Unexpected Happy News!

I received a set of revisions this week on the first three chapters of 'The Date Pool'. Not too bad thankfully, and as usual all the suggestions are wish-I'd-thought-of-that brilliant. I know they will make the story much stronger. I've already started on them and hope to get them out of the way this week, then I move on to writing chapters 4-6 and submit to my editor again at the half-way point.

I wanted to discuss one of the revision points before I got stuck in and emailed my editor to let her know, so when I got a phone call from her later in the day I naturally expected it to be about that. I was absolutely floored when instead she offered to buy my very first MS, the one I submitted via slush back in summer 2010, which went through two rounds of revisions under her supervision and was eventually rejected.

I am thrilled to announce that 'The Proposal Plan' (as I called it, the name may yet be changed) will be published by Mills & Boon RIVA in the UK only, in Spring of 2013!

Following the relaunch of RIVA in the UK and the introduction of the KISS line in North America, the intention is that titles will be simultaneously released in both lines from the middle of next year. In order to line the releases up in this way, there will be a short period early next year where a slot is available for a UK-only release. 'The Proposal Plan' will take up one of these slots.

I am absolutely over the moon that this story - which really was my baby - will finally see the light of day. I started it twenty-odd years ago, stuck it in the wardrobe when life and kids took over and only finished it when I stopped work to have the small one. With the encouragement of DH I finished it and sent it off, thinking that it might be rubbish but at least it wouldn't be rubbish cluttering up my cupboard anymore. The revisions were tough. The final third of the book was total cliche *toes curl as I remember*, and had to be completely rewritten, I had to cut one of the characters out and there were some major scene changes. But I loved the end result and I was so disappointed when it was rejected. I always hoped if I got published that I might be able to rework it one day and get it out there. I just didn't expect it to be anytime in this decade!

I am waiting to hear about the title and release details, and in the meantime I am cracking on with 'The Date Pool' with renewed enthusiasm.

So my message of the week is: never give up hope on those rejected MS's. They might make it out there one day!

Loveable Heroines

I thought I'd post this week about heroines, since I am up to my ears in my new MS and (as is usual for me) my heroine, Alice, feels like my best mate and is hogging the story and my hero, the gorgeous Harry, feels a bit of an enigma to me. I have just submitted my partial of the story to my editor and I know the revisions she comes back with will relate to him.

My favourite heroines have always been quirky, funny and loveable and they are exactly the kind I like to write now. I remember watching a romantic comedy while I was at university and wishing I was the heroine, or failing that her best friend. In fact, I think my love of romantic comedy stems from that film even though it wasn't mainstream.

What film was this? I hear you ask.

In the early 1990s Rik Mayall did a series of three hour-long shows for ITV, called Rik Mayall Presents... and one of these was a romantic comedy called 'Dancing Queen'. Rik starred as Neil, a spoilt yuppy whose mates play a stag night prank on him. First they hire a stripper and ply him with alcohol, and then they steal his trousers and stick him on a train. He wakes up on his way to Scarborough with the stripper, Julie, sitting opposite him.

Julie was played by Helena Bonham Carter, totally against her usual type, and she is absolutely adorable.

The music is wonderful - Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel singing 'Come Up and See Me' as Neil runs trouserless around Scarborough clutching an alarm clock trying to work out how to get back to London in time for his wedding. And in the final scene Julie is twirling an umbrella about as she dances to ABBA on the beach and Neil speeds across the sand to find her   in his BMW.

Rik Mayall is surprisingly perfect as the hero. But Helena Bonham-Carter's Northerner Julie steals the show as she talks about her conflict ('I were too young, he were too fat') and asks about Neil's wedding ('What's your fiancee's name? Sophie? That's a pretty name. Julie's horrible. Makes you think of Julie Andrews.'). I don't think I've ever rooted for someone more.

Unfortunately I think the only way you can watch this now is on YouTube, but if you ever get the chance to see it, I can't recommend it highly enough. Very much in the mould of Four Weddings and a Funeral, the sheer delicious happy-ever-afterness of it is fabulous.

Anyone else remember it? And is there a film or story that really fed your love of romance or a hero/heroine that you really love?

I am off to get to know my hero a bit better.

Diving in!

I am excited to say that my story proposals were more on the button this time than they have been in the past *wipes brow* and my lovely editor picked out the idea that I liked the best!

 After a couple of weeks of major league character planning, during which I filled out huge character questionnaires and imagined myself shopping, holidaying and goodness-knows-what with my hero and heroine, I am now ready to start writing the story. So in the next couple of days (small one has been ill, so everything has been on hold) I will be revisiting my plot board and getting started on Chapters 1-3 of The Date Pool (my pet name for the story, although my editor is calling it Alice and Harry).

Hope to blog in the next week or so about how it's going, can't deny I am super excited to be starting a new story but I am also trying to ignore Captain Doubt whispering about one-book wonders.

In the meantime I am taking part in Tea Cooper's roundup of the progress made by some of the entrants of New Voices 2011. Come and join me over at her blog if you have time for 'New Voices - Where Are We Now?'  www.teacooperauthor.com

The Lucky Seven

The fabulous and talented Lindsay Pryor has tagged me in a blog chain called The Lucky Seven, and since I am reduced to cleaning the house while I wait for my editor to give me the go-ahead (hopefully) on one of my story proposals, it is a welcome diversion *puts down the bleach and toilet brush*

The rules:

Post 7 lines from an unpublished work of fiction
Go to page 7 or 77, go to line 7 and post the next 7 lines or sentences exactly as you see them. No cheating!

So here we are. Seven lines from my unpublished New Voices MS, 'Honeymoon With A Stranger', which one day I hope to return to and rework and get out there! In this scene the heroine, Anna, has just twisted her ankle and is now on the phone to her pushy mother...



'I'm not thinking about your ridiculous day job, I'm thinking about the photo shoot, darling! You'll need to look glamorous, not swathed in bandages. The sooner you give this ludicrous hiding-out idea up the better. There's still huge interest in the break-up, Johnny's been working the press like mad and they say his record's on target for the Christmas Number One.'


'Mum, I couldn't care less what Johnny's doing and there's going to be no photo-shoot. I'm fine here. This place belongs to Jack Hamilton-Walsh and it's a publicity-free zone, thank goodness. It's perfect.'


'You don't mean the rugby player?' Her mother zoomed in. 'Mr Fix-It?'


That's it. Obligation fulfilled. I know I need to tag another seven people but this thing has run for a while now and I'm going to struggle to  find someone who hasn't already been hit! So if you would like to keep the chain alive, please consider yourself tagged and let me know so I can come and read your seven.

Back soon, hopefully with feedback on my story proposals. Bye for now.

Nailing Down The Process...

I've hit send on four new story proposals and I'm waiting for feedback on which of these the RIVA team think are suitable to develop. (And crossing everything that at least one of them will hit the mark, it wouldn't be the first time if all four were knocked back). So I thought I'd make use of the waiting time by looking back at what I got right with this last MS that sold, as opposed to the previous stories that didn't achieve those dizzy heights.

I love reading blog posts by authors talking about their 'process'. I adore the idea that there are a list of rules which, if I follow them faithfully, the end result will be a saleable MS. This trait slops over into other areas of my life - I had a shelf full of How-To books on baby rearing. I read Gina Ford and Tracy Hogg, I am a devotee of Dr Christopher Green's Toddler Taming. I wanted to believe that if I followed a set of rules the small one would sleep through the night at six weeks. Some of the rules worked and some didn't (the small one didn't sleep through for MONTHS *grits teeth at memory*). And it's the same with my How-To books about writing. Some of it works for me and some of it doesn't. The trick is to pick out the things that do work.

I thought I'd start with planning, since that is one point that I have nailed down about myself. I am not a pantser. I am in awe of them. How do they manage? How do they know they can sustain their conflict and story for the full 50k? I need to know where I'm going at all times. 

My most recent submission that didn't make a sale was my New Voices entry, Honeymoon With A Stranger, and as I've mentioned before, that story was an example of me starting out as a pantser. I dashed off one chapter because I thought I had an interesting initial hook situation, but I had no idea where the story was going after that. None of that mattered because I didn't expect it to get anywhere in the competition. It placed well in NV because I had no choice but to do some plot development and I had Liz Fielding in the background advising me and helping me brainstorm, but the moment the competition finished and I tried to complete the MS, it got harder and harder to continue with every chapter. I floundered around, not knowing where I was heading, my conflicts weren't strong enough, and as a result the story was rejected by M&B. My characters were good, dialogue and humour worked, but the whole thing fell down because it didn't have a decent story that could sustain me through 50k.

So when I started writing Secrets of the Rich and Famous, with editorial guidance, pantsing was out and planning was most definitely in. I did detailed character interviews and I had to submit a detailed story plan to the editor before I wrote so much as a word. It was broken down into twelve stages - I knew what was going to happen in every chapter, I knew how it was going to end. And in producing this plan, I used a plotboard. I hadn't done this before, and I have to admit part of the attraction was the fiddling around with stationery and colour coding - I like all that! This is what my plotboard looked like when I started out.

Pretty bare really. I split it up into five acts, put in lines for the mid-point, turning points and the black moment, and slapped on post-its for scene ideas and roughly where I thought they would fit in.

I planned to update the board as I went along, adding new ideas as they came to me etc, but this picture is also exactly what the board looked like when I finished the story. For some reason I never got round to adding to it and I never really referred to it, it just sat in my spare room. (At one point I hung the washing too close to it on the airer and it got dripped on - hence the pink streak!) 

In conclusion therefore, I could assume that plotboarding just isn't for me. But I know deep down that setting this thing up helped. It helped a lot. It made me visualise how the story played out and it forced me to think about how and where different events and developments happened in my story. And when I actually did get stuck into the writing I didn't have any problems with sagging middles or floundering about what would happen next, like I did with Honeymoon.

So this time round, I will be doing all the five act organising and plotting all over again. I might not plotboard - maybe I will set up a spreadsheet or draw a diagram, I haven't really decided - but I will do something visual to nail the story down before I start writing.

What works for you? Do you plan or do you dive in and pants?

I'm Visiting The Hot Pink Typewriter...

I'm hanging out over at the Hot Pink Typewriter blog today. Come and keep me company if you have time!

An Update and a Title!

I am just about back down to earth now after a lovely Jubilee weekend of sunshine and celebrating. (There was wine, lots of it!) Before the long weekend my editor put me out of my misery as I waited for an email requesting revisions, or worse rewrites of the last quarter, by informing me they will be accepting the ms without further revisions. I was so relieved that I initially skipped over the last part of the email in which she offered me a contract  for my next two stories. To say I am delighted is an understatement. The DH broke open a bottle of champagne we'd put away years ago for a special occasion - until now there hadn't been one special enough!

I now have a title ....drum roll... 'Secrets of the Rich and Famous'. I'm liking the title lots - it's a good reflection of what happens in the story without being sledgehammer-descriptive. What I don't yet have is a mainstream release date - although I was told December when I got the call, the release is on hold for now while RIVA undergoes a relaunch a bit later this year. Just wait until you see the covers, they are to die for! It is a terrifically exciting time to have joined the line and I can't wait to see how it develops from here.

So that's my news for now. I'm getting back to normal. I've ejected the older kids back to school and I'm in the middle of writing proposals for my next story. I am also trying to nail down all the things I did right this time that I got wrong before - in other words finding my writing process. There's definitely another post in there.

Thanks so much everyone for all the lovely comments I've had. This has been a super happy few weeks for me.