How long does it take to write a novel?
My first book Cuckoo took me my entire life up to that point. The next three: Every Vow You Break, Tarnished and The Long Fall took me a year each. The fifth, her Husband’s Lover, thanks to a false start, took two years. Then the sixth took four years to write. Indeed, it needs another draft, which I will attend to soon, but I don’t want to talk about that now.… read more
Claydon House, Heygate Estate, by Reuben Powell. For more of his work, go to Hotel Elephant http://hotelelephantgallery.blogspot.co.uk/
When I’m thinking of a new story, I usually start with a ‘what if’ question – what if you couldn’t remember parts of your childhood? (Tarnished) ‘What if, sixteen years down the line, you bumped into the man you nearly left your husband for (indeed, your own personal ‘what if’) and you still had that deep chemistry thing going on?’… read more
(This post expands on a NaNoWriMo pep talk I wrote a couple of years back).
Are you at the end of the first week of NaNoWriMo 2013? If so, congratulations!
If you are (and even if you’re not), it’s likely that you will be very familiar with this scary thought:
When you start to create something, YOU ARE FACED WITH INFINITE POSSIBILITIES.
You may sense the germ of an idea, a character, a colour, a bit of story or a setting, but beyond that, once you sit down to start whatever it is you’re making, anything can happen; you’re simply finding the best path through the whole universe of choice.… read more
Photo by Darren Cool for Connors Brighton
Last week I ran a three-hour MA class on plotting at City University. Apart from being one of the scariest things I have ever said yes to (and I admit this as a constant yes-person), planning the session coincided with a small sea-change in my working process.
If you have even glanced at some of my previous posts, you will have gleaned that, in NaNoWriMo parlance, I am a pantser, not a plotter.… read more
Scene of the Every Vow You Breakmass market paperback launch party
Every Vow You Break is now available in mass market paperback. Up until now it has only been published as a trade paperback.
Trade paperback is the larger format, shorter run, more expensive paperback – the type that is difficult to fit into normal bookshelves – that many publishers produce several months earlier than mass market. There has also been a Kindle edition of Every Vow You Break, but current practice is to keep the price rather high to match the more expensive trade paperback.… read more
I’m just lifting my head from the final stages of editing the first draft of novel #3 to tell you this:
My author’s copies of Verbroken Belofte, the Dutch translation of Every Vow You Break arrived today. Aren’t they chillingly lovely? They’re published by the very classy Bezige Bij. I love all my covers, but these are just so haunting.
I’ll now get back to it. Normal service should be resumed in about one week, when I will have handed novel #3 in.… read more
Here I am, reading the prologue, giving it my best, gothic, intonation. Probably hamming it just a little tiny bit…
(As a nod to crime fiction convention, it contains my first ever police character).
Jamie Harrison interviewing me at Crawley Wordfest. I might look a bit miffed, but that's my thinking face, honest.
I have had an extremely busy week with my Every Vow You Break launch party on Tuesday and the Cuckoo One Town One Book event as the finale of Crawley Wordfest.
‘But surely,’ I hear you say. ‘That’s only two things to do in a whole week? Most people have to do at least thirty things a day to make their living?’… read more
I’m very excited about the Every Vow You Break launch, which is happening on Tuesday 3rd April at 6.30pm at Goldsboro Books, 23-25, Cecil Court, London WC2N 4EZ. If you’d like to come along and raise a glass to my new book, please let my publicist Sam Eades know: samantha.eades@headline.co.uk, so she can put you on the guest list.
On Friday I went with Sam Eades, my lovely publicist at Headline, to Clays printers in Bungay, to see Every Vow You Break roll off the presses. I had been told by David Headley at Goldsboro Books and S J Watson that it was an astounding day out (‘like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory for book nerds’), and that the sandwiches were very good. They were right on all counts.
After those remarkable sandwiches at Cambridge House, a beautiful Georgian building where the company started and which they now use for hospitality, We were shown around the massive factory by the lovely Vicky Ellis and Phil and Steve, having a peek at every single part of the process.… read more
