Tag Archives: One More Chapter

WRITERS ON THE ROAD: CAROLINE JAMES

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Meet Venus. My writing retreat on wheels.

“Come and write in me!” Venus whispered when I reluctantly went to view her. I’d never had any desire to be a caravaner. It suggested too much Hi-de-Hi! But from the day I met Venus last summer, it was love at first sight.

She’s a big twin-axle unit and, combined with the car, as long as an articulated lorry. Spacious with bedroom, bathroom, kitchen-diner and lounge.

Our first few forays into caravanning were in the UK as we took in the delights of Wales and Northumberland, with only minor mishaps with awnings and wrong turnings. I could write in the peace of the countryside or overlooking a beach. Venus has few demands. There’s minimum cleaning and washing and no gardening – no distractions to stop me from writing.

Now we felt prepared for an overseas adventure. Unlike a motorhome, travelling with a large caravan needs plenty of planning. Would we get stuck in the Eurotunnel? Would our ‘BipandGo’ get us through tolls in each country automatically? Would the pitches be big enough for Venus? The list of checks was long. But most significantly, would all the travelling distract from my writing?

Leaving in mid-December to head south through France, the adventure began, and I was too distracted to write as the days progressed. We enjoyed many stop-offs along the way, including Christmas shopping in Lyon and being frozen to the bone in Beziers during the coldest temperatures for years. But once over the border to Spain, the weather warmed up, and we eventually settled for several weeks on the coast, south of Alicante. Now Venus became our Spanish home, and she adapted beautifully. The awning was up, the canopy open, and wine poured. With a novel to finish and perfect, the peace and tranquillity of my writing environment was a writer’s dream, and the words flowed. Distractions from our European neighbours were pleasant. Bonjour! Guten Morgen! They called out and encouraged me to write.

Travelling around Spain sparked many plot ideas. I know that I will have future characters enjoying the mud baths at Lo Pagan on the Costa Blanca and visiting the eclectic rastro market in Calpe or taking in the rich history of Alicante. With so many festivals to enjoy too, I made prolific notes as I planned the outline of a novel.

Heading home, we took a different route. Driving across Spain via Madrid, I saw how beautiful and rich the country is as we encountered miles of orange groves and vineyards. Every town and village seemed to have a castle built precariously high on a hill, or a medieval church tucked around a corner. Approaching the Pyrenees, bathed in glorious sunshine, the view was magnificent, and I didn’t give the drive a second thought.

But now, I know how to write about fear.

Suddenly, the temperature dropped to sub-zero, and driving snow became a blinding blizzard as darkness fell. Venus is a heavy vehicle, and as we drove along the top of mountains with nowhere to shelter and a hundred miles to go, I thought I was going to die. Look out for a scene in a future novel when the terrified characters disappear into a wintery Spanish night – the story will write itself!

Our next trip will avoid the mountains in winter.

Happy travels everyone!

With love,

Caroline

 

Out now – THE CRUISE

 

PUBLICATION DAY SPECIAL: THE LOVE EXPERIMENT BY KITTY WILSON

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Sometimes I fall in love with a book instantly, and sometimes it takes a little while. This was one of the latter, but let me tell you, by the final chapters I was laughing and sobbing at more or less the same time, which isn’t the best of looks in a busy Starbucks branch.

The premise of The Love Experiment is deceptively simple; Lily won’t date – even staying the night after a hook up is too much like commitment, and Jay can’t date – he’s promised his sister he won’t in an attempt to show her that changing the habits of a lifetime is possible. But there the cliches end.

All the characters, large and larger than life, are drawn with an incredible eye for detail and a roundness that is often missing in romantic comedy. They were real and will stay with me for a very long time. And laugh? Did I mention a fair chunk of the action is set in a drag club? The names of the artists alone was enough to make me cackle. And don’t even get me started on the harpist…

This book is laugh out loud funny while at the same time dealing with serious issues and the horrendous scars they leave. The more I came to know about Lily’s past the more I ached for her to be able to move forwards. The more I understood what made her the way she is. The more I wanted to be her friend.

Lily’s backstory and what happened to her as a teenager really got to me. So much so I had to ask Kitty Wilson why she decided to shape her character that way:

Thank you. Lily is far from my usual heroine and is polished, successful and on the surface has it all but, underneath, is a scared young girl desperate for a sense of control.

When I was creating her, I initially wanted to highlight women’s health, I know so many women with periods that are completely incapacitating[1] and yet I haven’t seen it mentioned often in novels. That was my starting point but, as an author, it is hard not to be shaped by the things around you. As I wrote the first draft, the discussion of women’s safety was at its peak with the subsequent growth of Everybody’s Invited illustrating how schools and universities were often far from the places of safety that every parent hopes. This awareness worked its way into Lily’s story and when her body changes as a teen, things take a dark turn as name-calling in school morphs into something more sinister.

I did consider carefully whether these themes should be included but they are so frequent in women’s lives it felt wrong to cut them, so Lily was born, a high achiever who is privately carrying the weight of gynaecological issues and a related history of childhood bullying. These two things then shape all her life decisions; decisions that on the surface look like they are healthy, empowered choices but are actually indicators of deep-rooted scars.

But I love a happy ending – I write romance after all – and adore weaving through the joys in our lives, and hopefully The Love Experiment brings many, many moments of light and laughter to brighten Lily’s path as she learns to defeat the dark and open herself to life and love at its fullest.

 

 

[1] One in ten women in the UK have endometriosis and another one in ten have PCOS. https://www.endometriosis-uk.org/information

https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/polycystic-ovary-syndrome-pcos/

 

 

 

 

TWO EVOCATIVE AND INNOVATIVE DUAL TIMELINE ROMANCES FROM ONE MORE CHAPTER

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Dual timeline romances based around the First and Second World Wars are tremendously popular, but these two new summer releases from One More Chapter break the mould: Deborah Carr’s moved between WW1 and WW2, and Eva Glyn’s is set in the former Yugoslavia, a theatre of war in the 1940s that is barely mentioned in modern fiction.

 

The Beekeeper’s War by Deborah Carr, reviewed by Eva Glyn

An unusual dual timeline in that it is set during the First and Second World Wars, but I enjoyed The Beekeeper’s War all the most because of it.

I have read Deborah Carr books before and she is so skilled at recreating believable and accurate historical settings and characters, without ever beating you over the head with it. The history just flows as the natural backdrop for her story, which is of course how it should be but is nonetheless not easy to achieve.

The novel opens in 1916 when two friends from Jersey, Pru and Jean, are nursing wounded soldiers. Despite herself, Pru begins to fall for a handsome airman Jack who visits Ashbury Manor and is a close friend of the son of the house, Monty, who is a patient there. Jack is still very much on active service and the book opens with a scene of him escaping his German captors a year later, so we know this affair is not going to run smoothly.

In 1940 Pru’s daughter Emma finds herself at Ashbury to stay with her mother’s friends, determined to unlock some secrets from the past. To say more would spoil this story and that I don’t want to do, because it is such an enjoyable read I’d like you to find out for yourself.

 

An Island of Secrets by Eva Glyn, reviewed by Kitty Wilson

I raced through this novel over the course of two days and was thoroughly swept into the story of Guy and Ivka, as well as that of Leo and Andrej. The only drawback being that it ended too quickly and I should have savoured it.

It is written as a dual timeline and is seamlessly woven together as Leo goes in search of answers to outstanding questions her elderly grandfather has about his time in Yugoslavia (as it was) in the Second World War. I found the story of Guy as an SOE operative on the isle of Vis truly compelling and Eva Glyn writes with a sensitivity and insight that comes across on every single page. She truly bought home the scenes where Guy witnessed the horrors of war and I was totally pulled into the story as he battled with the choices he had to make.

From the very start of his first meeting with Ivka I was so invested in their relationship, they seemed like a natural good fit and I couldn’t help but respect the courage both of them showed on a daily basis. In fact, all the characters were written in a way that had you aware of their flaws but thoroughly rooting for their success.

But for me the most outstanding element of this fabulous novel was Eva Glyn’s way of conjuring the isle of Vis in the reader’s mind, she had me there seeing and smelling and feeling the scenery and made me feel that I could truly inhabit her characters’ world.

Overall, I found this novel to expertly crafted and cannot recommend it highly enough, it is a deeply impactful and emotionally powerful read and the story of Guy and Ivka in particular will stay with me for a very long time.

 

 

 

 

SUNDAY SCENE: EVA GLYN ON HER FAVOURITE SCENE FROM AN ISLAND OF SECRETS

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It’s every writer’s dream, isn’t it? To sit in the exotic location where you’ve set your book and actually write the scene. From exactly the same place as your character; to see what they see, hear what they hear, smell what they smell. Well, one morning when I was on the Croatian island of Vis researching An Island of Secrets, I made it happen when early one morning I picked up my notebook and strolled down to the harbour…

 

Although a few cafés were open at this hour Leo had chosen one in front of a broad flight of steps in a corner of the harbour, its tables tucked back into a narrow space between a pizzeria and a bakery. Not the one where she usually bought her bread, but today that might change too. Or it might not. If she was to stay in Komiža then something damn well had to – she’d been here a month and she couldn’t go on as she was.

Cigarette smoke drifted around her and music was playing from a radio further down the quay. A few local people were about and the crew of one of the holiday yachts moored on the mole had settled at a table somewhere behind her, but generally there was an air of peace about the place and she felt herself relax. A scrawny black and white cat with the swagger of a prize-fighter strolled past, but the tiny tabby cleaning itself under one of the chairs seemed unimpressed.

There were two reasons she had chosen this place to have her coffee. The first was that she could see The Fishermen’s House from here, and the second that yesterday she had found a photo from 1944 in the online archive of a museum in Split and she was pretty sure she recognised where it had been taken.

She pulled out her phone and looked again. Yes, that was definitely the narrow building where the tobacco shop now was, and the distinctive carved lintels above the windows of the property directly to her right were in the picture too. The palm trees were in the correct places, although in the photo they were barely taller than the men and now they towered more than four storeys high.

She had scanned the faces of the commandos in vain for anyone who looked vaguely like Grandad. But although she had been disappointed, she knew he might recognise some of the men and the thought made her tingle with excitement; she had already emailed the photo to Auntie Mo so she could show it to him. It was progress of a sort and there was pitifully little else to say. How the hell did you find out about some random woman who lived sixty years ago in a foreign land? Especially when you weren’t entirely sure who that woman was.

 

Leo is in Komiza to try to find out what happened to the woman her grandfather, Guy Barclay, had to leave behind when his commando unit pulled out in 1944. When Guy first arrived on Vis, the only part of Yugoslavia not occupied by the Germans, his mission had seemed straight forward, but then he stumbled across a brutal execution on a remote hillside that changed everything.

These executions – of female partisan fighters who had fraternised with their male colleagues – really happened, and at the time their British allies were powerless to do anything about it. But it made me wonder, what if one of them had tried? I had my hero and I had my story.

 

Find out more about my books set in Croatia at evaglynauthor.com

 

 

 

 

 

EVA GLYN ON THE INSPIRATION BEHIND THE OLIVE GROVE

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Sometimes an idea for a book creeps into your heart and stays there. That was how The Olive Grove started for me, with a story told by our tour guide when we were on holiday in Croatia.

We were on a small-boat cruise that began in Dubrovnik and after visiting the main islands off the Dalmatian coast and some interesting places on the mainland, ended up in Trogir. And when we were on board travelling there were talks we could listen to and to make our experience complete we wanted to lap up every one.

The war in Yugoslavia was perhaps not a particularly enticing topic when the alternative was to sit on deck, watching the glistening sea ripple alongside the boat while soaking up some sun, but I remembered hearing about the war on the news at the time and was keen to know more. And then, somewhere between the dates, whys and wherefores, our guide Darko began to tell an incredible story. His own.

I suppose I had assumed Darko was Croatian, but he is in fact Bosnian and grew up in Mostar, one of the towns that was to be worst hit by the fighting. His father was a soldier in the Yugoslav army, but when everything fractured and splintered he followed his ethnicity and joined the Croatian side, having to leave his Serbian wife (and Serbia was now the enemy) at home with their sons.

I will never forget the silence in the room at the horror of what we were told. No electricity, no water, bombs raining down, queuing for food at the community organisation – life as we would all recognise it wiped out over the course of a few days in a war that would last for years. Darko’s life moved underground to the shelters, because they were the only safe place. And he was one of the lucky ones, because living in the army housing meant the shelters were purpose-built, deep and strong.

There were moments to awful to contemplate. Darko’s mother actually disappeared, as many people did during ethnic cleansing, but he was one of the few lucky ones because she actually came back. But there were moments of light too; finding a food parcel dropped by the UN and hoping it was one with chocolate inside.

These incidents and more form the kernel of The Olive Grove, but viewed through the prism of time by my proud Croatian character Damir. Orphaned during the war he was brought up by his aunt on the beautiful island of Korcula (which we visited during our trip); brought up to forget everything about his life before he came to the island. But when she dies, the past creeps back to find him.

While Darko wears his wartime past with relative ease (which is often the case when everyone around the child is having the same experiences, when the awfulness becomes a sort of normal), fictional Damir no longer can. And help comes from a surprising quarter. A middle aged English woman called Antonia who feels she has messed up her life so badly she takes a job on the island to take stock and to heal.

And that’s what The Olive Grove is really about. It’s about healing and friendship. Like Darko’s childhood memories there is sunshine and shade. And unlike them there is the most incredibly beautiful setting.

With Darko’s help over countless Zoom meetings during lockdown I have been able to create authentic Croatian characters and culture, so as well as the initial inspiration, there are many other reasons why The Olive Grove could not have been written without him. And what’s even better, we have become friends across the miles too.

WELSH WRITING WEDNESDAYS: REINTRODUCING JANE CABLE

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I have been writing for Frost for so long I tend to assume everyone knows who I am, but common sense tells me that isn’t the case. Our readership is growing all the time, so many won’t have the first clue about why the Contributing Editor blathers on so endlessly about writing and books. And. this year, about Welsh writing in particular.

So the first thing you need to know is that I am Welsh. I was born in Cardiff and my formative years were spent in and around the city, although I left to go to college at eighteen and never lived there again. In modern parlance you would say that, despite living in England for so long, I ‘identify as’ Welsh and will do so until the day I die.

With my Dad at the launch of his first book

I was a teenager when I discovered there was a rich literary tradition on my doorstep. My father, Mercer Simpson, was a lecturer at the Polytechnic of Wales and worked with Tony Curtis, and I remember the great excitement in our household when Tony won the 1984 National Poetry Competition. By that time my father had retired and was spending his time reading for the Welsh Arts Council and editing the Welsh Academy of Literature’s magazine so the house was stuffed full of books by Welsh authors.

This may have been my literary heritage, but I eschewed literature, refusing to take english as an A-level. When I was a student Dad and I would debate whether there was such a thing as intrinsically ‘good’ and ‘bad’ in the arts and could never see eye to eye, largely because I considered his views desperately old fashioned. Never an academic, my normal reading was romances, women’s fiction and historical sagas. In other words, popular fiction.

My father reviewed books endlessly and became an acknowledged expert on Anglo-Welsh literature. By the time he died in 2007 he’d had four of his own poetry collections published, the last of which he’d worked on during his final illness and his publisher brought the first copies to his funeral.

By then I had started writing too, experimenting with romantic fiction, something he barely understood, but my mother ploughed through my early stories and gave me both encouragement and useful feedback. Instead my father was really proud of the fact I freelanced as a cricket journalist. My mother’s bragging rights came a few years later when, in 2011, I reached the final of The Alan Titchmarsh Show’s People’s Novelist competition.

Mum and her Welsh flag

My mother loved reading but loathed formulaic romances, and her opinion has had more influence that anything over the way I write. I love a love story, but there has to be more. More for the reader to get their teeth into; a hint of mystery, research so good it teaches you something, a broadening of horizons. These are the stories I aim to write.

My career as a published author had a bit of a rocky start, but in 2018 I settled with Sapere Books, writing contemporary romances with a look over the shoulder at the past. The first two books were World War Two influenced, and later this year my debut dual timeline will be published by them, set in Cornwall in 1815 and 2015.

Last year I took another step forwards and signed a two book deal with One More Chapter, a division of Harper Collins. Both will be out this summer, written under the name of Eva Glyn. Eva for my paternal grandmother and Glyn for the Welsh novelist and poet Glyn Jones, a great friend to both of my parents and an emblem of my literary roots.

 

 

 

 

 

SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE – JANE CABLE ON HER NEW PUBLISHING CONTRACT

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I have never particularly seen myself as a tortoise, but boy oh boy, has this been a long time coming. Today it was announced that I will be writing emotional women’s fiction for One More Chapter, a digital first division of Harper Collins, under the name of Eva Glyn.

I think all writers have an idea of where they want to be, and for me, no doubt influenced by Harper Collins being the sponsor of The Alan Titchmarsh Show’s People’s Novelist competition in which I was a finalist, they were the publishing house at the top of my wish list.

Having failed to win the competition and so any short cut to publication, I might have guessed I was in for the long haul, but at that stage I didn’t realise quite how long it would actually be. But fairly early on in my career I had a near miss when after a one-to-one at Winchester Writers’ Conference a young editor called Charlotte Ledger requested the full manuscript of The Faerie Tree.

Nothing came of it, and the book became my second indie novel. And as my career progressed I was aware of Charlotte’s rapid rise through the ranks of Harper Collins’ digital imprints and wondered if perhaps at some stage it would be worth submitting to her again.

In the meantime I had the opportunity to work with Amy Durant and when she set up Sapere Books was happy to follow her there. And while I am happy to stay with Sapere too, I still hankered after what a bigger publisher could offer in terms of multiple platforms and international clout.

By the time the Romantic Novelists’ Association conference came around in 2019 I had a new manuscript in my locker that I knew wasn’t a Sapere Book. I saw Charlotte Ledger was offering one-to-ones and I was lucky enough to grab one. We met again. And again she asked for the full manuscript, but this time to be sent to her personal email. I felt I was one step closer.

In the end Charlotte didn’t take that book, but the door was kept open. Last March I had a fifth anniversary blog tour for The Faerie Tree and the response was so overwhelmingly positive I brought the title up to date, gave it a little polish, and after much encouragement from Susanna Bavin, sent it off to Charlotte.

She asked me to do some rewrites and they were so in line with my own thinking for the book that I did. The next thing I knew we were talking about author brand and slowly it dawned on me she was offering me a contract. And the author brand she was suggesting was exactly where I wanted to be – emotional women’s fiction.

There would be no ghostliness, no looking back at the past, so these would be different to my books for Sapere, so we decided they would be published under another name. I chose Eva Glyn – Eva for my father’s mother, and Glyn for Glyn Jones, the Welsh author who was a great friend of my parents.

Today is a proud day because for the first time I can talk about the deal as the cover for The Missing Pieces of Us has been revealed and the book is available for pre-order. And it’s only taken me nine years…