tradition of it. Porterhouse Blue, and all that: they’re perfect target for a bit of knockabout satire. So why didn’t I go for it?

That was what my agent asked, anyway. And I said… well, I work with these people – do I really want to go public taking the mickey out of them? The very thing which makes a Cambridge college so much fun to write about – it’s small, it’s insular, it’s quirky – makes it very hard to work in one whilst publicly sending it up. Nobody will ever speak to me again, I said. I’ll be sued – I’ll be sacked.

But in the end it was just too tempting to resist. For the setting of Hearts and Minds I carefully designed a made-up college (St. Radegund’s) which bore no resemblance to anywhere real. I made sure none of my characters were anything like any of my colleagues. Or at least that’s what I thought.

But of course, when they read it, they ALL imagined it was about them – about us. One ex-colleague rang me up and said, ‘I don’t remember us being that conflicted’. We weren’t, I wanted to shout. It’s fiction – I made it up! Two different friends (one from Cambridge, one from Oxford) have accused me of basing my male lead on two different real people (one from Oxford, one from Cambridge).

Do I mind all this, though? Well, actually, no – I think it’s rather nice, that people see reality in my book. The best moment of all came at a local book signing. In a romantic sub-plot in Hearts and Minds, the student union entertainments officer falls in love with the (young, male) college Dean. There were some undergraduates at the signing, and one of them came up to me and said she could not believe it when she read the novel. She is her college’s entertainments officer – and she has a major crush on the Dean!

The thing is, I think, that it doesn’t matter where you set your book – whether it’s your own office, Regency London or a paradise island in the Pacific. We all want to find ourselves in the pages of fiction; we want to see echoes of our own lives. Whether authors write about what they know or not, readers will always read about what they know.