Return to Barradale

My latest Linford Romance has been published - available from Amazon and other online booksellers and from your local library:

Melody has sworn never to return to Barradale, the island where she grew up and had been so unhappy. Now, living in Glasgow, she has forged a new life for herself. But when the gorgeous Kieran Matthews turns up on her doorstep demanding she return with him to see her sick sister, she finds she cannot refuse. And for Melody, family secrets must be unravelled before Kieran's love can help to resolve her past.

Hope you enjoy it!

Art mirrors life......

Sometimes, very rarely, you are lucky enough to have something you put in your soon-to-be-published book occur in real life. That has happened to me in respect of the serial I have just written for People's Friend. This serial was started two years ago. Writing a serial is a long drawn out process as each 5000 word episode has to be agreed (often with two or three revisions) which results in a lot of to-ing and fro-ing between the writer and editor. When I began the serial all that time ago, I set it in Sorrento as I had just spent a holiday there. Our hotel and the deserted bay a short walk away were the perfect setting. Vesuvius, the harbour and Pompeii were perfect backdrops for interesting scenes which I knew would chime with many readers who had been to those places or always wanted to go.

One of my characters is an archaeology student and when we visited Pompeii there were stories in the news about the fact that there are still artefacts on the site waiting to be dug up. I therefore made it my hero Antonio's dearest wish to be chosen by his Professore to help with those digs. This became an absorbing storyline and conveniently created tension between his heart's desire and his need to honour his father by helping him run the family hotel. As I was writing the last two instalments, low and behold, my Sunday paper plopped on the mat with a two page article about the Life and Death Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition at the British Museum. I immediately wrote into the last instalments a scene explaining how my hero Antonio had been part of the team which packaged the artefacts to be displayed. The exhibition goes on till September and therefore will be on when my serial comes out in People's Friend plus there have been fascinating programmes on the television. I was delighted that purely by chance my fiction had mirrored real life.

Purely by coincidence, a similar thing has happened to me in the same week. About a year ago I wrote a novella about a female scientist who finds herself a job on a deserted island in the Indian Ocean. My heroine had a child who died as a result of her not taking her baby to be vaccinated about which she feels terrible guilt and shuts herself off from the world. Unfortunately it was not accepted as a pocket novel because the editors felt the death of a child was too raw for the pocket novel world. I shelved the story and only recently, thanks to our own lovely Sally Quilford learnt that Harper Impulse are looking for new romance authors. I duly submitted my story (and am waiting stomach knotted, for their response) but lo and behold in the news came the story about the threatened measles epidemic in Wales due to people choosing not to vaccinate their children. Suddenly my novella was topical! Whether that will give it more chance of being accepted or not I don't know. I wonder how often these sort of coincidences have been visited on other writers, do tell if you've had anything similar. I think now I ought to zoom off and write a novel about a woman, of a certain age who wins the Euromillions lottery and lives a life of unparralelled luxury endlessly cruising the world. Might do that before I check my tickets for yesterday which are languishing in my purse....., you never know your luck! Cara.

Characters and Moral Event Horizons

Some of you may be aware of the recent plagiarism suit brought against Mills and Boon author, Kate Walker in relation to her novel, The Proud Wife, which a wannabe writer (I'm deliberately not naming names here) claims Kate's novel was  plagiarised from the unknown writer's unpublished novel. I’m not going to go into all that here, but you can read about it on the Pink Heart blog and the case notes make very interesting reading on the subject of romantic tropes. There's also an interesting blog post here on 'original ideas' in fiction. There are certainly no original ideas in romantic fiction! But as a friend said to me the other day, new writers always think they've reinvented the wheel. I was the same when I was just starting out. You get on much better as a romance writer when you realise that the tropes are there, and all you can do is bring your own voice to them.

But what stood out for me about the case, and what led to this particular blog post, was that the heroine in the unpublished novel seemingly threw herself down the stairs deliberately to bring about a miscarriage. To be balanced about this, I don’t know if it was intended to address this in the story so that it wasn’t actually what happened.

But it did get me thinking about moral event horizons by characters.  A moral event horizon is what a character crosses when they commit certain acts.

To me a heroine who harmed her baby in such a way would not be at all sympathetic. I’m not talking about abortions here, as I do believe it’s every woman’s right to choose (though I would suggest that in romantic fiction an abortion would be a hard sell). What I’m talking about is a deliberate and violent act meant to bring about the end of the pregnancy because the heroine was peeved at the hero for ending their relationship. 

Of course some characters do cross the moral event horizon, especially if they’re meant to be the bad guys/girls. It can be as simple as kicking a puppy or as complicated as blowing up a building. But heroes and heroines are supposed to be above all that. I’ve often used the example of James Bond. We may not care if he kills bad guy Blofeld, but God forbid he should ever harm a hair on Blofeld’s cat’s head!

Really good television series can explore moral event horizons. 24, starring Keifer Sutherland, often posed questions of right and wrong, and grey and grey morality. Keifer, playing the hero, Jack Bauer, often behaved in ways that were distinctly un-heroic. He tortured people, and even shot one colleague because it would have caused the deaths of many more people if he had not done so. No matter what Jack did, we saw the reasons for it and we forgave him. Or if we didn’t forgive him, we understood the predicament he was in. But Jack wasn’t a romantic hero. In fact most of his lovers died or ended up in comas! I think this is another reason we forgave his transgressions, because he always had to pay a heavy price for what he did.

Heroes and heroines in romance novels have to be heroic at all times, and there are certain lines that they should never cross. When reading through entries for an open romance writing comp (as a fellow competitor, I should add, not as a judge!) I was put off by one hero who called the heroine a ‘whore’. To me there is nothing heroic about a man who verbally abuses a woman. Another story opened with the heroine being physically abused and myself and several others expressed a wish that a hero would come and save her, only to be told that this was the hero, who would turn out to be a 'nice guy' really. In my opinion, the fact of him physically abusing the heroine in the opening chapter put him beyond the realms of redemption.

I think the problem with heroes is that some people think that because a man is an alpha male, it means he has to be aggressive and perhaps angry at the world until the heroine comes along and saves him. That’s not how it works. Alpha males protect their mate and they protect others whom they love. They may have faults, but there are lines that they should not cross and in my opinion verbal and physical abuse is one of those lines.

Your hero and heroine are allowed to make mistakes, but they must be forgivable mistakes. A young woman throwing herself down the stairs in order to bring about a miscarriage is to be pitied perhaps, as she clearly has psychological problems, but that would be a different story altogether and perhaps not suited for the romance genre.

If she is the heroine of the story, she has to earn her happy ending, and she can’t do that by behaving in a way that brings harm to a helpless child. 

 

My latest ebook, LonesomeRanger (formerly published as Sunlit Secrets) is out this week, published by Pulse Romance, (which is run by our very own Kate Allan). In that both my hero and heroine make mistakes. My heroine, Connie, takes the role as schoolteacher in the town of Ocasa based on a lie. She lets them think she is her older sister, who has died en route to the town. Nate Truman, the hero, has a dark and troubled past. They both make mistakes, but I hope that in the novel I’ve given a damn good reason for those mistakes and that the reader can forgive them, because essentially both are good, noble people.

It’s a balancing act, I think and you have to be careful not to make the reader lose sympathy with the characters that you really want them to be cheering for.

In pocket novels, which are set in a more rose-tinted world, it is more important than ever that your hero and heroine don’t behave in a way that turns the reader against them.

What, for you, would be a moral event horizon in a hero and heroine? Do  you have any examples of heroes or heroines in romance books crossing that horizon? And if so, did they manage to redeem themselves?

(It isn't my intention to bring a witch hunt against the wannabe writer in the Harlequin case, hence me not naming her in this piece. So please keep any comments on that subject civil and polite).

E books

Having read numerous articles and everyone's helpful advice I've decided to put my backlist on Amazon.

The physical part of converting my work was not as difficult as I'd feared. Amazon issued very issue to follow instructions and I didn't actually reach the 'head banging' stage as I thought I might. I am not the most techie person in the world and that is why I've lagged behind everyone else.

Having said that, my progress has been delayed. Going back over my earlier works has made me realise how much my writing has changed since I started doing pocket novels. The earlier works I've had to seriously re-write in certain places. I rather rushed into the first two but now I am on my third one I can see it will form a major part of my year's work to convert them.

Some of my work doesn't flow too well and although the stories are only a few years old they have become dated. In the modern world of technology I suppose that it inevitable but it suprised me. I think it's a very good exercise to get out some of your older work and look at it. You realise you are in danger of repeating phrases, plots, even names. It exercises new writing muscles and of course reading the stories with a fresh eye after a long break away gives you a different perspective.

Margaret

How to Start?

After spending the past year preparing books to put up on Kindle, and doing rewrites of previously written stories I'm finally at the point where I need to write something new. I've had the idea for the story in my head for a while, knew the location, characters and roughly what was going to happen - but for the past week I've been dithering about without actually writing anything. I set up the file, but in the header and footer and downloaded all the research material I will need – but still couldn't begin. I wondered how anyone else gets over this initial hesitation. 1. Do you plan your story in such detail that you've already got the first chapter more or less written? 2. Do you cut pictures from magazines and pin them up to give you visual clues to your characters? 3. Do you get the plot first and the characters second? 4. Do you start with action/conversation/scene setting? 5. Do you edit as you go along/each morning before you start again/wait until the end? 6. How much do you have to put down before the story takes off and writes itself? My answers to the above are as follows: I don't plan anything nowadays, although when I first started writing I had every scene mapped out. I don't see my characters in my head but I do hear them talking. For me characters come first and the story second. I start with conversation and action but rarely with scene setting. I edit as I dictate – as I use voice recognition software I have to do this or might end up with something incomprehensible. I also read what I've written the day before and alter anything that needs doing. However I don't do anything else until the book's finished. I'm delighted to say that I've now written two pages of the first chapter but it hasn't taken off yet - I think I'll need to get around 5000 words down before that magical moment occurs. At the moment I'm doing anything rather than opening the file; it's so long since I've written a new book I've almost forgotten the excitement you get when your characters come alive and you can't wait to get your desk every morning. I'm hoping the muse hasn't abandoned me. Looking forward to hearing your answers – it's fascinating learning how other writers work.

Write, Write and Write Again

Today I'm posting on the subject of editing. How much is too much and how little is not enough? It's something I've been ruminating on for a few weeks because I submitted my latest pocket novel to My Weekly a couple of months ago. While the Editor liked my characters and setting and the style of writing itself, she asked for changes to the plot line. I made the changes and sent it back. She then asked for another set of minor changes - which I agreed with (some of the scenes were too intimate and took us beyond the bedroom door - it had originally been written with B&K in mind!). But then a third editing was requested. I did this and sent it off but haven't heard back yet.
     My feelings on this are that I'm happy to make most changes the Editor might ask for, because at the end of the day, I want the story to be published and I trust in the Editor's judgement. There is also a two way conversation going on and she will accept refusal to change certain things if I feel there is a valid reason not to.
      But that may not be the case with every publisher and/or editor. It's possible to knock the life out of a story by over-editing and yet equally we've probably all read books which would have benefited from further edited versions before publication.
     Now that it is so easy to self publish stories as E-books, is there a case for simply writing the stories we want to and refusing to edit to someone else's requirements?

   
   

I’m continuing the cover story as it seems of interest to us all.

It’s always so exciting to see a new book, especially one with your name on it! Does one ever get weary of it? No, never. I suppose we Pocketeers get very little choice of what the publishers produce and despite our artwork statements, the cover pictures often look very unlike our characters. If we are producing our own covers, as many of us do now for Kindle and such like, we can spend hours looking through suitable picture galleries to find some thing we like. It’s a subject we have been talking about a lot lately.

The picture showing above is my latest large print ... the fourth in my potteries saga. I’m not sure about this one. She is supposed to be a nurse in 1945 era and has red curly hair and is very bubbly. I do feel this one looks a little like Anne from the Famous Five. Let’s hope people read it anyway! Is this just me feeling everyone looks rather young these days?

What actually sells a book? Is it the cover? The author’s name? The blurb on the back? Possibly it is all of these things put together, plus a bit of serendipity and a lot of luck. As most of our large print books end up in the libraries, we hope there is something about them that makes people want to read them. ‘Patricia Keyson’ in last week’s blog, suggested that a plain white cover wouldn’t sell any books but it has been done. I can’t remember the title (does this mean something, I wonder?) but someone did use a plain cover and made a lot of sales. Perhaps it was the intrigue factor?

I find it interesting to look at older books and see what their publishers made of them. I had some of my mother’s old books, dull looking covers with occasionally a small picture glued on. I suspect they did once have a paper cover, a dust jacket, which may have made them more valuable if they had been kept. Maybe they never sold in the quantities that are deemed normal these days.

Today’s paperbacks fill the bookshelves bringing them into a more affordable range and don’t they look nice? Hardbacks are usually three times the price at least and many of us wait till they are out in paperback to afford to buy them. Some still use paper covers (dust jackets) but mostly have the same pictures beneath them. The paperbacks usually have the same picture on and of course, are more affordable.

Whatever the reason for book sales, we all need a good cover, so good hunting to everyone!