Finding Inspiration

Rewriting a novel – a nuts and bolts approach

/ Caron Allan / 4 Comments

(This post first appeared in 2017 when I was invited to do a guest spot on Pink Glitter Publishing for my dear friend and author Emma Baird.) And sorry, it’s another really long post this week…

I love rewriting. There, I’ve said it. I think I could be the only person in the history of the world who actually enjoys rewriting. In fact, I like it a lot more than writing the first draft. I hate that bit. Okay, maybe not hate. I love the thrill of writing the first 50 pages or so, when it’s all fresh and exciting, and it begins to unfold on the page. Love that. But…sooner or later I always hit the first-draft wall. I know it’s because I don’t plot. I’m a pantser. So sue me, I hate to plot. If I plan out my book, on some level I feel I’ve already told the story already and it loses it’s allure.

But that makes the initial experience of writing a draft rather an emotional, rivers-deep-mountains-high kind of affair. But… rewriting, oh that is a whole new thing. I LOVE rewriting. You are free from the ‘burden’ of creating and, taking a distancing step back from your work, you can begin to rethink, polish and tidy. I love to tidy. Sometimes I can only do this by laying all the pages out on the floor and wracking my brains over which order this mess is supposed to go in.

Hemingway famously said, ‘Write drunk, edit sober.’ I haven’t tried it, but it might work for you. I have to say, editing sometimes makes me feel like I need a little help…

Don’t revise as you go. I know there are always a few people for whom that system works, but trust me, it’s not for most people. You get so bogged down in the detail that you never progress. I know people who have spent literally years rewriting the same first three chapters and have never finished the book. It makes me so sad. Write the whole book, from beginning to end, always looking forwards, pressing on till you reach ‘The End’. If you can’t remember the names and places mentioned earlier in the story, just do what I do and put a massive X, or XX, or Mr Thingy, or What Was Her Name, The One With The Long Blonde Hair, in its place. Or refer to a list of names and places you create as you go along.

It’s so much easier to revise a whole book. Like creating a sculpture, you’ve got that solid block to chip away at. You’ve got the overall shape and idea to work on. Your book is your outline. (You can thank Mary Wibberley for that bit of advice in her book from decades ago, To Writers With Love.)

After finishing your first draft, don’t immediately start revisions. Unless you are on the clock and the deadline is almost on you (we’ve all done it), put the book away for as long as you can. This is the perfect time to write another book. Yes, really. Leave your first draft for at least a few weeks, ideally a few months, or even a year. You will need to approach it next time around with a good degree of detachment to get out of writer mode and into rewriter mode. Then, when you’ve finished the next book, while that is ‘maturing’, you can go back to the previous one. Or, if you’ve a) got all the time in the world, or b) you’ve decided to write a series and publish fairly close together, now could be the perfect time to write book three!

Gary Cooper pondering that tricky scene just before the end of chapter six.

So you’re ready to start. Read it. Don’t write, don’t type, don’t tweak, fiddle, twiddle or jiggle. Just read the whole story through from beginning to end. You are trying to get an overview, to reacquaint yourself with your story. Afterwards, make notes on how you felt about the book. Does the story hang together? Does the plot progress logically (unless an illogical plot is essential to your story)? Do you have that sensation of tripping up as you read—a bit like when you miss a stair and think you’re falling—that’s when there’s a problem, usually a plot problem. Try to pinpoint what it was that made you feel like that. Put a sticky note on the page, or if a computer file, highlight the section, or bookmark it, or make a note in the Track Changes feature if using Word.

If you’re frustrated by not being able to make changes as you spot them, or worried you might forget, again, as already suggested, make notes in the Track Changes feature of Word, or pencil notes in the margin, or use sticky notes if working with a paper copy, just don’t change the body of the book yet. Hopefully after rereading the whole book, you will be able to see the strengths and weaknesses of your draft. You will see what needs to go. If not, give it to a trusted friend or writing pal to read. Ask them to be honest and not just pat you on the back. Rewriting can feel very much like ‘fixing problems’ or putting right things that are wrong, and with this mind-set, this can be quite demoralising. Don’t get into this trap. Remember, you’re polishing, refining. Putting flesh on a flexible framework. It’s all good.

Save your original draft, and make a copy with a new version name, just in case in the end, you’re not happy with what you’ve done and need to revert and give it another go. Again, we’ve all done that, I think. Give yourself a fall back position.

Start tinkering. Start with the easy stuff like consistency of character description and behaviour, check the names, spellings, and personal details of all characters, check place-names are correct and consistent throughout. Then move on to point of view. With POV, consistency is everything. If you’re writing anything other than an omniscient third person viewpoint, then there will be things your main characters cannot know until it is revealed to them. Make sure you’ve nailed that.

Next, check for all those words you overuse. For me, that’s words like So, And and Also. A friend of mine uses Thus in almost every paragraph… it’s really annoying. If you use unusual words to describe something, don’t repeat them more than once (if that) as unusual words stick in the reader’s mind and break the wonderful spell you’ve created of suspending disbelief: the worst possible offence you can commit as a writer of fiction. Don’t rip your reader from the story and plunge them back into the real world. Make less use of unusual words such as coterie or Schadenfreude, these are words that stand out from the page, and stick in your reader’s mind. If you use clichés—please don’t—but if you absolutely must, do it just once, don’t repeat them. You also don’t need to show off all the big words you know. Nine times out of ten, the simple, direct phrase will work better than anything flowery, waffly or too complicated. Keep it simple.

And if like me you write books set in the 1930s or 1960s – check for anachronistic things – things that weren’t invented then, hadn’t been discovered, developed or couldn’t be done, differences of etiquette, speech patterns, all the stuff that has furious readers turning to Goodreads or Amazon and saying, ‘1*, couldn’t possibly get past the comment about using a zip! In 1920? Hardly!’ Because believe me, those little things make a big difference to a reader and can ruin the whole reading experience. If in doubt, ask someone, or ask Mr Google.

Brain boggle is a normal part of revising your book. Don’t worry about it. Have a nice soothing cuppa and relax for a bit.

Check hyphenation, apostrophe use, adverbs and speech tags. I don’t agree with the ‘don’t use adverbs, they’re evil’ approach, but use them sparingly. (See what I did there?) Keep metaphors and especially similes to a minimum, unless you’re writing poetry; they are also irritating. Don’t use fussy speech tags: he responded, she retorted, he espoused, she countered, etc. Once in a while is fine, but you don’t need to tag every speech, just enough so the reader knows who said what. The word ‘said’, 90% of the time, is the best speech tag there is, it’s invisible, the reader will pass on, aware of who is speaking but not bothered about how – that should be clear from the context and what they say. Again, keep it simple.

Tidy your grammar, get rid of typos and unnecessary repetition. Check your tense scenes or action scenes for long, meandering sentences that slow the reader down and take forever to read so that the reader can’t remember what you were talking about, and they have to go back to the beginning to reread, trying to figure out the meaning (like that, for example – four lines for one sentence??? Too much, unless you’re writing War and Peace). Check slow, reflective, emotional or romantic scenes for accidentally humorous clangers, (my often quoted, ‘and then he opened the door in his pyjamas’), or break-neck short sentences that rush the reader too quickly through the text.

Read it again. And again. Tweak as you go, now, but remember some changes will have a knock-on effect and need to be addressed multiple times throughout the book. Now pass the draft to your close friends/beta-readers/book group, for your first round of major feedback. You can’t, sadly, trust yourself entirely to write, polish, edit, proofread, proofread, edit and polish then proofread. you’ll need help. If affordable, get professional help, go with a recommended person or business, not someone you pluck from nowhere unless they have incredible feedback. Otherwise keep to a small trusted group of serious writers and readers who have excellent language skills and a kind, tactful way of letting you know when something’s not quite right. If you use more than one beta-reader, you might find they contradict one another – then all you can do is go with the majority and trust your gut.

Then—I hate to say it—you need to do it all again. I read somewhere that if you don’t hate your book by the time it is published, you haven’t done enough work on it, and believe me I’ve come so close to hating a couple of my books. Your book is not ready for your editor or proofreader until you are absolutely convinced that it’s perfect. Trust me, it won’t be. But it’ll be pretty close. Make sure you are not the only one to do the ‘extra final final proofread’ – you’ll definitely miss something.

As an editor, I’d say there’s nothing worse than getting a script that should be as close to release-ready as an author can make it, but turns out to be little more than a first draft. It’s like seeing a neglected child. And when you make your first sale or get a really wonderful review, it will feel like it was worth every minute.

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Author interview: historical fiction author Heike Wolf

/ Caron Allan

It’s been forever since I managed to nab someone unlucky enough to be interviewed by me, but what could be better than a chat with a writer of historical fiction? Heike Wolf is the author of a number of books that tell the story of people living through different eras of German history, and she has a real flair for bringing the past to life and making the characters so real and relatable. How does she do that? And what is her inspiration? Let’s find out!

Hi Heike, and welcome. It’s great to have you here.

You and I have got to know one another through the amazing work you’ve done in editing the German translations (translated by the brilliant Stef Mills) of my Dottie Manderson mysteries. And although we’ve chatted in the past, I almost forgot that you had an actual life with other interests – and a day job as an author.

What kind of books do you write? And what is it about them that fires your inspiration?

I write historical fiction. I have been a history buff for as long as I can remember and when I read or hear about historic events, I’m immediately involved emotionally: trying to picture, to actually feel, how people experienced these events, how they felt, what they thought, what the world looked, sounded like, smelled like at that point. It’s the people behind the history that fascinate me.

When I plan a new book I first read about the historic background – and by that I mean reading everything I can get my hands on, immersing myself in that time period. Then, the ideas come automatically, the historic events fuel and shape the story.

The two books about the Schönau family were also inspired by my own family history. I grew up with the many life stories I heard from grandparents, my great-aunt and others, most of them tragic, and they not only made me realize how lucky I am for my sheltered life but also inspired me to weave some of them into this two-part novel about a German family.

I love history too – it was studying texts from the past that made me realise that, in simple terms, the people of the past were real, and living, and ‘just like us’ – once I grasped that, I found history deeply absorbing. But as individuals we also have a past.

So what were your earliest influences? What did you read as a child?

My mother read to me for hours before I could read myself, authors like Astrid Lindgren and some of the most popular authors of German children’s books. My English grandmother gave me Enid Blyton books as soon as I could read, and I devoured them. Of course I then wanted to go to boarding school and solve mysteries …

Actually I read so much that my parents were on a perpetual book hunt for me. They asked friends, relatives and neighbours if they had children’s books I could borrow. They scoured flea markets, my mother walked to the library bus with me when it was in town and of course I had a long wish list that consisted exclusively of books. I remained faithful to Enid Blyton for most of my earlier childhood. When I was eleven, I saw “Gone with the Wind” on television and wanted to read that book quite urgently. That started my historical fiction infatuation. It consisted mainly of books about American history, with a bit of Tolstoi and other Russians sprinkled in. In my later teens I discovered Dickens, Poe and the marvellous Goethe. Yes, I was a nerdy child, I admit it.

I wanted to go to boarding school and solve mysteries too! Though I was less interested in studying…

What are you working on at the moment?

I’m researching Prussia during the Napoleonic era for the third book in my series about a village in Prussia (in German) and I’m currently translating the second book about the Schönau family into English. This will accompany the family from 1934 to 1957 – through dictatorship, war and a divided Germany.

Speaking of the Schönau family, I know that this week, you’ve just released your first English translation of the first book of the two, A Citizen of All Times which I highly recommend for an insightful, absorbing read, and so what can we look forward to in the future from you?

In German, I want to write some more books for my Prussian series – it covers a fictional village near Berlin throughout the most eventful periods of Prussia between 1685 and 1945.

I also have plans to write a novel or series about Germans moving to the United States, so I’m gathering ideas for that.

As for English versions: After the translation of the second book about the Schönau family, I might translate my trilogy about an American family between 1832 and 1932 at some point.

Like most authors, you’re also an avid reader, who are your favourite authors?

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – a masterful way with words and a fascinating character in itself.

Charles Dickens – he created the most unique characters and had a talent to combine humour and tragedy in his very own way.

Erich Maria Remarque – such elegant prose. Never a word too much, wonderful mastery of language and one of the most important chroniclers of the 20th century in Germany.

Edgar Allan Poe – a dark mind, which he put to thrilling literary use.

And what do you do when you’re not reading?

Hiking through the forests and being enslaved by my two cats. Reading. Doing puzzles while listening to historical or true crime documentaries. Doing volunteer work for our local castle.

Lol I’m glad I’m not the only cat-servant around! Do you have a writing process as such, and if so, what is it?

I research the history first and see what story ideas result from that. Then I mull these ideas over – preferably while hiking – until I have a beginning and a broad idea of where the story goes. I start writing and see where it takes me. I rarely develop characters thoroughly in advance because I noticed that they develop on their own while I write. I see where they take me and usually it makes sense to follow that path.

Then I see how the story develops and plot step by step – preferably while hiking even more.

I have no set writing times, I noticed it doesn’t work if I force myself to write. So I write when I feel like it (which fortunately is often).

What single piece of advice do you wish someone had given you 15 years ago?

Most of the time things turn out much better than you fear.

That’s very true. And fear can stop us from achieving so much.

Coming back to books, do you regularly reread certain books?

I read Goethe’s Faust about once every two years. Then, there are some novels that touched or / and impressed me for various reasons, so I occasionally read them again. Several of them from the authors I mentioned above as my favourite ones but also many others.

And lastly, where can readers find you?

I’m not very active on social media, but I do occasionally post on Instagram: www.instagram.com/heike_wolf_historischeromane

My own website is mainly in German (but these days it’s so easy to have websites translated right in the browser) and contains information about my books and articles relating to some of the historic topics I covered in my books: www.menschenlebengeschichte.com

Thank you so much, Heike, it’s been fascinating talking with you, and I wish you great success with all your ventures.

Brief bio of Heike Wolf:

Heike Wolf studied to be a lawyer, but she has been fascinated by books and writing ever since she can remember. She started to write fiction as soon as she knew how to write at all (the quality of her works has improved by then). The passion for history came a few years later and so the ground was set for writing historic fiction after she had first focused on non-fiction books for expats to Germany (“Coming to and Living in Germany”, “Cross-cultural musings about Germany”).

Her family history extends across many countries, and she has also lived in various countries herself, so it’s not surprising that her family history and the countries she loves play a role in many of her books. Her two books about the German family Schönau were in large parts inspired by her great-aunt’s life. As Heike Wolf, who grew up with an English mother and a German father, also does literary translations, she translated the first Schönau book into English and is currently working on the translation of the second.

Her novels are characterized by careful research and the skillful interweaving of the historical background with the lives of her characters ­– “people live history”.

Carry on reading below to find out a bit more about Heike’s new book A Citizen of All Times out this week in English:

The story of a German family in the most turbulent time of the last century.

Volume 1:

While Charlotte plans her eightieth birthday and follows the demonstrations and upheavals in the East Germany, she thinks back to her childhood and youth in Leipzig, where she was born in 1909 and grew up with two siblings. Their sheltered childhood is shaken by World War I, revolution and a completely changed world. During the turbulent years of the Weimar Republic, in a politically unstable time, the three Schönau children take their first steps into adult life. While Charlotte’s sister Dorchen enjoys the liberal cultural life in Berlin, her brother Heinrich is drawn to the wrong circles. Charlotte herself experiences the versatility of being a university student and suffers the first painful loss of her life.

In the second volume, the darkest period of German history has descended upon the country. Each of the Schönau siblings has a different way of getting through the Nazi dictatorship and World War II. Dorothea gets to know the ugly face of the new regime, has to make sacrifices and undergo fundamental life changes. Heinrich has found his place and is leaving behind those who have accompanied him. Charlotte focuses on her family and tries to ignore unpleasant truths. The war brings unimaginable losses and forces almost everybody to make difficult decisions. At the end of the war, the family finds itself facing new trials.
Charlotte’s eightieth birthday on November 9, 1989 ends in a way she would never have thought possible.

You can find both eBook and paperback versions here:

Amazon USA

Amazon UK

Amazon Germany

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So… how did we get here? A few ideas about being a writer.

/ Caron Allan / 5 Comments

Now also available in a German language edition

This week, I thought I’d burble on a bit about some of the milestones of my writing life.

Writing courses, conferences and videos/newsletters: There are so many out there, and I’ve tried quite a few.

spoiler alert:

*sigh* they’re not as much fun as you’d think, sometimes. And sometimes they’re not too helpful, either.

As part of my degree in literature and history, I did a writing module – just a bit of extra fun for me, to pat myself on the back for all the hard work, and to finish off my credits and collect the ‘with honours’ portion of the diploma. One of the first things the tutor told us, and this was around only around 2010, was that we would need to resign ourselves to being hobby-writers only. She said, as if it was good news, that we had a greater chance of being part of the next team to travel into space than to be picked up by a publishing company. I know, from talking to some of the other students, that I was not the only one to go home from that session feeling like I wanted to throw myself off a cliff. I was in my fifties, so going into space was the unlikeliest thing I could imagine… I had hoped that getting a book published would be a little easier.

But actually, not long after that, I began to hear about this thing called self-publishing, and the more I looked into it, the more I liked what I saw. So, at the end of 2012, with  sideways smirk at my diploma, I uploaded my first novel onto Mr Zon, and the rest, as they say is… well not history, but cozy mysteries that sort of sell. (Thank you, you lovely reading people.)

My mother said, ‘That’s not real publishing, it’s not a real book.’ Nothing could shift her from that, and of course, that was what all the newspapers and the books and nay-sayers were saying at the time. They still do. But all I can say is, I’ve read plenty of rubbish trad-pubbed books, and many wonderful self-pubbed.

Years earlier, when we lived in Brisbane, Australia, I attended some workshops for crime writers who were starting out. Sadly, I don’t remember anything the tutor taught us, other than this advice: If we wanted write crime fiction and bring authenticity into our work, she suggested we practice following people. Yes, actually FOLLOWING total strangers we did not know. Pick them up at the mall, trail them, see where they go, what they do, who they meet, she said. It would bring realism to our writing, she said, and help us to understand the criminal mind and all about the complexities of being a private investigator etc. All I could think was, I will definitely get run over, punched in the face or kidnapped, maybe all three. This sounded like a terrible idea, and again, I was pleased to discover I was not the only one who thought so. I didn’t go back. Nor did I take her advice. But I would dearly love to know if any of the class thought, ‘you know what, that sounds like a really good idea’. I hope the library of the prison they are likely to be incarcerated in have a better range of ideas in their ‘How to Write’ books section.

So what did help me to get started on the long and winding road to your bookshelves? 

A very old book by Dorothea Brande: Becoming A Writer. It showed me myself and taught me that writers are created not born, to a certain extent. It showed me how to get started and how to teach myself to write.

Stephen King’s On Writing. For similar reasons to Dorothea’s book from the 1930s, plus the voice of experience and not to mention, success.

And I talked to lots of writers, beginners and well-established. I still do.

And I read, and read, and read. Not just to learn, but for the sheer love of it. I read all sorts, not just within the genre I write.

And on top of that I wrote. And when I had finished writing a book, I set it aside and wrote another. Because in the end, the only way to learn how to do something, is to actually make yourself do it. At first you’re terrible. You can’t play the piano when you are five and have never touched a key before. Writing is the same. It’s a process that requires dedication and above all else, perseverance.

My first book, using the back of a Weetabix packet for the covers, written when I was around 10.

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Is the 11th too late for goalsetting?

/ Caron Allan / 5 Comments

For various reasons I’m a bit late to the What I Will Accomplish This Year 2024 party.

I have goals – quite lofty ones really, but who knows what I will have the time and energy to achieve? But if I decided, you know what, I’ll take a year out, the danger is I won’t achieve anything, and what’s the point of that?

So here we go – this is 2024 as I see it, part of the way through the second week of January. this is what i would want to do, in an ideal world, if the sky was the limit and i didn’t have cancer treatment to deal with.

  1. Finish and publish Dottie Manderson mysteries book 8: Midnight, the Stars And You. This has to be this year’s main priority in terms of writing, because people keep saying things like, you know, when is it out? There’s only so many times you can nod and smile and say, it’s coming, honest. There’s a teaser for it on here somewhere. If you fancy taunting yourself with something that is still four or five months away, here it is. I promise it’ll arrive eventually.
  2. Because I felt pretty down about the whole ‘by the way, you’ve got breast cancer’ thing, apart from working on the 2nd book of the Miss Gascoigne 1960s mystery series (which came out on Dec 8th) I started playing around with a book I wrote over ten years ago, purely for fun, and it’s actually almost ‘there’ – almost ready for publication, and so although it’s not part of any of my three series, I will very likely publish that in February, just for fun. It’ll just be a one-off, stand alone novel like Easy Living. This book is called The Cousins, and again, there’s a teaser and a bit of info here.
  3. Now I know last year, in a fit of optimism I started banging on about a new story in the Friendship Can Be Murder series, which has been out for over ten years and I kind of thought was finished at three books. And I have written quite a lot for that new book, but it’s nowhere near ready, and so, let’s be honest, it’s not likely to make an appearance in 2024, or if it does it’ll sneak out at the very last minute. I tentatively called that book Dirty Work, and I do hope to finish it and publish it over the next year or two, but there’s no date as yet.
  4. And then, my second main priority will be to get to work and finish and publish book 3 of the Miss Gascoigne mysteries. This will be Through Dancing Poppies, and I hope/plan/rashly promise it will be out in November of December of this year. You can bang on my door and demand it if I don’t deliver.
  5. My next German translation of a Dottie book is due out at the end of this month. If you love to read a novel in German, this could be perfekt for you! Keep your eyes peeled for Rosenblüten und weiße Spitze: ein Dottie Manderson Fall: Buch 7. Zitat aus Rosenblüten und weiße Spitze: Ein Dottie Manderson Fall: Buch 7

And by the way, if I seem flippant about the cancer, I’m not. But I am open to talking about it – as they say, fear of the name increases fear of the thing itself, and I refuse to live in fear. I trust the medical team at the hospital where I’m having treatment, in fact they’ve been blooming amazing, and I believe them when they say that ‘eventually’ I will be okay. And so many lovely people are praying for me… And if only we could get proper funding for the NHS I’d be a happy bunny. I believe passionately in a national health service – good health is not something that should be the preserve of the wealthy.

So that’s how my 2024 is looking right now. What are you doing with yours? Got any plans for world domination or maybe a nice holiday?

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Poison in the Pen by Patricia Wentworth

/ Caron Allan

I always love to reread old favourites. Poison in the Pen by Patricia Wentworth is just that: everything I love in one volume.

  • elderly amateur detective – check
  • hint of romance – check – though not as much as usual for Wentworth
  • cosy mystery – yup
  • clues – oh yes
  • red herrings – check
  • a host of daft characters – check
  • poison pen letters – what’d not to love? Though I was sad the letters weren’t quoted – too offensive, maybe?
  • increasingly exasperated professional detective – I love a stroppy copper who just wants to get home
  • the killer speaks

Now obviously I can’t tell you whodunit, or there will be no point in you reading it. So with the help of mime I mean, carefully edited text, I can comment. So take a look at this:

As you can tell from the title, this is a poison pen letter mystery. It’s set in an English village in the mid-1950s, so quite late as Wentworth books go, she’d been a published author since 1910, and sadly passed away at the beginning of 1961.

(Note to self, If I’d started earlier, I might have got 50 years of writing under my belt too… So envious.)

The village setting means we can guess at many of the situations and some of the characters here.

There’s a retired military man in a big house, he may have been a brilliant army Colonel but he is rubbish at relationships. he really wanted a dolly-bird half his age to look good on his arm and to make sure the house was tidy. Sadly, his chosen love is mainly interested in having a good time, and is fed up with her elderly husband, who is clearly BORING. (If he’s so smart, why did he choose her? Conveniently we can nod to one another sagely and say, as they do in the book, ‘There’s no fool like an old fool.’)

But – the fish-out-of-water over-dressed, colourful wife effortlessly puts everyone against her, not doing herself any favours by refusing to make herself pleasant or conventional. Wentworth describes her wearing of bright colours, making her literally the scarlet woman, giving her loads of make-up,  and making her determined to not give a damn. Here she is being interviewed by the police about her secrets.

But has she acted on these secrets, or the urge to get rid of her annoying husband and grabbing the money, to slope off into the bright lights with her boyfriend, who incidentally was about to be married to someone else… We need more information…

Almost the entirety of the rest of the cast are single ladies – widows and spinsters all – and all a bit bored with life in a village with insufficient scandal/bingo/internet facilities to keep them busy.

They knit. They sew. They garden. They care for children. They cook. They clean. And they are – let’s be honest – a bit too fond of a good gossip.

Cue the poison pen letters.

For me, the disappointing part of this story was that everyone was far too polite to let us know precisely what was written int hem. There are suggestions of infidelity, and immorality, and secret yearnings and guilty secrets, but no juicy details. Oh well, you can’t have it all, I guess. It’s enough for us to know that one poor girl has killed herself because of the letters, and two more deaths follow in quick succession, leading us to question the ‘suicide’ verdict of the first death.

Miss Silver, Wentworth’s elderly lady detective, comes to stay in the village under the guise of being a dotty but not very well off old woman in need of a change of scene. She knits her way through scenes and observes the inhabitants acutely. She dispenses kindness to those who need it, and has no truck with those who get a bit above themselves, especially overbearing men.

Miss Silver is a tricky character. She’s clearly not ‘elderly’ in our modern sense, I’d say she could be in her 60s in this book. She’s not frail, and her mind is a steel trap. She’s deeply religious, compassionate, and fierce about getting justice for those who can’t get it for themselves. She was in early life a governess, and she can kill an attitude with a single look. She has a couple of irritating quirks, but I think this is just the difference between early 20th century attitudes and now. I find her far warmer and more loving than Miss Marple, for example, and she is surrounded by people, many of them very much younger, who admire and love her. And with her understanding of human nature, she sees everything.

As I said before, I love a poison pen letter. Forgive me for plugging my own, here. In A Meeting With Murder, my character Dee Gascoigne is staying in a village where poison pen letters are doing the rounds. Dee doesn’t really see what the issue is with these letters. Her friend Cissie explains:

Dee still shook her head. ‘I just don’t see why people get upset. I mean, why can’t they just put the letters in the dustbin or on the fire and forget about them?’

Cissie smiled. ‘Think about it like this,’ she said. ‘Imagine you lived in a tiny little place like this, where you knew everyone. Then imagine one day you opened a letter, you didn’t know who it was from, for they never sign these poison pen letters. And when you looked at it, it said something like, ‘I know you killed your mother to get all her money’. Think how you’d feel, to get something like that. And you’d know that somewhere in the village was a person who really thought it was true, but you didn’t know who it was and you didn’t know how many others they’d tell. And suppose you were frightened everyone would believe them, and that they were all looking at you too. Suppose your friends began to hear rumours and believed them. Suppose they stopped speaking to you and began to avoid you…’

Dee stared at Cissie and her delicate colour faded from her face so quickly Cissie was afraid she had gone too far to make her point. She felt cruel. She reached out a hand to pat Dee’s arm. ‘There, there, dear, don’t let it upset you. I was just trying to explain…’

In a soft, distressed voice, Dee said, ‘But that’s horrible, I’ve never thought of it like that before.’

‘Exactly, dearie. But that’s the kind of wickedness these letters contain. Now imagine getting three like that in a fortnight. And everyone you know, everyone you meet, you’d look at them and think, was it you what sent me that? You’d feel like you was being watched, my dear, and you wouldn’t know where to turn or who to go to, nor would you be able to sleep for fear of what the next day would bring, and you’d wonder if people knew and if they thought it was true. Even I’ve had one. Accused me of stealing money out of the birthday cards that were put in the post. And I’ve never stolen a thing in my life.’ Cissie pulled her shoulders back and lifted her head, the very model of moral rectitude.

For me, it’s the psychological aspect of the poison pen mystery that is most intriguing. I LOVE the ‘why’? In Wentworth’s book, we reach the final unmasking of the killer who is, of course, the writer of the letters. In a near-perfect summation of the ‘otherness’ of a murderer, Wentworth manages it beautifully: (Anon is because I didn’t want to say who it was – no spoilers here!)

So go on, read an old-school favourite this Christmas, and lose yourself in your most-loved tropes, busybodies, and village settings!

Happy Christmas!

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Fairy tales: Not for the faint-hearted!

/ Caron Allan

I remember as a kid I was a voracious reader. By the time I was 6 or 7 I was reading from a big book of fairy tales.

I remember standing in the kitchen of our flat in Tunbridge Wells and reading to the man who had come to repair our gas boiler. I can’t remember his face, but I remember the blue overalls – not a ‘uniform’ I had been aware of up to that point in my life. I adored this guy, he was friendly and patient and kind, and he told me about his dog. He dated my mum for a long while and I hoped they’d get married so we could be a family and live happily ever after. Sadly that didn’t happen and we moved away, which broke my baby-heart.

But he always used to say how much he enjoyed me reading the stories to him. Sometimes he had to stop his work to help me with the tricky words that were extra long or that I hadn’t seen before.

A while ago, I thought, let’s have a read of those old stories. I was in for a bit of a shock.

They are gruesome, aren’t they? And brutal! I can’t believe anyone ever thought they were suitable for a small child to read. (Not mentioning any names, but I’m looking at you over there in the corner, Brothers Grimm!) Were they cautionary tales to frighten children into good behaviour or what? yes, I know kids go through that gore-is-good phase but honestly!

People got chucked into barrels which were nailed shut and they were thrown into the sea. They got fed to wolves either deliberately or accidentally. Dropped into cauldrons of boiling water. Thrown down wells. Made to climb ridiculously high beanstalks. People’s bones were ground to make someone’s bread. Or people were locked into cages by witches and made to stick a finger through the bars so she could decide if they were fat enough to eat. Turned into swans. Turned into frogs. Turned into pretty much anything as a matter of fact.

But the characters of the stories try to do what they think is good: they turn sick people around in their beds to trick the devil, they try to get good fortune from fish, but still they get turned into roses and chandeliers, or have to run for their lives. And there are the musical animals or tiny people who can make shoes… but even so…

I mean, that’s dark, isn’t it?  Mwah ha ha!

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Author interview – Emma Baird: multi-genre author extraordaire!

/ Caron Allan / 1 Comment

It’s been a little while since I last did an author interview, and I recently ‘met’ Emma Baird by the magical medium of the Interweb. With her recent release of her novel The Girl Who Swapped, I thought this would be the perfect time to interrogate her before she can recover from post-publication exhaustion.

Hi Emma, it’s great to have this chance to find out a bit more about you. Q1. What kind of books do you write?

Women’s fiction – which is a broad church, thankfully. So, I can write fantasy, chick lit, young adult, contemporary fiction, humour, adventure stories, thrillers, crime fiction… You get the picture. Women, luckily, are very open-minded about what they read. And they tend to read voraciously. I think that gives writers so much freedom.

Q2. What were your earliest influences? What did you read as a child?

I just read. And read. Enid Blyton, Charles Dickens and a lot of Greek mythology which meant I was useful for crossword clues.

I do remember loving Judy Blume. She tapped into the 80s child psyche so well. If I mentioned Are You There God, It’s Me, Margaret or Forever – I’m sure there are lots of people who would nod along, saying ‘Yup! Loved those books.’ I did have to work my way through understanding American food references, though. Graham Crackers, digestives, basically.

And er… my mum had a copy of a Jackie Collins book, and a friend and I used to sneak into her room and read it. Now, that was educational.

Lol I bet it was. My parents used to go through my books quite carefully to check they were suitable. I’m glad to say a few things slipped through! They didn’t realise I read their books too! Q3. I know you’ve only recently released The Girl Who Swapped, which I’ve read and really loved by the way, so what are you working on at the moment?

 

 What can we look forward to in the future from you?

Oof. I went through this mad writing phase last year and finished quite a few books. They are not fit to be unleashed, however.

I do have one book that I’m quite fond of, Artists Town – it’s a coming of age tale that needs a little French polishing. It is set in a small Scottish town, and it tackles lack of confidence, homosexuality, crime and acceptance. The working title is Artists Town, though I’m working on that too. Re-writing and revising is the really important bit. I wish I could find a way to stop procrastinating about it. My way of dealing with rewriting is to start another story instead!

Q4. What are your favourite authors? What are you reading now?

Otherwise, I’ve just finished Anita Brookner’s Hotel Du Lac, as I adore many of the 20thCentury women writers. I re-read my way through Barbara Pym’s books a couple of years ago, and I really enjoyed Penelope Fitzgerald’s The Bookshop. I love their observational skills, and the way they make the ‘ordinary’ so interesting.

I LOVED Lauren Graff’s Fate and Furies – and she’s a much more current writer. Special mention too, to Fiona Walker and Marion Keyes (women’s fiction experts extraordinaire). I’ve read all their books – and Marion Keyes is vastly entertaining to follow on Twitter.

Q5. What do you do when you’re not reading?

Cook. I love cooking. I don’t do anything else while doing it, but prep and cook, so it feels mindful. I walk a lot, as it’s easy exercise. Kind of fond of drinking wine too… (interestingly, you can drink and write, but you can’t drink and read!) Also, I’m very much into the 21st Century habit de jour – Netflix binge watching. What the flip did we do before Netflix?!

Q6. What is your writing process?

Boringly prosaic. A word count per day. I set it low. I read a book by Martha Beck years ago about the importance of setting small goals. So, mine is 200 words every day. As it is so low, most days I manage 500 words, so every day I get to feel like I’ve over-achieved my goal. The day job helps with that too. I’m a copywriter – blogs, website content, product descriptions, e-books, video scripts, etc. The usual deal is you get paid by word count, so that discipline makes writing for yourself a lot easier.

 

At least you’ve got a process that works for you! Emma, thanks so much for ‘popping along’, and I wish you every success with The Girl Who Swapped, and with your future projects. I’m looking forward to reading your Scottish-based book hopefully fairly soon. But you can’t rush these things! To find out more about Emma and her work, please follow the links below:

Links:

Website:

http://emmabaird.com

Social Media:

Twitter: @EmmaCBaird

Wattpad: @SavvyDunn

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