Guest blogger – Christina Jones

January 26, 2010

What better way of brightening up a cold, grey Tuesday with a little Moonshine. I’m thrilled to welcome Christina Jones to the blog.

Chris is a member of the RNA but I hadn’t met her until I randomly bought one of her previous books, Heaven Sent, and it just blew me away. I’ve never read a book quite so full of joie de vivre and I raved about it to my agent. So you can imagine how chuffed I was when Chris became a client of the same agency last year. Anyway here she is to talk about her brand new romantic comedy,

I’m so excited and thrilled to be asked to be a guest-blogger on my-mate-Phillipa’s brilliant blog today. And, as my novel MOONSHINE is published this week, no prizes for guessing what my blog post is about! I have no shame…

MOONSHINE is the sixth in my series of romantic comedy novels all based in a cluster of Berkshire villages. Like Midsomer and their murders, my small rural locale was in danger of becoming a little over-magicked. So, having already dealt with herbal-magic, astral-magic, aromatherapy-magic, firework-magic, and birthday-magic in previous books, I was slightly flummoxed over which particular branch of grounded-but-inexplicable wonderment I could cover next.

I poured a glass of wine to help me ponder the conundrum. And another. And another… And then – there it was! The solution! Slightly fuzzy round the edges – but a solution none-the-less. I’d write about magical wine!

And that’s honestly how MOONSHINE came about. Once I’d got the basic idea, everything else fell into place beautifully. I already had the location – the hamlet of Lovers Knot (just along the road from Fiddlesticks and Hazy Hassocks) – and the main characters (newly-divorced and forced-to-downsize Cleo, and achingly upper-class and waste-of-space Dylan – aka The Most Beautiful Boy In The World) – all I needed was the magic…

Wine, as everyone knows, is pretty magical anyway – especially after several glasses – and I’d dabbled in a bit of home-brewing in my past, so it seemed like a good idea to dust off some of my Nan’s old wine-making recipes (leaving out the ones involving doubtful root vegetables and things-that-needed-a-lot-of-washing) and do a bit of research. After the neighbours had recovered, I knew which ones I could safely use in MOONHINE without causing too much – er – distress.

As a result, Cleo in MOONSHINE concocts Razzle Dazzle Damson, Blackberry Blush, Plum Pucker and Sloe Seduction among others. Each wine has a different magical effect on the lovely-but-mad residents of Lovers Knot as they celebrate their annual Harvest Home.

Of course, Cleo isn’t a witch, so there had to be some other element to make the wine magical – and this was another easy part. The magic ingredient was the water collected from the local waterfall – Lovers Cascade. I’ve been fascinated by waterfalls all my life (have spent many happy hours dragging a damp and grizzling family under yet another torrent) and must admit to going a bit OTT with Lovers Cascade, making it the grazing place of unicorns and orcs. Sadly, this was lost during the editing process….

As I always use lots of my own life in my novels, the wine-making and the waterfalls aren’t the only “true” bits in MOONSHINE. Oh, no… I made poor Cleo live in a mobile home on a caravan site surrounded by the biggest bunch of eccentrics outside Royston Vasey. Yep – been there, done that. Living in a caravan brings a host of problems – and Cleo meets them all.

And then there was the class thing…

As I grew up in a council prefab, but went to a pretty posh grammar school where several of my class-mates had titles, and also once worked as a skivvy for someone who owned an entire county and regularly flew chums for lunch in Juan les Pins and dinner in Monte Carlo “on a whim”, this was something else I felt I could tackle with some authority. Unfortunately, Cleo can’t. Dylan being very, very upper-class, and Cleo well aware that she isn’t, causes all manner of conflicts – all grist to the romance-writer’s mill. But of course, this being a feel-good rom-com, Dylan isn’t all he appears to be, and Cleo learns that jumping to conclusions always leads to a fall – if you’ll pardon the strangulated and mashed metaphors.

So – in a nutshell, that’s how MOONSHINE came into being. A lot of my own life, a whole splodge of imagination, and of course – just a touch of magic…

Comments

1. On January 26th, 2010 at 2:18 pm
   Debs Says:
   

   I loved all Christina’s books and this was truly fabulous.

2. On February 7th, 2010 at 3:53 pm
   Phillipa Says:
   

   Reading it now – it’s fabulous.

3. On September 23rd, 2010 at 11:07 am
   Clark Reddington Says:
   

   Nice writing. You are on my RSS reader now so I can read more from you down the road.