What a Flipping Weird Book Year (and a special offer for people in the US)

This month my latest book 'out there' My One True North is on special offer on Amazon.com for readers in the United States - it's only $1.99 so please grab it while you can.

My One True North came out in what should have been the biggest year of my career. Just before the world went bonkers, I'd been awarded the Romantic Novelist Association's Outstanding Achievement Award which lifted me from the most severe depression I've ever had following the death of my father. I can honestly say when I was doing the speech, all I heard was a pin drop silence that I took for boredom and at one point I can been seen flicking through the speech to see if there was any way of cutting to the end. I wasn't prepared for the reception, I was humbled by it. Many people have presumed that My One True North was written when I was grieving dad. The story is, after all, about traversing the cold lake of grief - easy assumption. But quite the opposite is true, it was written before dad was even ill. I found myself stepping in the footsteps of my characters, having to pick something for dad to wear to meet his maker (I can't tell you how long I laboured over his socks). It was life imitating art and my only consolation is that I got it right, I got it on point what a truck travelling at 100mph to the head grief can be. But it was never my intention that it was a miserable book - on the contrary. If you tackle something as heavy and dark as the loss of a partner, then you need lots of humour and lightness whipped into the mix. And as I was writing the book, I was aware that it fell quite naturally into four stages: the lowest point, a dawning of light on the horizon, an autumnal breeze of change blowing out the old so that new life had clear passage to grow - and finally an upward surge. It was like four points of the compass: South, East, West, North - in this case 'The Northern Lights'. North featured heavily, not the least because that's where I come from. But the true north... the idea of fate interfering, overriding circumstance to put people together - for them to find their true north in each other.

Some have commented that there was no epilogue with this book. (Funny because if you do write an epilogue, some people complain that you've spoon fed them conclusions they were grown up to reach themselves, thank you... you can't win!) I will continue to write epilogues if needs be, but in case you're asking, there's no epilogue in this one because when I tried to write one, it felt as if I had left the characters where they should be and must leave it there because anything else would work against it. It didn't feel right to add anything else, it ended when it ended and in my head it was the perfect point to say goodbye with a spectacular scenic finish. 

I was lucky that I managed to have a hardback launch for this book before lockdown, where so many of my friends didn't manage it for their books out later. I was lucky that the supermarkets, who had cut down on their books offering, took mine by the thousands and it stormed the charts and stayed in them for weeks - my longest 'tail'. I felt privileged to have more letters than ever before that this book about two people grieving their partners who find friendship with each other and a motley group of people travelling in the same grief boat, gave respite to worried minds, took people away from the mess happening in the world. Books can work with the tide or against it, and the trouble is we never know when or in which direction those tides are going to flow so there is alchemy at work with book success. A book with a sad beginning could have floundered in a climate where people were looking for jollity, but mine didn't. The tide worked in my favour. This job is often about luck as well as hard work. 

I should have been in a radio studio with Graham Norton to advertise the paperback, I should have been at parties and touring and readings and celebrating the biggest book of my career... but instead I had to sit in my office and connect to people via Facebook Live. It became a weekly event - just me and a cup of tea and a bun, talking about all sorts of very little news but somehow that worked too. It gave people a sense of connection. That for an hour each week, we were all pals in a virtual front room, chatting about the little things not the great big elephant in the room as, for that hour, it had been banished to the shed. I enjoyed all those sessions. I enjoyed writing jokes and making them into mini videos and posting them 'The Daily Jolly' I called them. As authors we have to keep the plates spinning, we have to keep saying 'Please buy my book, this is my job, I have a mortgage' and we had to invent other ways of spreading the news about books we had worked on for the best part of a year. We couldn't afford for them to be pushed out into the sea only to sink like a boat with a hole in the bottom. 

And I had to put my creative head on and write the book that I'm about to bring out in just under seven weeks now. I Wish It Could Be Christmas Every Day (across social media as #ChristmasEveryDay) WAS written just after dad's passing, unlike My One True North. 

Timing is everything and this book wasn't the one it was originally meant to be. I've had the title in my head for years. It was originally going to be a sort of Brigadoon where people find themselves in a place where it is Christmas every day, literally. But I couldn't make that work. Had I written it weeks later, when the pandemic hit, it wouldn't have been the book it is today either - because the idea of setting a story in a place where people are effectively locked down, would have been the last thing on my mind.

I wrote the first draft in less than three weeks flat. I didn't want to talk to anyone in the new year, I just wanted to write. I immersed myself in a world of snow and let my brain guide my hand hoping it would come up with the goods. And it did. And whereas My One True North has a big cast, big scenes, lots of action, this one has a stripped back crew and one location. And I think it's the best thing I've ever written because of the emotional punch, no doubt dredged from me because of what was going on in my own life. I needed to give myself some hope and redemption with this book. I needed friendship and romance and kindness and resolution. I needed to work a lot of stuff out of me via my characters - writing really is the best sort of therapy. And I can't wait for this one to come out. Even though I won't be having my launch parties and my signings, I hope this one drops into shopping baskets everywhere and people find, within its pages, exactly what they need to find in these times... that it doesn't take much to have fun, that life is here and now and we need to enjoy it in the moment and not put everything on hold until times are better. That it is people who count more than things. And that snowmen poo marshmallows.  

This is the story of six people.

Bridge and Luke who have been battling for five years to end their marriage. They've both moved on and found a way to part via a no fault divorce. All they have to do is meet, sign a piece of paper each, swap them and be on their way - never crossing paths again. But an unforecasted bout of snow means they have to take refuge in an old inn on the North Yorkshire moors and spend far more time with each other than they'd planned. Plenty of time for dangerously cosy memories to rise up and engulf them.

Mary is the 'invisible' PA to Jack Butterly, owner of the hugely successful Butterly's Scones, a man who Mary has been secretly in love with for four years. She has volunteered to drive Jack to a country house hotel where they will spend the night before the next day's early morning meeting, knowing this is the best chance she will ever have of getting Jack to see her outside the job.  But the snow alters their plans and they too are forced to hole up in the Figgy Hollow Inn. What happens when Jack sees this capable young woman through the eyes of others?

And Robin and his husband Charlie are on their way to spend a five star Christmas in a top Aviemore hotel when they too have to seek refuge in the inn and forsake their water bed and seven course Christmas dinner cooked by a Michelin-starred chef. It's a disaster... or maybe they find everything they were most chasing with new friends and a log fire instead.

I think out of all the characters I've ever created, these are my favourites. They became so real, so rounded, I loved them. I loved watching their friendships grow, I loved writing their energy and laughter and banter. I even loved eating their food.

This horrible, awful, sad year has spawned a book I'm so proud of. I hope you take it to your hearts and it gives you pleasure, fun and respite. And with equal starring roles to the human cast are diamonds, scones, broccoli, tins of tomatoes, snowmen, Christmas crackers jokes (of course!) stockings, carols, radios... and an awful lot of food. The only thing missing is Rudolf. And I'm really annoyed at myself that I forgot to shove him in somewhere!

Enjoy! xxx

The Power of Kind Words

The day before my dad died, when I was sitting beside him in hospital, an email popped up on my phone from a woman who had taken it upon herself to trace me in order to let me know in advance that she was going to give me a shit review on Amazon. Quite simply she didn’t like the story. I never think my books are going to satisfy everyone on the planet, but I did wonder if she ever stopped to think how much her words would sting me, what exactly I would be doing when I got her email. If she experienced a sense of pride imagining me opening it - me, the smug bitch who needed to be taken down a peg or two for having the affrontery to be a novelist - and not as someone who would read her words whilst my heart was breaking as I held the hand of my beloved father on the last full day of his life? In the old days (pre-internet) she would have been cross but then forgot about it because it was all too much effort to track me down and then write a letter to the publishers to be forwarded. But these days, it's much easier to vent, so much easier to spew bile.

Guess what - we authors feel very deeply, we mine into our emotions and that's what makes us write the words that affect our readers, make them laugh, cry, rejoice.

Words, are powerful tools. A simple ‘thank you’ – said or withheld – can change the course of someone’s day, often beyond.  But with power comes great responsibility, as Spiderman’s uncle once said.  Words, as we are seeing more and more, can pull someone back from a brink ...or push someone over it.

Where once upon a time we might have shared a discussion about someone on the TV with a friend, we now use the internet as ‘a mate’. We parade our feelings about people we don’t know – to people we don’t know. Some might say ‘we have freedom of speech so what’s the problem with that?’ Well, just because you can write something, doesn’t mean you should, love. Words are often like handguns; they should be used responsibly, with care and sense not wantonly as if we were power-drunk cowboys. Our safety catches are off; the internet has stripped away our awareness of empathy, how much we can affect other people with what we say. We can shoot directly at targets that bleed these days. Did I say how powerful words were?

We’ve all done it.  It’s too easy, too habit-forming. We’ve all thought ‘Jesus wept’ when we’ve seen someone a bit non-conformist on Only Connect/Love Island/Question Time.  Some people take it to extremes, want to grind someone they can’t stand underfoot, even though they’ve never met them or are likely to. Most of us have taken to Twitter at least once to parade our observations to people we don’t know looking for what - affirmation that we’ve got our thoughts right? Until you’re at the receiving end of a trolling you have no idea how much those comments wound. We have developed a thirst for hate, Twitter has become the gladiatorial arena and anyone in the public eye is a potential bear to be poked with a stick for entertainment. No longer do we just turn to our partner in the lounge and say ‘look at the arse on her’, we have to submit our words to the internet where the person with the big arse might see them, even copying in the generously proportioned person to ensure they see them – possibly even adding a hashtag to make trebly sure. What have we gained by going that extra distance to the keyboard and doing that? Do we go to bed happier for it? Do we think what effect our words might have on that person if they read them and do we savour their distress?

We live in a negative age. We are more likely to rage online about a meal we’ve hated than one we have loved. Maybe it’s time to flip the coin. Maybe it’s time to reconnect with the kindness inside us – a quality that is often mistaken for softness and weakness, not for the strong, life-changer… life-saver - that it can so often be.

Words can be gentle hands or weapons, and we are producing a generation who see cyber-bullying as the norm. Schools should be teaching their pupils how to use words with care and thought. It’s too easy to hate. It’s too easy to think that there is only one opinion on anything and it’s mine and it’s the right one. Once upon a time there was healthy discussion, now a difference of belief is tantamount to a thrown-down gauntlet.  There seems to be a culture of ‘I believe in peace and love and tolerance to all people, unless you think differently to me then I want to kick your head in, you f-ing cow’.  One careless word, one thought voiced in error leads to outcries to ‘cancel’, to extinguish a person’s career, to take away their livelihood and profession in a world where the goalposts are continually moving. Once upon a time a mistake was 'tomorrow's chip paper', now even the smallest of innocent errors hangs around for ever, like mustard gas. And, to paraphrase Jesus who puts it better than I could, are we all really that pure that we can be classed as the 'without sin' crew worthy of casting the first stone'? Nope - are we hell.

Take for instance a word that swam into my radar last week. Not so long ago ‘queer’ was a word that had been thrown into insult jail. Now it has been released and labelled as de rigueur. I can't keep up with what I can and can't say and if we get it wrong, there seems to be an army of enraged people waiting to highlight it to the planet, refusing to let it die as the clumsy mistake it was. With every passing year we get closer to 1984! The world feels like a field full of eight foot pot-holes full of dissolving acid. No wonder anxiety levels are at an all-time high. Maybe it's time to take a moment just before we put fingers to keyboards to type in something derogatory and think what negativity we are releasing. Maybe think of that tweet being directed at us and how we'd feel reading it. 

           

No surprise then that the sales of the books us commercial fiction writers pen are rising. Our books full of kind people, friendship, love and acceptance, fictional communities who pull together and bad guys are thwarted.  Does this not signify a clear desire for millions of readers to escape this hard and unforgiving world? Or maybe to find hope that kindness will somehow leap out of the pages and become real?

There is no word for our genre of fiction – one primarily written for women by women – because no label really fits which doesn’t sound dismissive. Chick-lit has become a derisory term and in no way describes the depth, the intricacy and craft of our writing.  Women’s fiction (note: there is no ‘men’s fiction’)? Somehow it sounds sniffy, as if it is fit only for creatures with smaller brains and intellect; something for the little lady to read inbetween doing the cooking and washing, as if our lives are less important somehow. (Fem-fiction?  Not for me; anything with the prefix 'Fem' makes me think immediately of a sanitary towel.)

'I don't read romance, I read proper books.'  Like Doctor Zhivago. A love story. Hang on... it's by a bloke. Let's reclassify it then as an epic masterpiece. See the problem we women of romance have?

BUT...

Whatever you call it, our books have the power to transform, to cheer and inspire, to act like aloe vera on troubled souls. In our works women sometimes find templates of healthy relationships for the first time, solace, motivation to change their lot. And they do, because they write and tell us about it. Though I don’t think any of us set out to alter the fabric of someone's existence when we wrote our manuscripts but our aim to entertain and tell a story often ends up having a massive influence on someone who desperately needs direction – and finds it within our pages.

Maybe it is time for life to imitate our art. For kindness and forgiveness and acceptance to be allowed to flower instead of being stamped out by big boots of intolerance and literary snobbery given the potential is has to be the salvation for so many. Until it does, we shall continue writing our tales of a nicer and infinitely more considerate world, of hope and 'within reach' happy endings. Our ‘little women’s’ books which seemingly have a power not really to be sniffed at.