Category Archives: Writing

A PUBLISHER’S YEAR: OCTOBER – AWARDS, ASSOCIATIONS AND AUDIOBOOKS

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Hello and welcome to the next Sapere Books instalment! Lots of exciting things have happened over the past few months. In August I worked with Simon and Schuster’s Sara-Jade Virtue to judge the RNA’s annual Joan Hessayon Award for New Writers. The books we read were all very different and very worthy nominees, but luckily we were unanimous with our winner: The Lost Village by Lorna Cook.

September also saw the whole Sapere Books team attend the Independent Publishers Guild Autumn Conference. The IPG has a wealth of resources for publishers and arranged fantastic talks for the conference. One area it has led us to mull over is audiobook publishing. We have come to the conclusion that it is too expensive for us to experiment with at the moment, but we will certainly be pitching all of our books to audio publishers both in the UK and the US to try and secure publishing deals. We did actually get approached by Tantor Media last month, and we have sold the audio rights to them for the first three books in J C Briggs Charles Dickens Investigations series, which is exciting!

At the beginning of this month we hosted one of our semi-annual author meet-ups. It is lovely to spend some time with our authors face to face, and to encourage all our authors to get to know one another. Everyone is spread out all over the country, and not all of them belong to genre-specific groups like the RNA and CWA, so it feels good to have informal catch ups to discuss industry news, writing projects – and life in general!

Last week the team attended the Crime Writers’ Association Gala Dinner, which happens every year to reveal the winners of their prestigious Dagger Awards. We are the current sponsor of their Historical Dagger, which had already been whittled down to six fantastic books, but I have to say S G MacLean was a very worthy winner for her third Seeker novel, Destroying Angel.

We also have some exciting company news to share. If you have been following these blog posts, you will know that we had been actively looking to sign up some historical nautical fiction. Well, I can know officially announce that we have signed Justin Fox, represented by the Aoife Lennon-Ritchie to our list. Justin is working on a series of novels set in the second world war around the South African Cape, and we hope to publish the first one next year.

As always, we’ve been busy publishing lots of fantastic books. New series we have launched include the Inspector James Given series by Charlie Garratt – traditional English murder mysteries set in the lead up to the Second World War; the DI Jemima Huxley series by Gaynor Torrance – a troubled female detective struggling to stay sane while solving complex murder cases; and the DS Hunter Kerr Investigations by Michael Fowler – a crime team solving serial killer cases in Yorkshire. We’ve also launched two psychological thrillers by Gillian Jackson – ABDUCTION and SNATCHED – which are receiving fantastic reviews on Amazon and Goodreads.

We also focussed on publishing more ‘backlist’ titles. We recently signed up Dorothy Mack’s Regency romance backlist, which were first published in the 1980s/90s. The first one, THE SUBSTITUTE BRIDE is selling particularly well at the moment. And we have just starting reissuing Alan Williams’ historical thrillers, with his Cold War espionage novel, GENTLEMAN TRAITOR, out this month.

Amy

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: TRACY REES ON WISE WOMEN

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When I first met Tracy Rees on Twitter I had a real fan girl moment – The Hourglass was one of my favourite books. I plucked up courage to ask her to write a piece for Frost, little imagining that during the subsequent exchanges of emails, she’d turn out to be everything she writes about below and more.

 

I always imagined that if I were ever published, it would be with something niche, perhaps something literary or quirky. Instead I find myself writing commercial women’s fiction (historical so far, but watch this space…) and I feel incredibly lucky. It’s a wonderful genre: accessible, comforting, profound and escapist all at once. And it’s a wonderful community; there’s something very special about the bond between women writers, at any stage of their journey.

As women, we have particular challenges, I think, in addition to those of our craft. Even today – and I certainly consider myself a modern woman – there is something in women (Nature or nurture? Probably both) that constrains us to care for the needs of others before ourselves. I certainly don’t mean that men aren’t caring because I only have to look at my own father and partner to know how amazingly kind men can be. But in women there is something that makes us feel guilty and unbearably stressed if we:

  • switch off from thinking about other people
  • pursue a pastime that often seems to have no measurable purpose
  • turn the phone off and spend hours alone, staring into space

Photo credit: Phil Lewis

And what is writing if not a taskmaster that demands all of the above?

Yet if we don’t try, how will we ever know what we’re capable of? What our strange fragments of story ideas might become? How far along our writing journey we might go if we give it our best shot? Exploring our dreams as far as possible makes us happier, fuller people, which in turn allows us to help and support others.

My mother, a true-blue bookworm, was the earliest cheerleader of my writing dreams. But support from fellow women-writers comes in many forms, from comforting cuppas to celebratory glasses of bubbly, from long, in-depth conversations to a hastily dashed-off email in an hour of need. When I was first published I didn’t know any other authors and I felt desperate for people who understood. That’s all changed now and I value it more than I can say, so much so that I’ve launched an appraisal and mentoring service. I love helping people and it’s hugely satisfying to be part of that chain of experience and knowledge, one to another.

There are long-established writers who encouraged me early in my career when I was struggling with unfamiliar challenges. There are writers a few years behind me, coming to terms with the demands of being a professional author. And there are aspiring writers, still discovering all the joys of writing, as well as the more gruelling aspects (Chocolate biscuit, anyone?). We are all a community and the friendship of those who understand what we are trying to achieve is a magic that keeps us going.

There are wise women in all my books, from the alarming Mrs Riverthorpe in Amy Snow, to mystical Old Rilla in Florence Grace to Gwennan (aka Gran) in The Hourglass. In my latest book, Darling Blue, the three protagonists, Blue, Delphine and Midge, are each struggling to find their way. By pooling their wisdom and uniting in friendship, they are able to guide each other and achieve more than they ever could alone. Which is exactly what I’m talking about here.

www.tracyrees.com

Twitter @AuthorTracyRees

Instagram @tracyreesauthor

Tracy Rees always wanted to be a writer. She first worked in medical publishing, then as a counsellor for people with cancer and their families, but like many writers has had many other jobs along the way. A Cambridge graduate, Tracy lives on the Gower Peninsula but divides her time between Wales and London, where her partner lives.

 

SISTER SCRIBES: SUSANNA BAVIN ON A CHANGE OF NAME

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In common with many women, I have gone through the process of a name change. I have twice gone through the hassle of changing my surname. Incidentally, if ever you have to send away your marriage certificate, do include in your covering letter a specific instruction that the certificate should be returned to you after the admin people have finished with it. Some years ago, I blithely sent off my marriage certificate… and it wasn’t returned. Not only that, but no one in the office could track it down. In the end, it transpired that someone had stashed it away in the safe – and all because I hadn’t given a specific instruction to return it!

Anyway, I am in the process of having another change of name, but this time it is to introduce a new pen name – Polly Heron – and it’s because I have a new publisher – Corvus, which is the commercial fiction imprint of Atlantic Books. The Corvus list includes women’s fiction, romance, historical fiction, sci-fi, crime and thrillers. As a saga writer, I’m not sure whether I come under ‘historical’ or ‘romance.’ Possibly a bit of both.

My first book for Corvus is the start of a series. Both the series and the first book are called The Surplus Girls. So who were the surplus girls, exactly?

They were the generation of young women, who, after the Great War, were left without the possibility of marriage, because of the appalling death toll exacted on the battlefields. This was at a time when marriage to a man who could support you and the children you would have, was pretty well universally regarded as the correct and desirable aim for any girl. So these young women, whose possible husbands had perished, found themselves – unexpectedly and without preparation – in the position of facing a future of providing for themselves. Not only that, but no woman could hope to earn as much as a man, even a man doing the same job (sounds familiar?).

Writing about the 1920s is something I have done before, in two of my books written as Susanna Bavin – The Deserter’s Daughter and A Respectable Woman. Although the decade was all but a century ago, to me it feels very close. My parents weren’t exactly spring chickens when they had their children and they were themselves born in the 1920s, so it is an era I grew up hearing about when family tales were told and, of course, I have family photographs as well.

It is in some ways perhaps a bit odd to write about surplus girls in the context of a saga in which, by definition, the heroine will end up with the hero and therefore no longer be a surplus girl, but I hope I have also conveyed both the universal shock and sorrow that pervaded society at the loss of such a large number of men and also the way that these losses brought the lives of individual girls and women into a new, sharper focus as they faced life on their own.

Free Poetry Book To Celebrate National Poetry Day

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poetry, poetry book, poems, women authors, Scottish writers, poetry book, female writers,Today is National Poetry Day and to celebrate you can get a copy of What Do You Think? A collection of poetry from Catherine Balavage, Frost Magazine’s owner and editor-in-chief. One of her poems is below.

 

Loved person

Broken promises I knew you could not keep
You only ever tried to love me and in gratitude I lay at your feet Because I was in love too, but my love was different

My love was the notion of life, a good one
All I wanted from ear to ear; a smile from my own mouth
It did not work
You loved me so selflessly I could not leave
Although I know now it was only through your love for me that I loved you You lost your own identity
You chose mine but I wanted mine to keep

Still. Here I am
This time only crying at your ever loving feet
I owe you too much to leave
So for the rest of my life. If I never find the courage I will be the living, loved dead
Even though I see
Your love in an otherwise cruel world binds me Forgive me. I doubt for all that I was ever worthy

 

Get your free copy of What Do You Think? now.

My Writing Process – Ian Wilfred

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Do men write romance? They certainly do, as Romantic Novelists’ Association member Ian Wilfred proves. Ian’s characters are instantly relatable and he has a knack of choosing gorgeous settings, from Tenerife to Greece to his native Norfolk.

On top of all that, Ian is one of the most supportive authors you could wish to meet. Which was just one of the reasons Jane Cable invited him to share his writing process.

Tell us a bit about you?

I’m 50+ but in my head I will always be 39. I live on the Norfolk coast with my husband and west highland terrier and I’m a member of the Romantic Novelist Association. My first book was published in 2013.

What you have written, past and present?

I’ve written and published five books. In the first four all my leading characters were women over 50 who are starting again and leaving the past behind, but in this year’s summer book, My Perfect Summer in Greece, Cheryl is a much younger heroine and this was lovely change

What you are promoting now?

My new book Time To Move On, which is out on 24th September. It’s the story of Billie coming to terms with her divorce and being made redundant, and moving to Norfolk from London.

What’s the most important thing about your process of writing?

I love to write every day even if it’s just a few hundred words. I have to keep the story fresh in my head.

Do you plan or just write?

I plan a lot more with each book I write and for me this seems to work better each time.

What about word count?

I don’t give myself a daily or weekly word count but I do like to do 40,000 words a month for the first draft. Then I take two months to rewrite and rewrite before I send it off to my editor.

How do you do your structure?

I don’t plan that – it just sort of happens. I have a beginning, a middle and an end in my head and off I go.

What do you find hard about writing?

Everything! Each book is a learning process with many mistakes made over the years, but you just have to move on and know you’re improving.

What do you love about writing? 

The characters. I love the first draft when they are in your head and you can’t wait to get them on the page and bring them to life.

Any advice for other writers?

I get asked this a lot and I always give the same two answers; write every day, and read and watch every article Milly Johnson has ever done on writing tips. She is the best for advice.

You can follow Ian on Twitter @IanWilfred39. He’s great at sharing news from a wide range of romantic novelists. 

 

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: CATHIE HARTIGAN BEHIND THE SCENES AT CREATIVE WRITING MATTERS

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I am so happy to introduce you all to Cathie on this month’s Frost. She is responsible for taking me under her wing at my very first RNA conference and was one of the very first people to ever read my work and encourage me to keep going. She is part of the Creative Writing Matters team who support writers in so many ways; mentorship, teaching, handbooks and the running of renowned competitions such as The Exeter Novel Prize.

 

Does creative writing matter? Yes, a great deal to us.  Margaret James and Sophie Duffy and I have been working together for nearly a decade now. As teachers of creative writing, and because a student’s success is as thrilling as one’s own – well, nearly – we encourage our students in any way we can.

What did they want in a textbook? What would really be useful for them? Would our experience as competition judges as well as teachers be of help? Margaret and I spent a year consulting them before we published The Creative Writing Student’s Handbook.

A dream for most novice writers, is that they should do well in a short story competition. I was thrilled when the first story I sent out bounded into a shortlist. What joy! More successes followed, but then, so did no listing at all. I soon discovered that just because it may not have done well in one competition, doesn’t mean to say it won’t succeed elsewhere. How many entries, who is judging, and whether there’s a strong entry or particular subject that resonates with the judge(s), all are factors.

During my years as a music teacher I was often charged with putting pupils through exams, and my sympathetic cup ran over on many occasions when I saw the terror with which many faced such trauma. But my goodness though, didn’t they all try harder when the exam loomed. Most got exponentially better!

On the back of my experience, I had the notion to hold a tiny competition in a creative writing class. The result was the same. Suddenly, all those last minutes unedited stories were tidied up. They took notice of the word count, the spelling and grammar, and familiar topics were rethought. I was surprised and delighted. Unlike music exams or driving tests though, entering a writing competition it isn’t a do or die situation. Okay, a particular judge may prefer another story, but it is possible to give of your best by crafting your story days or weeks previously.

Sophie won both the Yeovil Novel Prize and the Luke Bitmead Award, the latter leading to the publication of The Generation Game. Margaret was shortlisted for the RNA Romantic Comedy Award with The Wedding Diary, and for many years, had been the administrator for the Harry Bowling Prize. My short stories were being regularly listed and my debut novel, Secret of the Song was shortlisted for the Hall and Woodhouse Dorchester Literary Festival prize. Competitions were something we knew about. It wasn’t long before we realised that our fair city of Exeter was missing something – a novel prize. Seven years on, we can celebrate the publishing success of many fantastic writers who either won or were listed.

One of the lovely things about being a competition judge is being continually amazed by the extent of the human imagination. The sheer variety of subject matter that people choose to write about is extraordinary, but weird doesn’t necessarily triumph over the ordinary. The ability to move, surprise, make us laugh and/or cry will raise a story above the rest, but how or why isn’t easy to quantify.  Difficult choices have to be made. Sometimes there is a stand-out winner, but not often. Obviously, it’s nice to do well, but any listing is significant. A good record of success, at whatever level, shows commitment as well as quality.

Cathie Hartigan is a musician, novelist, and the founder of www.creativewritingmatters.co.uk and the creative director of www.exelitfest.com. Her second novel, Notes from the Lost will be published in October.

 

My Writing Process – Roger Bray

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I was raised in Blackburn, Lancashire and served for ten years in the Royal Navy before coming to Australia in 1983, after I returned from the Falklands. Writing is something I have always enjoyed and fiction was a favourite.  I loved being able to write anything within the bounds of the particular subject and not be restrained by anything except my imagination.  One restraint I did learn at school was other people’s perceptions of what is age appropriate for a juvenile to be writing.  Apparently graphic death scenes weren’t. 

My writing stayed in the background for many years until I was invited to write short stories for a couple of magazines which were well-received.  I then dabbled with a novel for a couple of years before getting into my stride and writing my first publication The Picture.

At the moment I am halfway through my fourth novel, currently untitled.  It is a story set in the UK and across Europe and deals with sex trafficking and organised crime from the perspective of an investigative journalist who is fighting his own battle with past tragedy while trying, against his better judgement to report what he has found.

As with all my novels I come up with a very broad idea of where I can see the story going.  I write and rewrite parts and scenes in my mind until I see a path then I commence.  That is how far I plan, maybe I’ll do some research at the start to get me on the right track but broadly speaking, once I start I write linearly.  I stop and research as I go and edit sections before moving on.  My word count is whatever I manage for the day but overall I aim for 90 – 100,00 words for a novel +/- as the editing progresses from me to beta readers and to my editor.

My basic day of writing would be re-read what I had last written, editing as I go.  I find this gets me back into the moment.  I then continue and write until I run out of steam or find myself veering off or woffling to pad out the chapter.  Either way that is the end for the day be it 3 or 8 hours later.  Rinse and repeat the next day until finished.

The hardest part of writing isn’t any sort of blockage, though they happen but I tend to get over them by just writing — sitting down and writing, getting words onto the page is, I have found the best solution.  Even if what you have written isn’t great it gets the process moving along and gives you something to edit.  It is difficult to edit a blank page.  The hardest part for me is staying within the storyline.  I have some great ideas which, unfortunately, don’t fit the arc, but I can waste hours trying to make them fit because I think they are so good — usually mistakenly.

In my current novel I have edited the first 2/3 of the novel to delete some of these great ideas I had but have turned into a bit of a millstone later on, something I have to be firm about.

I find the least enjoyable part is the whole process from writing The End onward.  There are lots of moments of doubt once I release my latest to a broader audience (broader than me and my wife’s cat).  Is it great or is it rubbish?  Typos – the bane of my life, plot holes or bits that grate when read?  All these things need identifying and fixing.  Nothing wrong with having any of them, that’s life as a writer but the process of sorting it out is no longer writing, no longer imagination and art.  It’s a drudge.

Any advice I can give? Keep going — you don’t fail until you stop trying.  Writer’s block?  No such thing — keep writing through, it, you can edit rubbish, you cannot edit a blank, tear stained page.

Website https://rogerbraybooks.com/ 

Facebook https://www.facebook.com/rogerbraybooks/ 

Twitter https://twitter.com/rogerbray22 

My Writing Process – Milli Hill

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What you have written, past and present.

I have written two books, both about childbirth. The first, a ‘how to’ manual called The Positive Birth Book, is a guide for pregnant women on how to approach birth differently, reframe it as a positive experience, and have a positive birth in any circumstance. The most recent, Give Birth Like a Feminist, is a call to arms, exposing the misogyny and power imbalance at play in the modern birth room, and giving women information about their choices and rights so that they can take a more active role in their birth. I also write opinion articles and features for the Telegraph, Guardian, ipaper, Independent, Mother&Baby and more! I started out as a blogger when I was taking a break from my work as a therapist due to having two young children. My blog became really successful and through that I got work as a journalist, and now an author.

What you are promoting now. 

Give Birth Like a Feminist, which came out on August 22nd.

A bit about your process of writing. 

I do a lot of thinking before I start. Maybe over days, or months, or during a dog walk, or in the shower! Then I usually make a spider diagram with the key point at the centre and all the other points coming off it. This sounds terribly organised but it’s normally done on the back of an envelope with a child hanging off my leg with the key aim of preserving the thoughts before they are lost! Then when I get the time to write, the ideas are all there, laid out for me. Getting to my desk is hard with a large family, and I also struggle with my inner critic / imposter syndrome etc, so the whole things becomes like a sort of inner dialogue between the part of me that believes in myself and my ideas and the part of me that says I’ve got nothing of interest to say. Those two parts of me argue for quite a while and then the confident part sort of grabs the reluctant part by the scruff of the metaphorical neck and frogmarches her to the desk. At which point I usually get on with it. I take a long time over what I have to say and am a perfectionist. Someone once described my writing as sounding ‘effortless’ which I took as a great compliment but it really could not be further from the truth!
Do you plan or just write?

I do both. I usually plan the skeleton but then putting on the flesh is the ‘just writing’ part.

What about word count?

I’m used to writing articles with a word count of around 800 to 1000 words and I think that’s a really nice bite size amount to get something across in. Even in a 10000 word book, breaking it down in your mind into chunks of 1000 words is a great way to keep it manageable both for you as a writer, and for your reader. I’m very conscious of how busy the world is now and how you need to get your ideas across quickly and in a way that feels accessible. And if you can just write 100 really great, thousand word pieces, then, bingo, you have a book. Effortless!

How do you do your structure?

I’m a big fan of circular structures by which I mean making a point / telling a story, or a joke etc in paragraph 1 of an article, then taking the reader on a journey through the next 8 paragraphs, and then coming back to the reference you made in paragraph one but somehow showing a development, growth, transformation has been make during the piece. On a larger scale you can do this in a book chapter, and then make an even bigger loop around the book itself. So you can have some nice loops within loops.

What do you find hard about writing?

I find it hard full stop, but also strangely compulsive! It’s like any creative process really, there is always that ‘void’ where it feels impossible, I totally hate that feeling of the blank page, the flashing cursor of doom etc! And as I’ve said, the mental battle of finding my voice is also deeply irritating! I also really miss the time when I was first writing my blog and could be more creative. Now I often feel I’m writing to order with article commissions etc and that kind of sucks the life out of it a bit. One day I really want to write fiction and I’m really looking forward to that!

What do you love about writing? 

I love the moment where creativity springs into life and the ideas start to flow and you know your fingers are knocking out killer sentences! I love reading something back and being surprised that I wrote it – this often happens to me! I think, oh, that’s actually really quite good! Did I write that?! That’s a really nice feeling. And I also like reaching other people through writing. Having my latest book published recently has been really fun in terms of being able to have conversations with people about what I’ve written and hear their feedback. The actual process of writing is quite isolating which I quite enjoy but then it’s nice to come and dance in the sunshine a bit afterwards!

Advice for other writers. 

If you are starting out a blog can be great – I was disciplined with mine and made myself do one post a week for quite a long time. I got better by doing that and I also learned a bit about what people enjoyed and wanted to read because of the instant feedback you get on a blog. Reading other writers you admire can be very inspiring too. But wherever you are up to as a writer, the main thing (and every writer knows this but it’s easier said than done!) is just write. Frogmarch yourself to the desk and just flipping well get on with it!

 

Give Birth Like a Feminist is available now.

Check out the The Positive Birth Movement.