In which things are published, or almost nearly imminently published

Some time has passed since my last blog post. Traditionally at this point I offer some sort of excuse or random self-flagellation for my failure in this area. Today I’m going to go down the excuse route. You see, there was this dog and it ate my homework right off the computer screen, or possibly it was a magpie and it stole my keyboard’s unusually shiny semi-colon key, and I do like a semi-colon so that was very limiting, or maybe I became briefly obsessed with watching old episodes of The Biggest Loser on youtube even though it is unquestionably terrible for my soul and wasn’t able to write blogpost because of all the time that took up. At least one of those things is true. Or possibly all. Anyhow I’m back now. Let’s get on.

This week I shall mainly be sharing news of recent and upcoming publications for they are cropping up all over the place and there is much excitement chez Alison.

I’m going to kick off with a short story anthology I’m super-proud to be involved with. The Write Romantics who are either a single multi-headed romance writing creature from another dimension, or a group of lovely individual romance writers who blog together and support one another (it’s definitely one of those) have put together a short story anthology in aid of The Cystic Fibrosis Trust and The Teenage Cancer Trust. I was terribly flattered to be asked to contribute a story, and I pretty much will do anything if sufficient flattery is offered. My story is ‘The Handsome Stranger’, and like all the stories included, it’s has a vaguely wintery or festive theme.

The anthology, ‘Winter Tales’, is available to pre-order for kindle now and will be available in paperback later this month. You can also join the Write Romantics at their online launch party this Saturday (8th Nov 1pm-3pm) where there will be competitions and much virtual wine drunk, and possibly real wine, but you’ll need to provide that for yourself.

Secondly, two more short story anthologies. It’s a little bit late in the day, but if some of you want an excuse to keep hold of your pumpkins (oddly not a euphemism) a little bit longer, you can still download or order the Halloween anthology, Hocus Pocus ’14, that I was involved in back in October. My story, Haunted House, is about a young divorcee, Melly, her best friend, Max, and an interfering old man called Ebenezer. As it’s a Halloween story, at least one of those three is, unfortunately, dead.

The final short story anthology I want to tell you about is Kisses and Cupcakes, from my publisher, Choc Lit, which features short stories and fantastic recipes from eighteen Choc Lit authors, including my good self. My story is ‘Imperfect Timing’ and it features a couple of characters that you might get to meet again next year. Possibly… I’ve also included the most awesome cupcake recipe in the whole wide world. Kisses and Cupcakes is available to download now.

And finally… drumroll please… my second Christmas Kiss novella is nearly ready to be launched onto an unsuspecting world. Cora’s Christmas Kiss is going through its final tweaks and edits at the moment. We’re finalising the cover design, and it should be available to order very soon indeed. Squeeee! In the meantime I recommend that you all prepare yourselves fully by downloading book 1, Holly’s Christmas Kiss, forthwith.

*takes a deep breath* So there you go. That’s all my publication news at the moment. And with that I shall stop thinking about books that are already written and turn my attention back to the books that are yet to come.

In which a year has passed and I muse on how it takes a village and all that guff

So this time next week I shall be in Telford getting ready for my fourth RNA Conference. That realisation made me also realise that it is now 1 whole year since I signed my first ever publishing contract with Choc Lit to publish Sweet Nothing, followed later in the year with a second contact for Holly’s Christmas Kiss.

One year on from such great excitement seems like as good a time as any to get a bit melancholy, raise a glass of something suspiciously green-looking, and have a bit of a think about the process of getting from ‘Hey guys, I’m going to write a novel!’ to actually having a novel out there in the world, where unsuspecting strangers, some of whom aren’t even friends of your mum, might read it.

And the conclusion of that little think would be this: it takes a village to make a novel. Not an actual village. It’s not compulsory for budding novelists to move to Little Middlewitch and start helping out with the church flowers. I’m talking about one of those metaphorical villages that exist only for the purposes of slightly laboured and clichéd metaphor. The Sweet Nothing Metaphorical Village takes in many helpful souls. There are the tutors and workshop leaders whose ideas I’ve cribbed and developed. There are the critique readers. There are the supportive wine-supplying friends who tolerate the fact that most of my gossip is about made up people. There’s the actual publisher who decided to invest their time and money in my work, and then there’s the editor, copy-editor, proofreader, cover designer and blurb writer. And then once the book is out there’s the audiobook people, and the pr dudes, and the book reviewers and bloggers who’ve featured me or my books on their site.

So it’s one whole year since I signed the contract with Choc Lit to publish Sweet Nothing. It’s six years since I first decided I wanted to write a romantic comedy, and decided that I wanted to base it on what I consider to be the ultimate rom-com from stage, book or screen. And the end result is a story that owes everything to my random set of pre-occupations: love and how it’s not the same as romance, how clever people can do stupid things, how knowing stuff is brilliant, tequila is dangerous, and M&S party food is the highest form of food. All of that stuff is part of me, but none of it would be out there in a vaguely readable form without the rest of the Sweet Nothing Metaphorical Village.

So please all raise your glasses. Wait. I didn’t mention that you needed glasses, did I? Ok. Those of you who are already glass-ready, give everyone else a second to pour themselves a tiny drinkette. Right, so please raise your glasses and let’s make a toast, to everyone in the Sweet Nothing Metaphorical Village. Cheers, and thank-you all.

In which I scrape the layer of dust off the blog and finish a book

Ahoy there, good morning, merry greetings and hello. I have been away from the blog of late due to having got myself into something of a pickle with the writing of novel 2 and ending up having to spend the last six weeks ignoring all activities that weren’t actually writing the sodding book. The sodding book (possibly not its final title) has now been sent off to my lovely publisher, Choc Lit, and I’m permitted to not think about it for a while, or at least until they send it back and tell me to have another go.

So, here I am with an unfamiliar sea of free time rippling in front of me. All sorts of excitements await. When I’ve finished here, for example, I am going to put some laundry in and then – and this is an exciting one – I’m going to wash my hair. Never let it be said that I don’t know how to live.

Before all that though, there’s some bloggy bloggy blogging to get blogged, which is tricky because my brain is still stuck in the imaginary world of novel 2. That’s one of the oddities of writing as a job, as opposed to being a lollipop lady (or lollipop gentleman) or managing a premiership football team. Writing is a freakishly blinkered affair. You invent a whole world, and people it with people (at least in my case – you can of course people it with elves or dragons or sentient lever arch files – the choice is yours), and then you live in that world for however long it takes to transfer that world and that story from brain to typing fingers to screen to page. That means that once the manuscript is done with and sent away, you find yourself in something of a lull. It’s what fellow Choc Lit author, Janet Gover, describes as the post-book meltdown.

With all the other jobs I’ve had the periods of stress usually came when there were too many diverse things to think about, competing for time and attention. With writing, at least when you’re in the final lead-up to a deadline, there is only one task: Write the sodding book (still not the final title). That single-mindedness is, for me at least, what leads to the meltdown. At the moment I’m at the crawling into the light stage, and I keep catching sight of all the things I’ve been putting off for the last few weeks: the form that came in the post at the start of March that I haven’t filled in yet; the piles of laundry that need putting away; the things in the back of the fridge that I’m not sure I can throw away without breaching the federation’s Prime Directive. All these things will need dealing with, before I regain the power of sufficiently complex thought to write you a blog post about something more interesting that the fuzzed up state of my brain.

Hopefully, that will be next week’s task, alongside starting the next book and doing it all again, obviously. I shall see you all there.

And as always, if you want to buy any of the lovely things I’ve already written, this is the place.

In which I have an actual book cover for the actual (virtual) book what I wrote

Ta dah!

So there is it. The cover for my first novel. The astute amongst you will also notice that it has a new title. The book formerly known as ‘Well it’s the book I wrote; it’s sort of about love and maths and stuff and it’s based on a play,’ is now officially titled, Much Ado About Sweet Nothing. Weirdly, my publisher felt that worked better. Curious.

Anyway, there it is. My first book cover. Huzzah!

(BTW, if you want a bit more of me wittering about romance writing related stuff, I’m on the Choc Lit authors’ blog today talking about What makes a hero: http://blog.choc-lit.co.uk/?p=5145)

In which I clear my throat and offer an announcement

Ahem.

That was the throat clearing. Here’s the announcement.

I am absolutely beyond delighted to announce that I have signed a contract with Choc Lit Lite to publish my first novel. I’m ecstatic to have signed with Choc Lit – they’re a really forward-looking exciting publisher, with a really good reputation for working with their authors and developing new talent. Waaaaaaah!

Obviously I’m a teensy bit excited about becoming a published author, but at the moment the whole thing feels utterly unreal. Fortunately I’ve just spent the weekend at the Romantic Novelists’ Association conference where there were lots of other published Choc Lit authors I was able to poke to check that they were really really real. After they’d got over the poking we even took a big group photo.

In which I appear to be a giant — (taken by Lizzie Lamb)

We don’t seem to have all managed to look at the same camera in this one, and I do appear to be quite huge – there’s a learning point there about not standing at the front when having your photo taken with thin people – but nonetheless it’s a Choc Lit Authors picture and I’m in it! Huzzah!

At this point I do need to thank just a couple of people. You have three choices about how to read this next bit. You can: a) take a very deep breath and just rattle through it as quickly as possible; b) do the full-Gwyneth and read the whole thing aloud with appropriate sobbing; c) scan quickly for your own name and ignore the rest. If your name isn’t there, it’s because I’m stupid and I’ve messed up and missed you out – unless I’ve never met, emailed, tweeted, written, phoned, texted or spoken to you in my life, in which case, seriously, what were you expecting?

So, in no particular order, thank-you to all of the following who have helped, supported, not ridiculed my attempts to do writing…

Deborah Catesby, Dawn Hudd, Holly Magill, Candi Miller, Tamara Bolger, Anne Milton, Lisa Bodenham, Kate Johnson, Julie Cohen, everyone who I’ve been on one of Julie Cohen’s lovely writing courses with, everyone I’ve ever taught on a creative writing course, the entirety of the RNA but particularly Melanie Hilton and the NWS readers, Helen Harron, my mum and dad (if you’re reading this in Gwyneth style you probably need to weep a bit here), the Choc Lit Tasting Panel, everyone else at Choc Lit, Tim Butler, Tony Judge, Dunstan Power, Clive Eardley, Taliah Drayak, Polly Robinson, all the RNA Conference speakers for the last 3 years (every last one of them), Katie Fforde, Greg Mosse, Kate Hill, Deema Davidson, Rich Badley, Eva Cubero, Isabel Phillips, all the lovely writers and readers on Twitter, the RNA Birmingham Chapter, everyone who has let me play at being a writer on their blog – a big hand for Nikki Goodman and the Write Romantics, everyone I’ve got pished near in an RNA kitchen – I’m looking at you Immi Howson, Jane Lovering, Ruth Long, Jules Wake, Talli Roland, Sarah Callejo, Jane Tranter, Denise Deegan, Colette Caddle, Brigid Coady and others too numerous and fabulous to list – and finally EngineerBoy for his most excellent services to engineering and mortgage paying, while I work the whole penniless writer vibe. Thank you all. Some of you will know how you helped. Some of you won’t ever read this or even know who I am, but thank you all the same.

Right. Gushing over. Time to get bum on seat, fingers on keyboard and actually do this writing lark for real. I’ll be back to the blog tomorrow to tell you all about what happened at the RNA Conference this year. Be warned – it will almost certainly involve pictures of shoes.