All Together, Now...

I've been Hopeless at remembering to post when it's my turn these past couple of months, mostly because I've been on tour for the publication of The Firebird and as a result I've been hopeless at remembering where I am and what day of the month it is at any given moment...

I was meant to post last Sunday, but I thought I'd sneak in now (with my apologies) to share this photographic piece of history snapped in London on May 16th of this year, when for the first time EVER, all of us were in the same spot at the same time, at the Romantic Novelists' Association's annual Summer Party.

A momentous occasion indeed, and luckily my son was on hand with a camera to capture it.

Left to right, that's Christina, Anna, Liz, Brigid, Me (Susanna), and Julie.

ALL IN THE SAME PLACE!

OK, maybe no one else is as excited about this as I am, but I'm sharing the photo with you anyway. And I promise I'll be here on schedule, next time.

Isn't it romantic?

Instead of starting an original discussion here, I'd like to continue one that's already begun over at the All About Romance blog, which asks the question "How Do We Define Romance?"

The AAR blog post was inspired by the Romance Writers of America's recent decision to eliminate the "Novel with Strong Romantic Elements" category from its RITA and Golden Heart Awards, and to ask writers of those novels to "re-examine" whether we really qualify to be full members of their organization.

You can read the details in the post I've linked to, above, and learn even more by following the links they've provided, as well, but for the sake of brevity I'll just re-post what my own answer to that question was:

“Do I think I write romance? Yes. But for me, a romance novel, besides having an HEA or HFN, only has one other key requirement: that the love story be essential to the plot. In other words, if you pull the love story out of the book, the story falls apart, because everything—every other element—has been stitched to that one central seam. That’s my own, admittedly personal, definition of a romance. And that’s what I write.”

(HEA and HFN, for those unfamiliar with the terms, are romance-writer-speak for "Happily Ever After" and "Happy For Now").

As a Canadian, I am used to walking on that border between the American and British ways of viewing something, but I have to say this whole thing's made me very grateful I'm a member of the RNA as well, where I have never once been made to feel my writing doesn't fit the definition of "romance", or felt that I might not belong.

But I confess to being curious: What is romance, to you? Or, if that's too hard to define, what is the most romantic book you've ever read?

(And come back Thursday, to read Julie's post)

Dance Your Troubles Away

Belfagen Dancers
(photo courtesy of Liz Fenwick/dancers courtesy of Anna Louise Lucia)

I’m still in recovery from last weekend’s RNA Conference in Penrith. A weekend which has become my writing New Year’s Eve, a time and place for me to assess the last year and plan for the new. A place to learn as well as a place to talk too much, drink copious amounts and generally get up to mischief.

This year it hit me like a proper new year. With all the angst and fear and heartache that I suffer every 31^st December. This last year has been full of ups and downs and beyond busy in a personal sense. I also realized (after being grumpy and various Heroine Addicts giving me great advice) that I haven’t been writing enough. Three hours of solid writing later and my mood was on the way back.

But what really got me in the new year spirit was something not directly connected with writing. The lovely Anna Louise Lucia is a morris dancer and asked her dance side to come and demonstrate to us on Sunday afternoon. They also taught us two dances. It was AMAZING! Everyone was grinning from ear to ear after we’d finished. All the cobwebs and problems were swept away as we tapped and twirled, dipped and swung.

“Let us read, and let us dance; these two amusements will never do any harm to the world.” Voltaire

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” Friedrich Nietzsche

“To dance is to be out of yourself. Larger, more beautiful, more powerful.. This is power, it is glory on earth and it is yours for the taking” Agnes De Mille

“It's the heart afraid of breaking that never learns to dance.” Xiaolu Guo

“Life is sweet when you pay attention. When it doesn't seem sweet, put a sticker on your nose and do a funky dance.” Whitney Scott

Come back on Sunday to hear from Susanna (who we missed at the RNA)

Conference Season

It's not long now till the RNA's Annual Conference, at Newton Rigg, Penrith, starting on the 13th July.

Bliss.

The Conference packs have arrived (if you haven't yet book, there are still a few places - snatch them quick!) and the annual pleasure of browsing the sessions and the annual agony of trying to choose which options to pick has begun.

Jan Jones has, as always, done a brilliant job of making sure there's something for everyone, whether you're starting out or multi-pubbed, interested in YA books or sweet short fiction.  Just sitting her writing this blog, I keep getting distracted by reading contributor bios or trying to decide between a drama workshop or something from Vulpes Libres.

My perception of the Conference has shifted a lot over the *cough*decade*cough* or so I've been going.  I've attended as a wide-eyed newbie, as an unpublished writer, blooded by my first serious rejections and once, memorably, having just given my first serious rejection of an offered contract.  I've attended - even more memorably - as a newly published author, as a contributor.  I've turned up tired, sick and hopeless, and ecstatic, empowered and feeling invincible.  I've always left feeling better equipped, better informed, and more resilient.  Frequently I've left making fantastic friends.

Last year I was honoured to be asked to facilitate the First Timers' Network, making sure new attendees have a chance to get to know each other before arriving, and have any support they need when they get there.  That was a new experience for me, too.

This year there's a something new for me, too.  This year, with the help of the lovely ladies of Belfagan, I'm going to be leading a session on morris dancing.

As you do.

Second Reads

Mayburgh Henge

If you remember, gentle reader, that last time we spoke my NWS manuscript, The Stone Voice, had been put forward for a  second read Since then things have moved on.

This week my manuscript came home to me. And it came home with two reader reports. Now I thought I would be upset that the manuscript wasn’t being sent on to agents or publishers but I knew the manuscript wasn’t ready. It was part way through an edit.

So it was with regret but no surprise that I read the reports. Well I couldn’t be happier. My first reader loved it! Which you would expect as she passed it on for the second read. My second reader report was amazing. Eight pages of gold dust. They have gone chapter by chapter working asking questions and teasing out theme and motivation so I can make it stronger. And the comment which made me happy…

“When a story is so close to being spot-on it can often be difficult to work out why some bits of the story aren’t hanging together…”

WOW!

So I have taken suggestion from my fellow Heroine Addicts and will be copying said reports. I will keep a copy untouched. I will take a copy and highlight all the positive points (for bad days). And with the other I will highlight in one colour those I agree with and in another colour those comments I don’t necessarily agree with. Then I have been told to do nothing for a month.

I can do nothing for a month. I think. I do have my new story to work on.  In November I’ll be back in the editing chair.

I can’t wait!

Come back on Sunday to hear from Susanna

The RNA ROCKS!!

I reached another milestone recently. After eight years I being a member of the Romantic Novelists Association’s (RNA) New Writers Scheme (NWS) I have managed to get my manuscript put forward for a ‘second read’.

I supposed I should explain for non-RNA types what exactly this all means. Every year 250 unpublished writers can join the NWS and it means that they can submitted a manuscript anytime between January and August which will be read by an anonymous reader. The reader is a published author who has a background in whatever genre you are writing in. They read your manuscript and then write a report on it, telling you what works and what doesn’t. Which completely rocks whichever way you look at it. Even if the report leaves you weeping in your beer. I still remember my first one… I cried all night but hugged the thought that although everything else sucked I could write a good kiss.

But if you get more than the kisses right, if the reader likes your manuscript. I mean LIKES it and thinks it is ready they send it back to the organiser recommending it for a ‘second read’. This means yet another anonymous reader gets your manuscript. They read it and if they LIKE it too, the RNA will approach agents or publishers on your behalf. It is like having an RNA kitemark added to your writing.

Mind you even just having it under consideration is amazing. I mean someone somewhere who I haven’t bribed with wine (well I could have at an RNA event but it wasn’t done deliberately) actually thinks my work is almost there.

Eight years. And a life time of dreaming.

Come back on Sunday to hear from Susanna 

RNA Conference 2011

The RNA Conference is always a highlight of my year. I love re-connecting with old friends and making new ones. I love the workshops and the celebrations.
I do find it all a bit dazing, though. All those voices in small spaces, all those faces and names... by the end of the first evening I'm always reeling a bit, in danger of losing my voice and with a ringing in my ears usually only experienced after an AC/DC gig.

So, though my ringing ears and reeling brain, and delivered to you in a croaky voice, these are my impressions...

Lizzy Kremer did a fantastic overview of contracts and what to look out for. She reminded us to read a contract with an eye to the best and worse case scenarios - will this clause work for me if the book bombs? And if it takes off, what then?
Louise Allen, Elizabeth Chadwick and Jill Mansell showed us (whether they meant to or not) just how hard working award winning novelists are, and that there as many processes in writing a book as there are authors writing them. Oh, and Louise mentioned that one of her working titles was once rumoured to be Gonad the Barbarian...

I met someone who edited memoirs of soldiers in the Peninsula War, someone who (like me) is fascinated by the breakthroughs of early scientists, someone who recently signed a six-book contract and someone who is interested to find out if pregnancy hormones are going to make her write the best book ever, or the worst book ever...

I learned that there are three golf balls on the moon.... and that shoe envy can be offset by knowing that said shoes are really, really painful.

Louise Allen ran through some of the basic mistakes that all authors can be prone to, for the benefit of our New Writers' Scheme members, including the ones about punctuation, Point of View, and that if you're moaning that a reader "didn't get it" then you're not doing your job as an author.... (and I've caught myself moaning that one myself once or twice!)

Valerie Webster taught us that Regency dances were all about flirting, that men were happy to skip and occasionally formed a couple in the dance if there weren't enough women, that a deep curtsey is Victorian, not Regency, and that I have two left feet.

Elizabeth Hawksley reminded us that characters that feel real have to be seen in their world in the round - showing how they relate to themselves, friends, family, their work, passions, goals... and that at some point a hero must develop emotional goals and recognise them for that.

When Cally Taylor won the Elizabeth Goudge Trophy, and Liz Fenwick came second and I was in the shortlist of six, I remembered what talented company I was in.

And all in all I remembered just how lucky I am to be an RNA member, and how priveleged to be part of this crowd of talented, hard working, savvy, no-prisoners, creative women, with hearts as big as the world.

(If you're on Twitter, follow the fun on #RNAConf11)

The Company of Writers

I had a treat last Friday. I went to my local RNA chapter meeting.

It's been a while since I've been, and it was exciting to see the many new faces among the familiar, and have a sense of so many established, just beginning and up and coming writers assembled in one place.

In the beginning there were just four or so of us, meeting in each other's houses, sharing a pot luck lunch. Last Friday there were thirteen of us who could make the date.

We run the gamut of romantic (and non-romantic, come to think of it) genres and every form and format of publishing. We're in libraries and magazines, stores from Asda to Waterstones. Published and unpublished, we all have manuscripts under the bed, stories unfinished, and hopes for the future. We come from all over Northumberland and Newcastle, with a couple of interlopers like myself, out on my little limb in north-west Cumbria.

Although I'm the official 'contact' for the group, work commitments and sheer distance (and diesel prices!) keep me from going as often as I'd like. They say writing is a solitary profession, and they're right - you only have to look at the way writers gravitate to e-loops, message boards, and social networking sites to get together with other writers and combat that solitary state.

Once in a while, though, the desire to connect transcends the world wide web. We need to get together, discuss our latest projects, fickle reviewers, unaccountable rejections and impossible revisions. We need to look each other in the eye, laugh, groan, sympathise, cheer... and remind ourselves we're not mad.

Or at least, that we're only as mad as other writers.

Do you get to meet with other writers in the flesh? Where, how, and what do you talk about?

Pop back on Thursday to see what's on Christina's mind...

Something to Celebrate

Today, instead of rambling on about myself, or what I think, or how I work, I'm going to use this space to spread the word about one of our own, the lovely Christina Courtenay, who's just achieved something rather wonderful and special, and who's far too shy and modest to say anything about it here. So I will say it for her:

Her first novel — and let me repeat that: her FIRST EVER novel, the beautifully-written Trade Winds — has just made the shortlist for the Romantic Novelists' Association's 2011 Historical Novel Prize!

That's Christina, standing second from the left, above, with fellow nominees Elizabeth Chadwick, Joanna Fulford, Kate Furnivall, Rebecca Dean and Jane Jackson.

The shortlist of six, which like all the RNA's Pure Passion Awards is selected by actual readers, now passes to a final panel of three judges: Richard Lee, founder of the Historical Novel Association, Elizabeth Hawksley, author and creative writing teacher, and Diane Pearson, president of the RNA since 1987. And the winner will be announced, along with the winners of the other awards (for the Romantic Comedy Prize, the Love Story of the Year, and the Romantic Novel of the Year) at a champagne reception at One Whitehall Place, Westminster, on Monday, March 7th.

Christina is one of those quietly generous people who's always the first to help somebody else, so it's lovely to see all that good karma flowing back at her. She was, in fact, one of the very first friends that I made in the RNA, and it was because of her that I met Julie Cohen, so without her we might never have begun this blog at all.

When I suggested she post something here about her nomination, true to form she shied away from the idea, not wanting to brag...but since an occasion like this seems to warrant a wee bit of bragging, I'm happy to do the deed for her!

We're all so very proud of you, Christina, and we have our fingers firmly crossed for Trade Winds.

(You can read the full list of award shortlists here, and be sure to come back again Thursday to read Julie Cohen's next post).

Stage Fright

A few years ago, I attended a talk by a famous literary agent where she told us about the things an author might have to do, such as talks, book signings, and perhaps radio and TV appearances. At question time I gathered up all my courage and asked, “what happens if you’re an author and you’re a shy little wallflower type person?” She frowned at me and just said “You can’t be”. Right. But I was!

Don’t get me wrong – I love being the centre of attention in a small way (I’m a Leo so that comes with the territory) and don’t have any problems chatting to strangers. Speaking to a large audience, however, is a different matter. Then I’m far from confident and envy those people who can just stand up and keep a crowd enthralled. How do they do it?

I don’t ever feel that I have anything very interesting to say and I’m useless at being funny. At least intentionally. I once fell into a shop window in Oxford Street by mistake (I thought there was a glass partition protecting the dummies and leaned on it, except there wasn’t so I landed in a pile of fake snow) and that caused a great deal of amusement. In fact, my brother still laughs every time he even thinks about it. Sadly, I can’t perform such feats on command.

Some people seem to be born comedians and/or talkers and they’re never lost for words. Me, I’m the kind of person who always thinks of the witty repartee AFTER the conversation is finished. That’s why I became a writer, because then I have the time to think about it first! But that’s no good when you have to promote your book.

I’ve come a long way since that agent’s talk, but public speaking still gives me stage fright. I am learning though and in order to improve I even did a one-day course in public speaking, which was great. We learned that preparation is key – things like knowing your audience (what kind of people are they? what do they expect from you?), arriving early so the location doesn’t give you any nasty surprises, knowing your subject and being enthusiastic about it – this all helps. Always have three main messages that you want to get across and not lose sight of them. And it’s okay to be nervous, the adrenaline may even help.

I’m not sure I remembered any of those things during my recent attempt at public speaking as part of a panel at the RNA conference, but it went better than I thought so perhaps there’s still hope for me. At least I proved to myself that I can actually do it if I have to and practice makes perfect, right?

Anyone else a shy wallflower? And if so, how have you overcome that in order to do talks? I’d love to know.

Don't forget to pop back on Thursday, when Liz Fenwick will be posting.

Finding Time

Susanna’s not wrong: this year’s RNA conference at Greenwich was something special.

Not just because of the meeting of like minds, but because we were celebrating 50 years of the RNA. And because we were doing so at Greenwich, just down the hill from the Royal Observatory and the home of Greenwich Mean Time and the Prime Meridian of the world.

At the conference, Joanna Trollope spoke about how story telling is an ancient art, but novels have been with us for a relatively short time. A panel of Mary Nichols, Marina Oliver, Jan Jones, Julie Cohen and Jean Fullerton reflected on the past 50 years in romantic fiction (you can read the report here.) Between workshops, a few of us ambled up the sun-baked hill to pay our respects to the Meridian.

Time, time, time.

It made me think. You see, time has always been a bit of a bugbear to me. Not in the another-year-another-wrinkle sense. No, I’ve been more preoccupied with finding – with MAKING – time for writing.

This year, I think I’ve been doing better. In February, I joined an online challenge to write 50,000 words in the month. With friends cheering me on, tight management of the day job, Husband resigned to a month of quick suppers, and a quite ruthless abandonment of housework, I managed it. I made writing my first priority, and set aside all available time to do it.

It was good to do, but that white-knuckle write-a-thon left me with so many loose plot ends, I’ve been struggling to edit the monster every since. So now I’m trying a different approach. The 100x100 challenge aims to instill a habit of writing every day – with either 100 words or 30 minutes of editing as a minimum, every day, for 100 days. If you miss a day, you start your 100 days again. It sounds easy.

It’s not. It only takes a visitor, or a computer crash, or a domestic disaster, and suddenly it’s way past your bedtime, and the prospect of spending 30 minutes doing anything but sleeping is horrifying. So far, I’ve had to restart four times. But now I’m on day 14 and I think it’s going to stick…

What about you? What do you do to make time for things that matter to you, and how to you defend that time against those daily challenges?

Don't forget to pop back on Sunday, when Christina Courtenay will be posting.

In Praise of Conferences

I love conferences. Whoever first came up with the idea of combining travel, parties, and professional development, and tossing in a luncheon and a banquet and a really good excuse to buy new shoes, deserves a medal in my book. But there are conferences and conferences – the larger ones are wonderful, but privately I’m partial to the smaller ones, like Bloody Words in Canada, and the Romantic Novelists’ Association conference, which was held this year in Greenwich.

They’re less dizzying, these conferences. More welcoming. And in that kind of atmosphere, amazing things can happen. Case in point: On my first day in Greenwich, I found Julie Cohen and Christina Courtenay, both fellow writers I had met before and liked and kept in touch with, and Liz Fenwick, whom I’d briefly met a year ago in London and whose blog I liked to follow. And before I knew it Liz was texting wake-up calls and taking me for breakfast at McDonalds where I met her good friend Biddy (also friends with Julie and Christina), and that evening everybody introduced me to their good friend Anna, and we all just got along so well that by the barbecue on Saturday, while we were sitting drinking wine (as one must, at these conferences) somebody said – and I confess it might have been myself – but someone said, ‘You know what we should do? We ought to start a group blog.’

And the others, who were also drinking wine, thought it a Very Good Idea.

So we’ve started one, and here it is.

Which goes to show you, many good and unexpected things can come from conferences. Has anything happened to you at a conference? Did you make a lifelong friend? Meet someone famous who really inspired you? Get lost in the hotel? We’d love to hear your story.