Winter/Summer Conundrum

Real Life - Breckenridge, Winter

Book Life - Frenchman's Creek, Summer

Greetings! Apologies for the lateness of this blogpost. I could blame it on the fact that I am now The Heroine Addict who is the furthest west. I could blame it on my lack of internet, except it got sorted out this morning. I could but I won’t.

Instead I am putting it down to my head being pulled in two very different directions.

I’m currently working on a YA novel set during two summers in Cornwall. Wonderful I hear you say, nothing is more lovely than a Cornish summer and I agree with you. The only problem I have is that I am thousands of miles away in a ski resort up to my neck in snow.

It is causing a split in my personality. I stare at my laptop and the words conjuror up dark green trees, grey water, blue skies and twisted folk tales. I look up and out the window. It is snow and icicles, blue skies or blizzards, Native American tales and moose on the trails. What is a writer to do?

I’m thinking of stocking up on cider to see if that helps get me in the mood… all for research purposes, you understand.

How do you deal with the conundrum? 

Distractions

Lately I’ve been getting ideas for the book after the book after the next book (!), which is really distracting.  I should just be getting on with the one I’m working on right now, but when you get a good idea, you can’t let it pass by – you just have to jot it down somewhere, anywhere!  Especially if, like me, you can’t remember something from one minute to the next without putting it in writing.  But it’s very annoying.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m enjoying my WIP and haven’t yet hit that “oh-my-god-this-is-such-a-pile-of-cr*p” stage, but those tantalising ideas of future WIP’s won’t leave me alone and every now and then I have to break off what I’m doing, open a new document and write what’s clamouring to come out.

It sounds insane, doesn’t it?  I should be able to control my thoughts, tell them to form an orderly queue and stop jumping it.  I am half English after all, and aren’t the English supposed to be good at queuing?  But maybe my Swedish genes take over in this case, because those ideas just aren’t listening.  Or I have no willpower.  Or something.

Actually, I shouldn’t be complaining, because surely the worst thing for an author would be if you had NO ideas.  None at all.  If your brain was drier than a desert with nothing but tumbleweed blowing through.  That would be nothing short of a disaster.  And that’s why I tend to humour my ideas when they get impatient and won’t wait their turn.  They’re my insurance against the dry season.

Maybe I should give up visiting interesting places?  Because places very often inspire me, especially old ones with an atmosphere of times gone by.  Take for instance Caerleon, in south Wales.  Now, I’ve never wanted to write a book featuring Romans.  I like learning about them and think they were awesome, but I let other people do the writing.  But when I visited what used to be the Roman town of Isca, the atmosphere got to me and those “what if” questions began to crowd my mind ...

I’m supposed to be writing about Japan right now and into my mind pops a Roman centurion.  Very distracting indeed!  I think I’d better go and deal with him ...

The Curious Case of the Beautiful Heroine

I don’t know when I stopped describing heroines. Somewhere along the way between my first book and the middle ones I realized readers usually formed images themselves without my having to describe first-person narrators in detail. I might say what the colour of their hair was, or their age if it was relevant, but anything beyond that was more likely just a passing comment touching on some feature in comparison to someone else.

Celia, the heroine of Season of Storms, looking at her famous actress mother, admits: “She was lovely. I had always thought so, always wished my own eyes could have been as large, my features half as delicate. Instead I’d inherited only her small hands and her allergy to cats.”

And here’s the exchange between David Fortune, the hero of The Shadowy Horses, and the heroine Verity Grey, when they first meet:

“I must say,” he confessed, leaning back again, “you’re not at all as I pictured you.”

Everyone said that. Museum workers, I’d learned, were supposed to be little old ladies in spectacles, not twenty-nine-year-olds in short skirts. I nodded patiently. “I’m younger, you mean?”

“No. It’s only that, with Adrian recommending you, I’d have thought to find someone…well, someone…”

“Tall, blonde, and beautiful?”

“Something like that.”

I couldn’t help smiling. I was, to my knowledge, the only dark-haired woman who’d ever received so much as a dinner invitation from Adrian Sutton-Clarke, and I’d held his interest only until the next blonde had come along.

We later learn her hair is long, and that an eight-year-old boy thinks she’s a “stoater”, but that’s it.

In The Winter Sea, I don’t think I described Carrie at all. And I know in The Firebird the only stray reference to Nicola’s looks was made at the beginning, when she says she’d got her job partly because “I had the proper look [to suit the image of the Galerie St-Croix], the proper pedigree, the right credentials, and I always dressed to fit the part.” And later we learn what her hair colour is when Rob warns her his father has “aye had a liking for blondes.”

But that’s it.

So it fascinates me to no end to see readers remark that my heroines are always beautiful. I won’t quote any particular readers’ reviews because I don’t like doing that—readers are wholly entitled to have their opinions, and authors, in my view, should not interfere with that. But the comments come up with enough regularity to make me wonder why so many people, when faced with a character who isn’t fully described, seem to want to default to the “beautiful”.

Even more fascinating to me is that some readers seem to assume the heroine is beautiful because she manages to attract the romantic attention of one or more men in the small town she travels to, as if beauty alone is the thing that attracts men—as if no man could ever be attracted by a woman’s wit, intelligence, vivacity, or simply the sheer novelty of having her arrive in town. (I grew up in a small town and I’ve travelled to a lot of them and lived in a small village in the west of Wales—believe me when I say you do NOT have to be a beauty to attract attention when you turn up as a stranger in a local pub :-)

The women I see in my mind when I’m writing are never what I would call “beautiful”. Pretty, perhaps, in an ordinary everyday way, but it’s my belief everyone’s pretty to somebody, and the most plain-looking face can become pretty when we have fallen in love with the person behind it.

I’m curious, though: Why do you think some readers, when faced with a blank face, are programmed to fill in the features as “beautiful”?

Forbidden Kisses... (and a giveaway)

Wet Kisses...

As you will remember way back in November we had a party to celebrate the first of my short stories, ‘The Last Kiss’. That was the first of ‘The Kiss Collection’. December saw the publication of ‘The First Kiss’ and today is the turn of my third kiss-themed short story, ‘Lipstick on His Collar’.

This one explores what happens when you kiss someone you shouldn’t… not that any of ‘The Heroine Addicts’ have ever done that. Or, of course, any of you… *coughs* 

But it can happen. Hormones and attraction can over take you and before you know it you are in a situation you could've sworn you would never be in.

So as not to embarrass anyone here, I'm not asking you to share those forbidden kisses. Instead I am asking you to share any memorable kisses you have had. Good or bad.  First, last, forever. The best entry will win signed copies of the lovely Liz Fenwick’s books, ‘The Cornish House’ and A Cornish Affair’ PLUS (hold on to your hats) copies of each of my Kiss stories.

How can you resist?

Please share your stories in the comments, the Heroine Addicts will contribute too. Liz and I will confer (over a glass or two of wine) to decide the winner.

Come on. Don’t be shy, it isn’t like you’ve kissed someone you shouldn’t?

You can download 'Lipstick on His Collar' here or any of the other Kisses here

A Tiny Cameo Role

It’s amazing how a very small addition can sometimes transform a storyline, whether it’s in a book, film or TV programme.  Tiny cameo roles have the power to make a story so much more memorable, even though the character featured doesn’t really influence the plot in any way.  It can be the one thing that sticks in your mind and makes you want to go back time and time again.  For me, this is epitomised by a dog called Sykes.

I’m a fan of the TV series Midsomer Murders which, for those of you who don’t live in the UK, is a murder mystery series set in a group of tiny villages in the English countryside.  Life there seems to be fairly idyllic (apart from the extremely high murder rate!), and it portrays a sort of “olde-worlde” kind of England that reminds you a bit of Agatha Christie or Enid Blyton novels, and times gone by.  It features winding country lanes, little oak-beamed pubs and lovely woodlands covered in bluebells or daffodils.  There are plenty of gorgeous mansions and stately homes too, as well as chocolate-box thatched cottages, but underneath the pretty exteriors lurk some very nasty things.  It’s a great combination and I would watch the programme just for the nostalgia, if nothing else.

(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

The series had run for many years with an Inspector Barnaby in the lead role.  I’m guessing he must have become very tired of it himself, and the episodes were becoming rather stale and “samey” – a change was clearly needed.  So the script-writers decided a new Inspector Barnaby was called for and they very cleverly introduced him as the old one’s cousin.  Not everyone has taken to this new guy, but personally I think he’s doing really well – he has a great sense of humour and started off with a very subtle approach.  But the absolutely best thing about the new programmes is his dog – Sykes.  If anything was guaranteed to bring in new viewers, Sykes was it.

The moment Sykes walked onto the screen, I fell in love.  Apparently, so did a lot of other people.  He only gets about a minute of screen time for each episode, but he totally steals the show.  A scruffy looking terrier of some sort, he’s an extremely clever and talented little actor, who has appeared in countless films (including some with Johnny Depp apparently!).  He also stars in several adverts on TV, all brilliantly done.  He never disappoints and somehow manages to make his expression just right.  Adding him was a stroke of genius.

Are there any other cameo roles that have delighted you in books, films or on TV?  I’d love to know.

(You can watch Sykes in action here on YouTube)

What's the point?

Before Christmas, I did a writing workshop at a school, with some A-level Creative Writing students. They spent an hour coming up with characters, using fun exercises. When I asked them to read their work aloud, I was pleased by how uninhibited these teenagers were as opposed to adult writers. Their characters were bold and surprising, in the midst of dramatic, thrilling stories.

Afterwards, we had a question and answer session and we got talking about how you decide what sort of thing to write. I talked a little bit about how publishers like authors to have a 'brand', so that readers know what to expect when they pick up one of your books. If you've got a publishing contract, I said, your publisher will want you to stay within the same genre and write the same type of books throughout the contract. They wouldn't be happy if you'd been contracted to write a mystery novel, and suddenly you came up with a high fantasy swords-and-sorcery novel without a mystery in it.

'If you can't write whatever you want to write,' said one of the students, 'what's the point in getting published?'

I was taken aback by his question. I'm so used to talking to writers who dream of getting published, who want to know the golden secret of getting published, who work and work and work and try and fail and try again, so that their work will be on a book shelf somewhere. And this student couldn't see the point?

Yet what he was asking was deeply profound. He was asking what was more important: a publishing career or creative freedom? He was asking, why would you create something that isn't exactly what you want to create? He was at the time in his writing journey where the story was what mattered—not who read it, or how much money he could get for it, or what the Amazon reviewers said about it.

Just the story. The story was the point.

I'm ashamed to say I didn't answer him the right way—I was surprised, and I said things about being able to publish different types of stories with different publishers under different names, and about authors taking pseudonyms or changing direction as their careers grew. But what I should have said was:

You're right.

It is so easy to get caught up in the writing business. To worry about contracts and promotion, to jostle for attention and readers and good reviews. It's easy to look at other authors and get jealous because their publishers give them more support, or because they're winning all the awards, or getting better covers, or getting more press attention, or selling more books. It's easy to angst over publishing trends, and the decline of book selling, and the lack of book reviews in major publications.

But the truth is: the story is the point. The writing is the point. The creation is the point.

There's no reason to write anything otherwise.

So I'm going to try to remember that student's words this year, this 2014. I hope that I can.

(There's a thoughtful post on this subject here)