Tag Archives: saga writing

M W ARNOLD – A MAN IN A WOMAN’S WORLD?

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Not all romance writers are women… so I asked Mick Arnold to write about his publishing journey.

Good day and thank you very much for having me. My name is Mick Arnold and I write sagas as M W Arnold.

Those are words I certainly don’t think I’d have been putting down even a year or two back. So what was I doing at that time? Well, doing my best to recover after being laid low by illness, to be truthful and writing wasn’t top of my to-do list. I had written and indeed, had a women’s fiction novel, ‘The Season for Love’ published back in 2017, but whilst recovering I hadn’t been able to pick up my work-in-progress. An author friend persuaded me to try something different, something which wouldn’t put me in a bad place, so to speak.

Shortly after she’d made this suggestion – the author in question was Elaine Everest by the way – I watched a documentary on the Air Transport Auxiliary. This sparked something inside me and shortly after, I found myself scrolling around the internet to find out more about this organization who were responsible for the delivery of the military aircraft used by the Royal Air Force during WW2.

Fast forward about nine or so months, and I found myself pitching the story to some agents at the Romantic Novelists’ Association conference. Nothing came of that, so I began to pitch it to publishers online. I ended up with a contract for what became ‘A Wing and a Prayer’ with the American publishing house, The Wild Rose Press. From virtually out of nowhere, I was being published again.

Once more, I’ve found myself published in a predominantly female line of publishing…I couldn’t be happier! I’ve many good friends in the romance genre due to my previous book and my membership of the Romantic Novelists’ Association, and I’m very happy to have found the same very warm welcome in the saga/historical genre. I do find this a little strange as in most lines of work where you are in direct competition, there is much back-stabbing, but there has been none of that. Everyone has been so very welcoming and I feel as if I’m in a big, happy family. I don’t feel like I’ve been treated any different being a man as I would if I were a woman, and there aren’t many lines of work I reckon could say that.

My one regret? Well, no prizes for guessing. I’ve only, like everyone else, been able to chat online with my fellow authors and I really can’t wait for that to end!

Find out more about Mick and his books at https://www.facebook.com/MWArnoldAuthor

 

 

 

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.

SISTER SCRIBES: SUSANNA BAVIN ON INSPIRATION

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It’s best if I come straight out with it.

I’m a thief.

Don’t be shocked. It’s because I used to be a teacher. I can’t speak for secondary school teachers, but, as a former infant teacher, I can assure you that in primary schools, the staff are a bunch of thieves.

You see a display in another classroom –  in a library – in a gallery – a shop – on Pinterest – anywhere at all – and your first thought is: I could adapt that idea.…

You see another teacher’s lesson and you think: I never thought of doing it that way. I’ll have a go at that. You open birthday and Christmas cards, thinking: Could 6-year-olds make this?

So, yes, I’ve been pinching ideas for years. I’m no longer a teacher, but I haven’t lost the habit. I’m still on the look-out for good ideas, as all writers are.

And they can pop up in the oddest places. Listening to This Morning on Radio 4 last autumn, I heard a piece about the criminal activity of “crossing county lines,” which inspired a plot-thread in a novel set in 1922. Likewise, an unexpected clause in a family will some years ago was adapted to pile all kinds of difficulties onto Greg Rawley’s financial problems in The Poor Relation.

The thing about writers gathering ideas is that you have no control over what will spark off an idea or how that idea will grow. Readers often ask, “Where do you get your ideas from?” I know that some writers have a jokey answer about buying ideas in the corner shop; but the real answer is that they come from all over the place – an overheard snippet of conversation, a photograph, something on the news, something that happens to you or a friend…. But what isn’t generally understood is that the idea is just a spark, not a whole book. You don’t lift your entire plot from real life. A single idea, or a couple of ideas, can be all it takes to make the plot grow. And the final plot will very probably bear no resemblance whatsoever to the original spark.

Take The Sewing Room Girl. As I said, I used to be a primary school teacher. The most important job done by any school is safeguarding the children in its care. To this end, teachers undergo regular training sessions to help them understand what they need to be aware of.

Ten years ago, my school gave a training day to safeguarding. Sad to say, much of the training on these occasions is based around discussing real cases. On this training day, an example was given of the way in which a particular adult had kept control of a vulnerable child. Let’s just say that a certain piece of household technology was used as a means of keeping the child in a state of fear.

Out of that single idea came Juliet’s story in The Sewing Room Girl. I should like to make it clear that the household object in the real example did not exist in the 1890s, the time when the book is set. Neither did anything from the real-life case appear in any form whatsoever in the book. But hearing of that frankly appalling and distressing case sparked off the original idea, which over time grew into a complete novel.

Another feature of these ideas that spark off books is that they don’t always get used. The single spark that started me writing The Deserter’s Daughter was an idea for something that would happen in the plot. But no sooner had I created the Armstrongs’ antiques shop in the book than I realised I couldn’t possibly use the original plot-point because the shop was just too posh!

But that’s the other thing about writers’ ideas. Nothing is ever wasted. You will be able to read that particular plot-point in a book that will be published next year….