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
Here is the full programme I recorded with Gilly Smith a few weeks ago. For more information on the songs I chose, please see yesterday’s post. For the playlist without the chat, go to Monday’s post.
For more Write Songs episodes, with fantastic writers such as Mick Jackson, Sharon Duggal, Mark Chase, Jed Novick, William Shaw, Rebecca Whitney, Sally O’Reilly and Mark Radcliffe, please visit Gilly Smith on Soundcloud.
In which I explain my reasoning behind choosing the playlist I posted yesterday:
As part of writing Her Husband’s Lover, I wrote what I now see as a ‘warm up novel’.
This novel is now filed in ‘strong but wrong’. It strayed into a dark, dystopian territory – too far for me. It wasn’t time wasted though – I took certain parts and brought them forward into the ‘right’ novel, and am refashioning a lot of the discarded scraps into something quite different.… read more
Last month, I was invited to put together a playlist of songs that inspired Her Husband’s Lover. This was for a great local radio programme – The Write Songs, hosted on Radio Reverb by Gilly Smith. Here is the playlist. Tomorrow I’ll talk about the reasoning behind the choices, and later this week I’ll link to the radio programme. Enjoy!
