TALK RE BOOKS
I have always wanted to
write.
Ever since I could
read, that's all I wanted to do but, you know, life just got in the way.
I made all the
usual mistakes in life - well most of them really! but when my kids were born
in the mid-eighties, I got really interested in complementary medicine. My own
health hadn't been good and I wanted them to have only natural things. That
lead me down a very long garden-like path of herbs and aromatherapy and lately,
Reiki healing. (see www.gowerserenity.co.uk)
I've loved it all
but now that my kids have flown the nest, I've finally had time to indulge my
first passion. And I'm loving it!
I wrote one book,
based in the Welsh mountains, about drugs, called 'Getting High'. I didn't
think it good enough to publish but I'd proved to myself I could finish a
project. It sits in a drawer at home!
Then, my son, Tom, a
sci-fi writer, put me on to a critique site run by the Arts Council, called
'YouWriteOn.com'. On this website you post a piece of writing but, in order to
receive comments on it, you have to critique someone else's. You have to review
8 before you know your score, so it motivates you to look at other people's
work. I found this an illuminating experience and learned so much and was
greatly encouraged by the response that my stories got. I made it into the top
ten with all of them. It was a tremendous amount of work, as each piece was
between 3000 and 7000 words long and I was reviewing at least 2 a week.
Through this website
I made some wonderful writer friends who introduced me to various Facebook
groups and, from that, into self-publishing on Amazon.
I published The
Twisted Vine last year, told all my friends about it and let it go free a
couple of times. I was astonished at how well it did. The research was easy
because it was based on my own experiences of picking grapes in France in the
1980's. I thought - not everyone has had that experience, France is gorgeous,
most people like to drink wine and would be interested to know how it's made - but
it was only a chance meeting with another woman who had gone hitchhiking in
France at the same time, that Armand le Clair was born. She had been attacked
by a man who'd given her a lift and had fought her way out of the car and found
refuge in a Convent run by a silent order of nuns. Even the meal, with its
exquisite peach sprinkled with tiny mint leaves, was true. This anecdote
ignited my old notes and the story about the le Clair dynasty was born. I found
it really exciting to write the mystery part. It felt like I was making a Rubik
cube slot together perfectly - something I've failed to do in real life!
Encouraged by the
success of The Twisted Vine and the reviews by other authors especially, I dug
out my old manuscript about the village where my children were born in
Wiltshire.
We had an old
neighbour there, Harry, who had a wooden leg. My son, Tom, was the first baby
to have been born in this village for many years. It was a tiny place, deep in
a valley, a bit like Parkmill, with a big mansion at the top of the hill above
it. Harry told me how there only used to be a village pump for water on the
little green, then a standpipe at the end of our row of cottages - they were
tiny but very pretty houses for the workers - I called it 'Skid Row' - and then
the glorious day when sinks were installed in each lean-to kitchen with their
own tap.
Once I began
researching this era, it was unavoidable to leave out the cataclysmic event of
WW1 and I found the research very moving and absorbing. I didn't want it to be
about rich people. Downton Abbey came out at this time and I didn't want to
compete with that. I wanted to explore what this era was like for ordinary
people. And of course ordinary people still have fascinating lives with love
affairs and yearnings, births and deaths, and so Katy and Jem emerged and
battled their way through many ups and downs.
I found the way the
British Army treated their troops particularly shocking and there's quite a bit
about the experiences of foot soldiers, as well as the role of women in the
WAAC.
So what started out
as a happy memoir of picking grapes in The Twisted Vine turned into a murder
mystery and my fascination with plumbing in the early 1900s turned into a war
epic!
But that's the joy
of writing. That's the reward for the hard slog of research, the discipline of
working at it every day; it's the birth of characters who never existed before,
who form in your head and come out through your fingers. It is when these
characters start to run with your ideas that things get really exciting. I found,
especially with the first two books, that the characters wouldn't behave in the
way I had planned at all! They took the story and ran with it and I had to bend
to their will.
I'm also working on
a ghost story, called "The Rose Trail" which explores the thin veil
between those of us who are still alive and those who have passed away. I've
had some interesting experiences when giving healing to the bereaved, and after
I've lost people in my life, and I wanted to weave these into a mystery.
But I'm writing the
sequel to Daffodils now after lots of requests for it, so "The Rose
Trail" is on the back burner, and the first draft of "Peace
Lily" is almost finished.
Even though the
characters are firmly embedded now, I am managing to keep a firmer grip. I seem
to have got into a rhythm of writing.
I go into my shed,
light my candle, read my angel cards and open my computer. I edit, re-read as
much as I need to and then I wait. The method that seems to work for me, is to
get behind the character's eyes of whoever's point of view I'm in, and watch
what happens, but I'm keeping that story arc firmly in place. It's still
wonderful when that delicious moment comes and I see them, as if they were in a
film, taking the story to places I never imagined.
My Editor is my son
Tom, and when I get stuck, I brainstorm with him. Sometimes I just need that
little push of young energy to unlock the plot, find the twists and develop the
characters through talking about them.
It never ceases to
amaze me when we do this, as if the characters were real people. I hear myself
saying, but Katy just wouldn't do that, or, Jem is handy and resourceful - he's
easily capable of this, or that!
I can't see myself
ever stopping now. And with the government pushing back the pension age, I
really hope to be able to get an income stream from creating these stories out
of my head, out of thin air, until I fall off my perch!
I love my clients
and enjoy helping them but aromatherapy massage is hard, physical work.
Writing, unless I lose my marbles, is something I hope to continue doing for
the rest of my life.
The Twisted Vine
and Daffodils are on www.amazon.co.uk or in paperback from www.feedaread.com
Peace Lily will be
out this year with a third book in the trilogy, called Speedwell, will be coming
out soon. Then I can get back to The Rose Trail which I hope will become a
series based on a couple of psychic detectives.
Thanks for
listening. You've been a great audience.
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