ŷ������

Morning everyone!

I feel a little as though I have been out in the wilderness and have stumbled across ŷ������ again by happy accident. I'm really looking forward to spending much more time here chatting to readers and writers and looking at all the wonderful book recommendations.

Today is a strange one for me as I finished my sixth Polwenna Bay novel, Rhythm of the Tide, late last night and I'm feeling a little lost without being in the village and telling the stories. It is a beautiful day here in Cornwall though and I'm going to go out for a walk and gather ideas for my next book. I'm so excited about it.

Please feel free to get in touch and also to give me any pointers about what to do on here!

xRx

Way back in 2010 I was lucky enough to have my first novel published by Orion. KATY CARTER WANTS A HERO was a book I had never actually expected to see the light of day. I wrote it for fun - the best and only reason to write a book - and when Richard Madeley was kind enough to say he enjoyed it things took off in a way I could have never imagined.




The book was featured in every national newspaper and the first print run ran out in hours. This was in the days before ebooks had really caught on too so it was even more exciting in many ways! I went on national and local radio and did book signings as well as talks at literary festivals. Too be published was, and still is, a dream come true and KATY holds a very special place in my heart. Readers too are very fond of Katy and even now it���s rare that week goes by without an email or a tweet or a FB message about the book.







Pinchy the Lobster became the unexpected star of the book and had a fan club all of his own. People often give me lobster related gifts too. The latest is a fab lobster cushion from my boyfriend���s mum which has pride of place on the sofa. I have to admit that even to this day, unlike Angel in ESCAPE FOR THE SUMMER, I can���t bear the thought of eating lobster!

One of the questions I���m often asked is, ���Will there be a sequel to Katy?���� I thought long and hard about this because the novel did come to a conclusion. But then I thought about the person I was at 29 and the person I am five years on and decided that there was certainly scope for Katy���s next adventure.

A few weekends ago, knowing I was going to be writing the sequel, I reread the book. Goodness, but aren���t first novels autobiographical? There is far more of me in that book than I realised. Red hair? Big shoes? English teacher who wants to be a romantic novelist? Hmmm... It was also the feisty and sometimes angry voice of the person and the writer I was then. Like Katy, I���ve grown up a lot since and mellowed a bit too! LIfe has dealt me a few surprises, good and bad, and I too have a happy life in Cornwall with my hero. Using these parallels it hasn���t been hard to weave a new narrative.

Would I still be able to write as Katy? I wasn���t sure and I must admit this is one of the reason I waited to write the book. It feels like a big responsibility to shoulder because Katy means a lot to so many people and I didn���t want to disappoint them. In true Katy style though, I had to pick up my pen and just find out...

And that was this morning! The day just flew by because there Katy was and it was as though she���d never been away. Her voice is as strong as ever and the first 3000 words simply wrote themselves.

I can hardly wait to carry on tomorrow!

One of the most exciting things about being an author - apart from meeting lots of readers and talking about books with them - is seeing a novel printed out for the first time. After weeks and weeks of tapping away at a screen and looking at the book digitally it���s always something else to see the printer spewing out hundreds of pages.

I���ve been writing the 4th Polwenna Bay book for several months now and to finally be able to read it as a whole is very exciting. The whole process of putting a book together is quite a slow one and I tend to spend several weeks reading through and making lots of changes and rewrites. Then, when I am finally brave enough to let it go, I send to book to my editor and proof readers who have the job of pulling it all into shape. A good editor is worth their weight in gold and I am very lucky with mine.

So now, please excuse me while I return to making a few more changes!

It���s strange how the world changes without you even noticing. Five years ago when KATY CARTER WANTS A HERO was published very little was said about ebooks and ebook rights - they were tagged onto the deal as a little extra and it was all about the paperback deal. I don���t think I���d even seen an e reader or knew anybody who used one. Fast forward to 2016 and the opposite is true - it���s all about the ebooks.

I love paperbacks and I was always one of those people who swore I didn���t want a Kindle. I love the smell of books and the feel of holding one in my hands. I feel a big wave of joy when I see them on my shelf and nothing beats the weight on an unread book in a carrier bag.

Then I moved to Grand Cayman and suddenly buying books by the authors I love wasn���t quite so easy. My friend, the Cool Rev, came to visit and brought me a gift - a Kindle. At first I was skeptical and protested but when the new Sophie Kinsella came out I was persuaded to give it a try.

It was a revelation. Not only was my Kindle waterproofed (I could read in the bath/pool/sea without turning my books to paper mache) but I could read all night too without waking up my other half. The downside was that it was suddenly far too easy to download books at the click of a mouse and I���ve probably made Jeff Bezos even richer by purchasing far too many.

The rest is history. I am now a Kindle convert and what I���ve come to realise is that reading is still reading; only the delivery method has changed. People were probably alarmed when hand written manuscripts were threatened by the printing press, but they still read. Where would Chaucer have been without it? Probably a frustrated civil servant dreaming of being a writer - a little like lots of indie authors.

As for my own books? When I look at my sales figures it���s pretty clear where the market is heading. With days that run into sales of thousands probably only 2% of sales are paperbacks. My traditional deals with Hachette, Pan Mac, Avon etc included paperbacks but the book shops can only stock limited amounts of these as space is finite. A virtual bookshelf is infinite which means ebooks are never out of print or stock. Since publishing independently with Notting Hill Press I have concentrated on ebook sales but I know that lots of my readers would love a paperback copy. My mum is also keen!

It���s taken a bit of work, negotiation and planning but all my novels should be available in paperback by Easter, which is very exciting. The proofs of DEAD ROMANTIC arrived today which was wonderful and I keep looking at them on my shelf - tangible evidence of all those hours of working! They will be stocked locally and also available online.















The next job is to think about audio books!

I���m finishing Polwenna Bay 4: Treasure of the Heart this week. It���s been a fun book to write because it���s about a treasure hunt and I���ve had to spend a great deal of time trying to figure out the clues and where they could be found within the village. I don���t want to give the story away but St Wenn���s Well, the constant flow of water through Polwenna Bay and the village���s dark smuggling past are all a big part of the plot. Later on I���ll share some myths and local legends too but not yet. I don���t want any spoilers.

The story begins with a big storm on New Year���s Day and as I write this morning, Polperro is being battered by storm force winds and rains as the tail end of Hurricane Jonas batters the Cornish coast. The water is running off the hillside outside my writing room and I���m watching it trickle into the gullies and drains that craftsmen from a hundred years ago built. The walls outside are green and damp and if I open the windows I can hear the water running.











My house is about 100 years old and one of the newer buildings in the village. It still has an old out door privy and the water is channelled to flow beneath it - in the old days to carry the unmentionables away. This got me thinking about the gullies and secret streams that flow beneath the village and suddenly a key part of the plot has fallen into place. To find out how and why you���ll have to read the book. I love it when ���plot jigsaws���� fall into place like this. It���s part of the magic of writing.

And so, back to work!

I���m absolutely loving being back in England and even more so being in Cornwall. As much as I loved my time living in the Caribbean there is something so special about this small, green island - even if it is rather rainy and muddy right now. It���s been a case of pulling on my boots and waterproofs and stomping the cliffs and footpaths for inspiration rather than lazing by the pool but I���m certainly feeling inspired and a lot fitter.

One of the wonderful things about the UK is the history we have here and I love all the myths and legends that surround the everyday here. This is particularly true in Cornwall where tales of wreckers and piskies and obscure saints abound and the ancient pagan past is only a step away though the sea mists. These myths and the dramatic landscape certainly inspire my writing.

Those of you who have read the Polwenna Bay books will know that St Wenn���s Well plays an important role in WINTER WISHES and as I have been writing TREASURE OF THE HEART the well has become central to the plot and the way that the lives of some characters have played out. Cornwall is full of such wells and they each have their own stories and mystical properties. Adopted by Christianity, these holy wells have become a part of local folk lore and people still visit them and leave gifts of sparkly items, small fairies or clouties of cloth for the well spirits. In WINTER WISHES the Reverend Jules isn���t so sure about all this!

As part of my research for the book I began to look at the OS map of my local area and I was amazed to see that there were several of these wells literally on my doorstep. We visited one called St. Nun���s Well which is just outside the village of Pelynt. It was beautiful and had the oddest atmosphere.

Later on I was surfing the Internet (always a good way of avoiding work!) when I found an extract of a very old OS map of Polperro. This map showed that there was once a holy well right opposite where I keep my horses. Once called St Peter���s Well, it was known for curing sore eyes and had been visited by locals for generations. Work on the small lane during the twentieth century meant that it had been lost over the years but according my web site source it was still there if you looked carefully enough. Usually I moan like mad about climbing the steep hill to the stables but this time I was off like a shot. And guess what? I found it!








The well once ran into a big bowl but now it flows into a smaller basin. It���s hidden away but once I found it I couldn���t believe I had missed it. I must have walked past it a thousand times! It���s really made me wonder what else I haven���t noticed here. And what new adventures and stories I can dream up...

So now it’s October and Dead Romantic has been released, Escape for Christmas is with my patient and quite frankly brilliant editor, Jane, and I am almost at the end of planning The Little Caribbean Cafe. I’ve had to be really strict with myself because time is at a premium. School is very busy, I’m trying hard to move about more and exercise - writer’s bum is a real hazard of the job - and in between all this I’m writing novels too. It’s far too easy for my ideas to run away with me and I am making sure that this time I am really being strict.

In the past I have written loads of notes, either on paper or on my ipad, and I always have a notebook with me too so that I can write ideas down or continue the novel if I have a spare moment. I probably look very industrious in meetings! The point is that I never want to waste a second. I’ve also had lots of fun using ‘post it�� notes stuck onto a time line and moved around as the narrative develops. This was a great technique when I was writing Ellie Andrews has Second Thoughts because the narrative moved backwards and forwards in time and the heroine’s story spanned the build up from the morning of her wedding to her arrival at the altar. Seeing a visual representation of this was brilliant and certainly helped me to see exactly where the story was going and where the gremlins in my plot line might be. The picture below is of my early notes for the next book - I think they’ll only make sense to me and even I get confused! My partner, Christian, looks as though he wants to weep when he sees them. Being an engineer, he has a lovely methodical way of doing things and my creative ‘idea vomit�� is distressing for him to behold!

I’m living in the beautiful Caribbean at the moment and I soon discovered that air con dries everything out - from humans to washing to post it notes. When the plot lines for a book I wrote for a German publisher (He Loves Me Knot) kept tumbling to the floor like pink and green dandruff I quickly realised I needed to find another method. I was also getting very confused with all my note books (Christian counted that I had over 10 on the go at once!) and with the pressure of a full time teaching load as well, I needed to get a handle on my organisation. Fast. I chatted to writer friends about methods that worked for them and did some research online into novel writing software. Eventually I came across Snowflake Pro, a piece of novel planning software which looked to me as though it could be what I was looking for.

I read up on it and took the plunge, figuring that it was worth a try and could be written off as a business expense if I really hated it. I was also happy to spend more time with my new pink Mac Air and help save the planet in the process. It’s a simple process to download Snowflake Pro and the programme just replaces the notes on paper with digital files which link together.

I trialled Snowflake Pro with Escape for Christmas. I knew that I only had the school summer holiday to write this book and my editor was expecting it to arrive at the end of August. Err, no pressure there. I already knew the characters well from writing Escape for the Summer so I was ahead of the game in that respect and since the book was set in Fowey I was also sorted with the location.

I set a week aside to totally devote myself to planning and spent hours making detailed character files and expanding synopses. At times it did feel a bit OTT and I wondered whether I was becoming Cleo Carpenter, the cerebral and organised heroine of Dead Romantic rather than carrying on in my own more haphazard Katy Carter - esque manner! Still, I’d invested in the software so I stuck with it and, to my pleasant surprise, at the end of the week I had the entire novel planned in detail, structured tightly and divided into chapters. All I had to do was write it.

And this was where the fun began (and my holiday ended!)

With the novel planned in such detail, writing it was a joy. I knew exactly where I was going, the plot was coherent and I was able to schedule my limited time really effectively. That sounds totally boring and the antithesis of creative but it was actually one of the most enjoyable experiences of my writing career so far. Writing professionally means that you have to meet deadlines. Editors and copy editors are booked in, cover art is commissioned, the publishing house has their slot reserved and the bloggers and reviewers are waiting. There is no way a writer, or at least one who wants to be taken seriously and have a professional reputation, can miss deadlines. With Escape for Christmas so tightly planned all I had to do was write it. Of course as I wrote there were changes. Characters took the plot in directions I hadn’t anticipated, and there were many surprises along the way, but even so I wrote a novella of 67,000 words in just over 4 weeks. When I read it through I was pleasantly pleased because the first draft was not as rough as the first drafts of previous books. It has proven far less onerous to wrestle this novel into shape!

Of course his is just my experience but I am now in the final stages of completing the detailed planning of my next book. In the coming week or so I’ll be starting my first draft and I can hardly wait to get cracking. I’m able to manage my time far more easily this way which really relieves a lot of the stress of juggling two full time jobs.

So, I’d better get back to it. Caribbean Cafe, chapter 1, here I come...

So now it’s October and Dead Romantic has been released, Escape for Christmas is with my patient and quite frankly brilliant editor, Jane, and I am almost at the end of planning The Little Caribbean Cafe. I’ve had to be really strict with myself because time is at a premium. School is very busy, I’m trying hard to move about more and exercise - writer’s bum is a real hazard of the job - and in between all this I’m writing novels too. It’s far too easy for my ideas to run away with me and I am making sure that this time I am really being strict.

In the past I have written loads of notes, either on paper or on my ipad, and I always have a notebook with me too so that I can write ideas down or continue the novel if I have a spare moment. I probably look very industrious in meetings! The point is that I never want to waste a second. I’ve also had lots of fun using ‘post it�� notes stuck onto a time line and moved around as the narrative develops. This was a great technique when I was writing Ellie Andrews has Second Thoughts because the narrative moved backwards and forwards in time and the heroine’s story spanned the build up from the morning of her wedding to her arrival at the altar. Seeing a visual representation of this was brilliant and certainly helped me to see exactly where the story was going and where the gremlins in my plot line might be. The picture below is of my early notes for the next book - I think they’ll only make sense to me and even I get confused! My partner, Christian, looks as though he wants to weep when he sees them. Being an engineer, he has a lovely methodical way of doing things and my creative ‘idea vomit�� is distressing for him to behold!

















I’m living in the beautiful Caribbean at the moment and I soon discovered that air con dries everything out - from humans to washing to post it notes. When the plot lines for a book I wrote for a German publisher (He Loves Me Knot) kept tumbling to the floor like pink and green dandruff I quickly realised I needed to find another method. I was also getting very confused with all my note books (Christian counted that I had over 10 on the go at once!) and with the pressure of a full time teaching load as well, I needed to get a handle on my organisation. Fast. I chatted to writer friends about methods that worked for them and did some research online into novel writing software. Eventually I came across Snowflake Pro, a piece of novel planning software which looked to me as though it could be what I was looking for.












I read up on it and took the plunge, figuring that it was worth a try and could be written off as a business expense if I really hated it. I was also happy to spend more time with my new pink Mac Air and help save the planet in the process. It’s a simple process to download Snowflake Pro and the programme just replaces the notes on paper with digital files which link together.

I trialled Snowflake Pro with Escape for Christmas. I knew that I only had the school summer holiday to write this book and my editor was expecting it to arrive at the end of August. Err, no pressure there. I already knew the characters well from writing Escape for the Summer so I was ahead of the game in that respect and since the book was set in Fowey I was also sorted with the location.

I set a week aside to totally devote myself to planning and spent hours making detailed character files and expanding synopses. At times it did feel a bit OTT and I wondered whether I was becoming Cleo Carpenter, the cerebral and organised heroine of Dead Romantic rather than carrying on in my own more haphazard Katy Carter - esque manner! Still, I’d invested in the software so I stuck with it and, to my pleasant surprise, at the end of the week I had the entire novel planned in detail, structured tightly and divided into chapters. All I had to do was write it.

And this was where the fun began (and my holiday ended!)

With the novel planned in such detail, writing it was a joy. I knew exactly where I was going, the plot was coherent and I was able to schedule my limited time really effectively. That sounds totally boring and the antithesis of creative but it was actually one of the most enjoyable experiences of my writing career so far. Writing professionally means that you have to meet deadlines. Editors and copy editors are booked in, cover art is commissioned, the publishing house has their slot reserved and the bloggers and reviewers are waiting. There is no way a writer, or at least one who wants to be taken seriously and have a professional reputation, can miss deadlines. With Escape for Christmas so tightly planned all I had to do was write it. Of course as I wrote there were changes. Characters took the plot in directions I hadn’t anticipated, and there were many surprises along the way, but even so I wrote a novella of 67,000 words in just over 4 weeks. When I read it through I was pleasantly pleased because the first draft was not as rough as the first drafts of previous books. It has proven far less onerous to wrestle this novel into shape!

Of course his is just my experience but I am now in the final stages of completing the detailed planning of my next book. In the coming week or so I’ll be starting my first draft and I can hardly wait to get cracking. I’m able to manage my time far more easily this way which really relieves a lot of the stress of juggling two full time jobs.

So, I’d better get back to it. Caribbean Cafe, chapter 1, here I come...

Quite often when people find out that I write novels the next thing they say is, “Oh really? Everyone always says I should write a book but I just don’t have the time.�� At this point I usually count to ten because time isn’t something I have vast quantities of either. Like most writers I know, I also have a day job. In my case this is teaching English at secondary level and as well as working at school I also have tonnes of marking and planning to do at home. Once this is done then it’s time to hunker down and write. If you really want to write then sacrifices have to be made and my social life was the first casualty, followed by any hope of every having a night to do nothing and a body that is well exercised ...

My point is that if you really want to write then write you will. Nothing will stand in your way. It’s more of a compulsion than a job anyway. For me, I can’t imagine a life where I’m not planning a new book, writing one, wrestling edits and sorting covers. Even though it does cost me in other ways, just hearing that one person has enjoyed what I write makes the eye bags and extra pounds worthwhile.

So today I am thinking about my next novel. “Dead Romantic�� is out in just over a week, “Escape for Christmas�� is with my editor and the latest short story has just been published in “My Weekly��. My publishing schedule for the next 12 months is really busy and I need to make sure that I make the most of every spare moment. This means - and it sounds really boring - that I have to have my novels planned and ready to go.

I can already hear you saying that writing is supposed to be creative. The image of the writer sitting down for a cuppa with the muse and then creating wonderful prose off the top of his or her head is all very well but in the real world, which is where I live most of the time, this is more of an indulgence than a reality. In fact, it’s worse than that- it’s the recipe for waffle and a rambling novel that has the right to roam across weeks and months of valuable writing time. Writing, although wonderful, is a job and if you are being paid to write you have to be professional and deliver. Editors and publishers don’t like having to extend deadlines and agents hate having to go cap in hand and ask for more time for their clients. Writing is a business and to be taken seriously you have to be business like.

I know. It all sounds very serious and boring, doesn’t it?

The good news is that is you are strict with yourself there can be lots and lots of wonderfully creative things going on but within a tightly structured frame work. This all sounds pretty virtuous coming the girl who has run it up to the wire on several occasions, but I’ve been doing this job long enough now to know what works for me. I’m not saying my way is the only way or that it will work for everyone but I have learned some pretty tough lessons. A tightly planned book is a better book, there is no doubt in my mind about this. Within that planning of course there is room to be creative. Characters will still say and do things that totally take you by surprise and the plot will twist and turn in ways you never expect. That’s the joy of writing. A tight plan will help you to wrestle them into some kind of order and make sure that your narrative remains structured. My early (and unpublished!) novels wiggle around like my year sevens before break time and I totally understand now why they were rejected.

So, I promised that I would take you with me on the journey of the next book. Hopefully you haven’t given up yet! The working title of this one is “The Little Caribbean Cafe�� and it is going to be set on the paradise island of St Antonia, a small tax haven in the sunshine - not unlike a certain island I know!

My first job has been to scope out locations for the book. I do this by visiting various places on the island and snapping picture of them. Hooray for the advent of the iphone! This really helps me to have vivid images in mind when I write and I like to jot down sensory impressions when I visit the place. Oh dear. I am such an English teacher sometimes! Once I have the images I pop them onto a pin board on Pinterest for my readers to enjoy and I also keep a record of them in a folder on the desktop of my writing Mac. When I’m working on a scene I’ll often refer to the images to help me. This was a really good habit that I learned when I was writing for Working Partners. I do the same with characters too. Images from the internet, picture of actors who resemble characters or even people I meet (imagine my shock the other day when I met a waiter who looked exactly like Cal from the ‘Escape�� books!) Once I have my images sorted I am then ready to start the next phase of the book - planning the novel.

Here’s the for “The Little Caribbean Cafe�� so far!

And here are some more pictures that will help me to build my world. To make it authentic for my readers it has to be real to me.











































I’m off to do some planning now - more about that next time.

This is a place where I will be spending a lot more time in the future. I love blogging and I have tried to use all kinds of sites and methods but it never seems to work for me. I guess this is because I am always in about 10 different places at once. To make life less complicated I am going to blog here on my web site and then post links on all the other places I like to hang out such as Facebook, Twitter and Good Reads. Over the next few months I am going to take you through the entire process of writing a novel and then publishing it. This novel is “The Little Caribbean Cafe�� and it has been in the queue for a while now.

I’ll also show you the process of being an Indie author, something which I am very proud of and excited about. I think that this is one of the most exciting times ever to be an author and the world of publishing is changing all the time. There are all kinds of debates about this and I’ll share my thoughts on this with you. Love them or hate them ebooks are here to stay and so is Amazon...

That’s it for now. I am off to finish the final edits of “Dead Romantic�� and then it’s bed time. I’ll be back soon - I promise!