Good wishes for the holidays

Just a post to wish everyone 

A Very Happy Christmas

And if you do happen to get a new electronic device in your stocking, or you're looking round for something to read by Boxing Day, then just a reminder that What Happens at Christmas is a romantic suspense - a different kind of Christmas read, and if you fancy some sunshine, Summer in San Remo is in the Choclit bonanza sale at the moment. Just a hint, if you haven't read them yet!

See you in the New Year!

Romantic Suspense for Christmas

Reggie with one of my posh postcards.
He was very impressed,
and it's not easy to impress a unicorn. 

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.


What Happens at Christmas ... well ... that's a bit complicated ...

I wrote the Christmas romantic suspense by accident. It wasn't in the plan. When it went to the publisher it was called To Have Your Heart - a variation of which eventually became the strap line for the cover.

The title What Happens at Christmas was my publishers' suggestion, because a Christmas book has to have Christmas in the title, doesn't it?

Actually it was quite apt, as what happens in What Happens at Christmas does have to stay secret. But the only problem for hero Drew is that it got a bit too secret, and now he's looking for the girl of his dreams, and she seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth ...

I had fun writing the book, and I loved giving Devlin, from Never Coming Home, a cameo role, and I have to admit I fell for Drew in a big way - my unexpected and accidental hero. I also enjoyed setting the book in a beautiful part of my native Wales - the Brecon Beacons. I had to arrange a freak snow storm, because you have to have snow in a Christmas book too, but that's the thing about being a author - you even get to arrange the weather.

The book is out now in e-book, paperback and audio, with a male narrator, which is a first for me, but as a lot of the book, including the opener on the roof of a train, is written from Drew's point of view, it makes sense.

If you're looking for something a little different in Christmas reading, you've just time to get your hands on a copy. If you do, I hope you enjoy it.

You can see all the options HERE

Why I'll never write literary fiction.

Let's face it - I don't have deep thoughts, or a message, or anything like that. I don't even manage to have a theme. I like telling stories. Beginning, middle, end, so I'm stuck with genre fiction. And quite happy, actually. It's what I like to read. I've never got on with highbrow stuff.

I might one day venture into non fiction - the day job, when it is done, has possibilities to be a piece of popular history, if I have the energy to do it, once the thesis is finally finished, and some publisher thinks they want it, but that's a long way away.

I like distinctive locations, and a plot, and a love story and a happy ending. Literary fiction doesn't have to have any of those, so I really wouldn't have a clue what I was doing.

It's the love story that drives the thing, for me. I might murder a few people along the way - all right, maybe a lot of people - and the course of true love never does run smooth (thank you, Mr Shakespeare, or whoever wrote the plays. I'm researching that at the moment as a side issue to the day job, for a very much in the future plot for a romantic suspense. But I digress...) And there is usually a dark moment, before the end, when Hero and Heroine don't look as if they will get together, but then they do. And it all ends happily. That's my contract with the reader. Uplift. And probably a wedding ring.

I have to confess though that I have had a few thoughts lately about killing off a hero or heroine before the end of a book. I don't know where that evil impulse is coming from, or whether I'll ever act on it.

If I did, would that make it literary fiction, d'you think?

Publication day X 2

A book release is a red letter day and this week I am having two, as the paperback of What Happens at Christmas was out on Saturday and the audio version is out today from Isis Publishing.

I've featured in the Choc-lit Advent calendar - if you haven't caught up with that yet - check out the Choc-lit twitter feed. A clue every day and a chance to win a daily prize and something big (lots of books) for the overall winner.

There is an interview on the Female First website, all about the inspirations for What Happens at Christmas. The ones I can identify, that is.

It all started with a lunch with some fellow authors, and there was no alcohol involved ...

The link for the interview is HERE

What Happens at Christmas is on special offer on the Choc-lit Amazon page, if you have not got your copy yet LINK

It has been quite a week.

And what's next?

Well, the next book in the pipeline should be another in the Riviera Rogues series, set in the South of France, once the day job is finally put to bed.

According to Jamie Dornan and Matthew Rhys, Barry Island is the Welsh equivalent of St Tropez, so for the location for the one after that, all I have to do is open the front door. Not sure about the weather though ....

Jamie and Matthew

Celebration of release day - the What Happens at Christmas Location Tour.

The official release day for the paperback and audio versions of What Happens At Christmas is on Saturday 1st December!! (Although there have been some early sightings around the country.) To celebrate I've put together a short location tour of places that feature in the book. Unfortunately none of them involve snow- you'll have to imagine that for yourselves.

The armchair tour is on the Pages spot at the top of the blog. All you have to do is click for a glimpse of  the Brecon Beacons and Chelsea.

I hope you enjoy it. 

Reviving a manuscript

Should you ever try to revive an old manuscript?

When you have been in the Romantic Novelists' Association New Writers' Scheme as long as I was, it is inevitable that you have a lot of  old manuscripts in the drawer - and I mean a lot. Most of them will stay there. One or two might have possibilities if I have time on my hands and plenty of patience. Hah! But there are two I definitely want to go back to. Funnily enough, neither of them are finished. Maybe not so funny - is that the appeal? Unfinished business?

The first is an historical - a Georgian romantic suspense submitted as a partial MS that was my very last NWS submission before I was published - with  a contemporary in the same genre. It got a good report and I would have gone on with it, but then publication happened and it went off to that bottom drawer with the others. I wrote it for fun, but since then it has stayed with me, and ideas for making it a series that will connect to something contemporary have been growing, so I definitely think it is worth another look.

The other one was my first attempt at a contemporary romantic suspense. It got quite a good report. I was usually told I could write, which was encouraging, but there was an awful lot that was wrong. I think, looking back, it suffers from a common fault of inexperienced writers - there are two stories in there fighting with each other, or maybe a story and a half. Too many good ideas and not enough space to put them. It started with a Romeo and Juliet story of young love and tragedy and then resumed with the lovers 15 years later. My reader wasn't happy about that - I remember the comment that the heroine in particular was too young and that her mother was more interesting and the way it was written a reader could easily assume she was the heroine  ... And so on.

I decided to start a new novel rather than try to unpick that one, and I know the next attempt went a lot better - I think it may have eventually turned into Out of Sight Out of Mind, but I'm not sure.

The unfinished manuscript still came back into my mind now and then - there were a lot of things I liked about it and the hero, Luke, was one of my favourites. I can't remember the name of the heroine, but her mother was called Nadine - which might give some credence to the comments of my NWS reader ...I half promised myself I'd  have a look at it again, to try and get out the book that was lurking in the undergrowth. Simplify the story - turn it round so the R&J bit was a flashback interlude - possibly give it a new villain. Or a new motive. And probably get rid of the heroine's mother! She might get her own story in quite a different book.
One day ...

I've been using scrap paper to write on lately and a couple of the pages, when I read them, turned out to be old drafts of that book. I was surprised how good the dialogue still sounded. And I still fancied Luke ... And then I heard a scientific programme on the radio that gave me a lead on a plot point that had been a stumbling block that I hadn't entirely resolved, which I am now researching, and the book is now back on the table.

It will take some work and it's not going to happen soon, but I am certainly promising myself I will have a go. 

And the motto of the story? Never throw anything away.

The use of silence

Writing this in the week when the Armistice that ended World War One was commemorated, when the two minute silence is one of the most universal and poignant parts of any ceremony, has prompted thoughts on the power of silence to a writer. Aspiring - and not so aspiring - writers are told, or reminded, about using all the senses, and hearing can encompass all types of noise, from rain on the roof to opera to the sound of waves on the shore - which can be remarkably noisy, as you learn when you live by the sea. Some writers like to have music while they work, and will make a play list for a particular book. Sounds are very emotive for creating atmosphere - a distant bell, footsteps in an empty corridor, the sound of a door closing, very softly. All creepy, all very simple.

But what about silence? Not easy to convey in a book. Yet we have probably all experienced that feeling when silence has been so strong it almost seems like something you can touch. It can come in an empty, desolate place. It can be significant when there is an absence where there should be a presence - no sound were there should be one, like a heart beat. Silence in a conversation can speak volumes that words don't.

Silence might be a little difficult to convey. It needs some thought. It's not an easy option, but it can be powerful and worth thinking about.

I have two books in the half completed pile, which I am waiting to get back to, that open with a silent house, one an historical, one contemporary. I probably have both of them as neither manuscript is finished - I might have avoided repeating a similar scene if either was published - but I hope as they are different genres it will be OK. It's clearly a scenario that appeals to me. In both cases my protagonist -one male, one female,  is alone in an empty house where they have long memories and associations, and it is the prelude to leaving and beginning a new life, in neither case one that is sought or looked forward to. It is a scene of goodbye, and a certain amount of heartbreak. I hope it is a powerful beginning to the book. In both manuscripts I had to think about the effect of silence - in this case on memory. That absence where there should be presence - a kind of metaphor for all they have lost.

Fingers crossed that they work.

Now I'm keen to get back to them. Soon.