Category Archives: Writing

SISTER SCRIBES: SUSANNA BAVIN ON WHY WE NEED LIFE-AFFIRMING STORIES

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Certain types of books have a way of touching readers on a very personal level. For example, starting-again stories are deservedly popular. Who hasn’t at some point said to themselves, “If I could go back and do it all again…” or words to that effect? Call it a natural thought process based on experience or disappointment; call it pure fantasy. The point is that wondering “What if…?” it is part of the human condition and starting-again novels speak to us in a direct way that we can all relate to. One such book is the wonderfully funny and fulfilling The Summer of Second Chances by Maddie Please. Written with a light touch and plenty of chuckles along the way, this is a witty romp that deals with serious themes that add depth to the story.

Another type of book that touches readers in a similar way if the life-affirming story, the sort of book that touches on the strength of the human heart, and encompasses the resilience of the individual and a basic belief in goodness and hope.

Take Minty by Christina Banach. This is a YA book, but, as an adult reader, I was completely drawn into it. It deals with the difficult subject of death and bereavement and is beautifully observed and deeply moving. As well as tragedy and grief, there is also humour and wit and both the characterisation and the depiction of relationships are both spot-on. The book’s ending is an extraordinary piece of writing, being both heartbreaking and uplifting, and it will take your breath away. In spite of Minty’s central topic, we are very much in life-affirming territory, thanks to Christina Banach’s skill and empathy as a writer. (If this blog makes you buy the book, I’ll know when you are all reading the ending, because shares in Kleenex will go through the roof.)

Recently I read Christmas at the Foyles Bookshop by Elaine Roberts. This is the last in a trilogy set in the early part of the 20th century, about three friends, Alice, Molly and Victoria, with each girl taking centre stage in one of the stories. Right from the beginning, the girl I most wanted to read about was Victoria, whose parents died tragically when she was just sixteen, at which point she had to assume responsibility for the younger children; but I had to wait until the final book to delve into her life and find out the answers to all those questions. Victoria has known her share of heartache and now she faces the challenge of a family mystery. Set against the backdrop of the First World War, Christmas at the Foyles Bookshop is an emotional story, filled with love and loss, friendship and family, mystery and duty, heartache and hope. Elaine Roberts has written a heart-warming and engrossing saga that rounds off the trilogy perfectly. It gradually builds up to a gloriously satisfying ending brimming with that special life-affirming quality that, put simply, makes the reader feel good about the world.

 

 

SISTER SCRIBES: KITTY WILSON ON WHY SHE WRITES ROMANCE

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I was due to speak as part of a panel on Why I Write Romance at Exeter Literary Festival the other day, and knowing that my Sister Scribes post was due I thought I could write about speaking at such events. Unfortunately, chronic ill health meant I was unable to go and thus my intentions disappeared into the ether.

But all was not lost, jotting down my thoughts on why I write Romantic Comedy I inadvertently wrote an essay of over 3,000 words. Too many for here but I can at least share my number one reason for loving romance with you.

Simply put, I love the sheer humanity of romance. Romance is universal, most of us have a desire to find a partner, someone you can share your life with, grow old alongside. But the ability to be a calm, confident and capable individual in life is often lost when faced with someone you are attracted to, even if you didn’t realise you were attracted to them until you start stammering and the flush of your face is radiating like a beacon.

I’ve learnt that no matter how golden or blessed someone appears to be, they usually share this awkwardness, self-doubt is at its height when it comes to meeting a potential partner, self-sabotage often unwittingly kicks in and age does not always make us worry less.

Oh my god! Did I just say that? I said that out loud? Now I’m going to go home and worry for three days.

The adolescent fear – my face is covered in spots and my sibling did something mortifying in school – they’ll never fancy me now, I may as well never leave the house and just curl up in a corner and die.

The slightly older fret – how can anyone love me with a saggy tummy and too much grey hair, I’m nowhere near as attractive as I was when I was in my twenties (although I’d argue actually you’re heaps more attractive but that’s a tangent I’ll get lost in for hours) they’ll never fancy me now…and repeat.

Romance as a genre reminds us everyone feels like this and we are not alone. The playing field here is level. Romance is relatable. Really relatable.

I love a literary novel and am in awe of how those writers deal with topics of race, gender, class, poverty, abuse, justice and so on and when I read literary fiction I feel clever and worthy because that’s how attitudes over the years have conditioned me to feel but romance is what I want to read.

I want to read about the heroine battling with the mundane, the washing machine that’s broken just as she’s stained her best dress and is due to meet the person of her dreams for their first date. I want to read that the dog has just pinched the dinner our hero or heroine has spent hours slaving over and it is now being vomited up over the living room – these things make me feel less alone, make me feel comforted. They make me feel reassured (and thus able to giggle) about my own life which is largely spent in the house dealing with domestic catastrophes rather than my imagined-and-never-quite-realised life trekking across continents being glamourous.

Romantic comedy reminds me that we all have our insecurities, we all have our everyday tribulations, sometimes we can be our own worst enemy but we are all in this together, we all share these emotions but hopefully, like the protagonists of romantic comedy, each day we grow and with that earn our own personalised happy-ever-after.

SISTER SCRIBES GUEST: CLARE FLYNN ON THE BENEFITS OF A CRITIQUE GROUP

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I’m delighted to welcome Clare Flynn as my guest. Clare is the author of ten historical novels and a short story collection, and we met over dinner on the opening night of my first ever RNA conference a couple of years ago. Today, she sharing her thoughts on the benefits of critique groups for writers.

Soon after leaving London for the beautiful South Downs and Sussex coast, I had the good fortune to come across two fellow members of organisations I’m in – the Romantic Novelists Association and the Historical Novel Society. One is an author and the other an editor with authorial aspirations, both Eastbourne residents. We decided to set up a critique group and subsequently two more authors have joined our posse. We five now meet every Friday afternoon at a seafront hotel.

Our aim is to offer mutual support and encouragement, share tips on marketing and publishing, and most of all to give constructive criticism of our work. None of us wanted to do workshop style exercises, as apart from the editor we are all published – two of us hybrid, one indie and one trade. What we all have in common is the desire for a sounding board and some tough love during the writing process.

A few days before our weekly meeting, we email each other the extracts we want to review, usually a chapter of around 2,000 words so we get a chance to read them all at leisure. Everyone prints off a copy of each submission annotated with comments and brings it to the session.

We used to read the work aloud but it became too time-consuming and we have so much else to talk about. Instead, we take each submission in turn, with each person offering their comments. The criticism is always constructive and now we know each other well we don’t pull our punches. All of us share a desire to help each other produce the best work possible.

We have had short stories as well as extracts from works in progress. We use the approach of Adopt/ Adapt/ Reject, although most of the feedback makes eminent sense and is mostly acted upon.

Some examples of changes made as a result of feedback in these sessions:

  • Inconsistencies of character,
  • Lack of tempo and pace
  • Anachronisms and clichés etc
  • Details such as titles, uniforms and spotting costume gaffes
  • Metaphors that don’t work or take one out of the story
  • Making awkward sentences flow
  • Avoiding repetition
  • Spelling and grammar
  • Identifying a character going to sit down when they were already seated (it happens so easily!)

Not everyone submits an extract every time if they don’t happen to have a piece ready to review, but the weekly meetings act as a spur to getting the next chapter ready.

The group has been going now for nearly four years. Thirteen published novels have emerged so far from our sessions. This early input identifies any major issues before the final draft is released to the editor, agent and beta readers.

We meet in one of the public lounges and I often wonder what unsuspecting hotel guests think when passing by as we respectable looking women of a certain age hotly debate the choreography of a sex scene or the best way to kill someone off.

There’s always plenty to talk about as well as the work. We share publishing news, marketing ideas, gossip and plans for attending conferences and industry parties. It’s a very supportive and encouraging group.

The writer’s life is by definition a solitary one for much of the time, so having a weekly gathering to share triumphs and setbacks is an absolute godsend.

 

Clare Flynn is the author of ten historical novels and a short story collection. Her latest novel, The Pearl of Penang, set in Malaya in 1939 through to the end of the war with Japan, is now available for pre-order.

Website http://www.clareflynn.co.uk

Twitter – https://twitter.com/clarefly

Facebook – https://www.facebook.com/authorclareflynn

 

My Writing Process – Karen King

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writing, my writing process, I’ve always been a bit of a planner, mainly because when I started my writing career over thirty years ago I wrote for teen magazines and children’s comics and had to send a synopsis of the story first, for approval. Now I’m living in Spain I write mainly romance novels but I still send a synopsis of the story I’m planning to my editor. She will make comments and we’ll flesh out the plot between us before I start writing it up.

I really like to know my characters before I write the story, and often trail Pinterest boards for photos of people that look like my characters, print them out and put them in my WIP folder so I have an image of them while I write. I also create a Pinterest board for every book I’m working on, looking for images that are connected to the story and repining them to my WIP board. I find that really helps me to brainstorm. Once I feel I know my characters well enough I start to write, freewriting the story as it comes and not stopping to edit or correct until I’ve finished.  Then I leave it for a couple of weeks (unless I’m on a tight deadline) then go back and edit it. 

I usually do four different edits, first I read all the way through to get the feel of the characters and story. I make comments in the margin or underline anything I want to change but don’t alter them at this stage. For the next set of edits I work on anything that I’ve marked up and pay particular attention to the story structure and timeline. For the third set of edits I pay attention to characters, dialogue and setting and for the final set of edits I look out for typos and grammatical errors. I’m now lucky enough to work for Bookouture, and we’re usually on a tight deadline so they ask for the first draft, then get back to me with their comments, which works really well. I always find it helpful to get their advice and guidance into making my story stronger.

I find I work best in the morning so ideally like to get up, grab some breakfast and start work for a few hours. I write most days and don’t usually have a word count I’m aiming at unless I’m on a tight deadline, then I’ll work as and when I can during the day, and late into the evening too until I meet that wordcount (it can be anything from 2-5,000 words).  I mainly write in my upstairs office which is in the studio apartment on the terrace but can also be found writing by the pool with my laptop in a box to keep the sun off my screen, or at the dining room table. I can write anywhere really, as long as I have my laptop, or a notebook and pen. 

If I get Writer’s Block I simply carrying on writing until the story flows again, then delete any rubbish I’ve written to get me there. Which is why my advice to new writers is – stop faffing about and just write! You can edit afterwards, the main thing is to get your story down.

Contact Links

Website: http://www.karenking.net/

Twitter: @karen_king

Karen King Romance Author Facebook Page

Karen King Young Adult Books Facebook Page

Pinterest: https://uk.pinterest.com/karenkingauthor/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/karenkingauthor/?hl=en

Single All The Way

Blurb

Snow is falling, bells are ringing… and my heart is broken. I pick up the phone to tell my mother about Oliver and me. But before I can, she says, ‘I don’t exactly know how to tell you this… But I’m leaving your dad.’
Single together for the first time, 34-year-old Meg and her warm-hearted, long-suffering mother Sally are cancelling Christmas, and running away to a tiny cottage on the Cornish coast. For Meg, it is the perfect place to heal, away from all the mistletoe, while for her mother it has a special, and secret, place in her heart – from a love story that seems a lifetime ago…

Meg and Sally find they’re getting to know themselves, and each other, better than ever before. But as they are unable to resist getting involved in the village Christmas celebrations, they encounter two handsome local strangers.

Sometimes, it’s being away from home that helps you realise where your heart is. What neither woman knows is that, by the time the new year rolls around, one woman will have fallen in love with her husband all over again, and one marriage will be over for good…

An escapist, romantic and heart-warming novel for fans of One Day in December and No One Cancels Christmas.

Buy links

AMZ: https://geni.us/B07XDYL7GHCover
Apple Books: https://tinyurl.com/y4dkhrvl
Kobo: https://tinyurl.com/y6apzqe2
Googleplay: https://tinyurl.com/y5hc6nfn

 

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.