It’s less than a week until I’ll be running a workshop at the Bournemouth Writing Festival. I’ll be sharing my experience of winning a publication contract with Bloodhound Books after entering a pitch competition for The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell. The workshop will include tips and hints for anyone wishing to develop skills in online pitching of a manuscript. The event is a new one on the Dorset writing scene and the programme has grown considerable since the inaugural year in 2023. I’m pleased to be delivering on Sunday 28 April 2024 alongside writing friends Paula Harmon and Alice Fowler. Do check out the full programme!
I’m one of those people who struggle with Christmas. It’s a legacy from my childhood when money was tight, my father always drank too much and everyone made an effort to have a good time. Since my own children have grown up, it’s become a lot easier and we’ve introduced new Christmas traditions which I really enjoy like the 9am Christmas morning parkrun along Weymouth seafront. I also love visiting Weymouth on Boxing Day to see children riding their new bicycles and scooters. This year, the sea glinted silver under leaden clouds and was absolutely beautiful.
The new addition to our Christmas celebrations is Truffle, my daughter’s puppy. She’s still in training and tries very hard not to jump up, steal newspapers or lick everything off the kitchen floor. Unfortunately, my husband was clearing up his wine making kit (as if there isn’t enough to do on Christmas eve) when Truffle guzzled a few elderberries. My daughter was worried and rang the emergency vet who recommended a visit to the practice in Bournemouth. They duly set off but avoided a consultation charge by ringing a special phone number to be told Truffle hadn’t eaten enough elderberries to poison her.
My husband always cooks the Christmas dinner (my contribution is making red cabbage in the slow cooker). It was a splendid meal followed by music (I can play Jingle Bells on the piano – thanks to learning how to read a few notes on Duolingo‘s music programme) and singing – I just had to share with everyone my karaoke performance of Killing Me Softly which (after hours of practice), I’ve finally nailed. Well, the first verse anyway.
As for writing, I’ve submitted the opening 25,000 words of my new novel to Kate Nash’s mentoring BookCamp 2024. I thought I’d have it finished before Christmas but there was more to do than I’d anticipated. Several 6am starts and I sent it off yesterday. Hurray! (Now I need to go through the rest of the novel with a fine-tooth comb.)
I’ll close with a couple of Christmas snaps and greetings to you and yours for a happy, healthy and prosperous 2024.
Apologies for the extended gap between posts. Behind the scenes I’ve been busy working on my latest novel – and also a couple of pitches which I submitted as part of Bookouture’s annual pitch party on 5 December. Here are two pitches I submitted for a novel which has the working title The Upgrade.
MORIARTY x CLARK-PLATTS
During a holiday on a remote tropical island, a woman gets caught up in tensions between the local population and rich tourists. The husband she should be able to trust is the reason she’s a target. Can she escape the ensuing danger?
FOLEY x THE WHITE LOTUS
Three mismatched couples form a competitive friendship while on holiday. Amongst the flirt, the bully and the show-off is somebody with a secret. Temperatures rise and storms threaten. Who’s to blame when one of the group goes missing?
If you’d like to help me out with a little market research, please let me know in the comments which pitch you prefer. There’s another opportunity coming up with Kate Nash Literary Agency for their 2024 Bootcamp Mentorship and I’d like to get my ducks in a row.
Yesterday I was invited to join Sampford Courtenay Novel Writers to talk about The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell. It was a really fun morning where I got to share lots of tips and tricks for completing a novel. If you’d like me to attend your writing or book group (so long as it’s accessible from Dorset or London), please let me know.
It’s taken three years from writing the very first line of The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell to arriving at publication day. There have been many ups and downs in reaching this point, but I’m proud of this story with its mystery and underlying messages that show changes in the moral code over thirty years and provide glimpses into racism in a rural setting. Book blogger, Linda Hill has posted an insightful review covering many of the elements I hoped to get across in her publication day review here.
If you’ve ever wondered how an author spends publication day, here’s my schedule:
7am: write a blog post and send (timing has slipped a bit here)
8am: join Writers’ Hour to finish a Q&A kindly offered by book blogger Victoria Bucknell
9am: check Amazon rankings to see if the novel has made a splash (repeat hourly every ten minutes)
My publishing contract with Bloodhound Books for The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell indicates the title is a working title. It also says the publisher will consult on the proposed cover. Contract vetting by the Society of Authors, suggested I might like to strengthen the consultation right on the cover (and title) to a right of approval. This wasn’t something I cared about. After all, the title had changed four times since I started drafting the novel in 2021. Here’s the story of how the title changed:
Title One: Little Swot
In the 1979 storyline, Carolyn persuades her mother to invest in tutoring which provides an opportunity for close contact with the teacher of her dreams, Mr Simmons. But when I told my husband about Little Swot, he assumed the title referred to a boy.
Title Two: Extra Lessons
Still on the theme of tutoring, I changed to a title which I thought had a nuanced double meaning. (I did check on Amazon that it hadn’t been used for erotic fiction!) Although as time wore on, I began to feel this title wasn’t quite right.
Title Three: The Girl and the Tutor
I attended an online masterclass in December 2021 offered by Writers & Artists. It was called How to Write a Book That Sells and delivered by bestselling author Angela Clarke. The content focused on the submission package (opening chapters, synopsis and cover letter) and was aimed at developing this in order to acquire literary representation. One of the things Angela emphasised was the need to pay attention to supermarket bookshelves. It’s Angela’s contention that busy women doing the weekly shop want to grab a book similar to one they’ve enjoyed before. With the advent of Gone Girl and Girl on a Train, many similar titles followed. This is how I settled on the new title of The Girl and the Tutor and felt relieved that the girl in my title is actually a girl of sixteen years – and not a woman as in many of the other books. My husband still grumbled and said the title was too on the nose.
Title Four: The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell
In the latter stages of my querying journey, I won feedback on my submission package during a fundraising auction for Ukraine. The editor of a small press gave helpful advice to improve all aspects of the package and suggested a new title. She said, The Girl is good, but The Girl and The Tutor is not great. Maybe just something generic like The Lost Girl or The Missing Girl or The Cold Case or The Abduction of Carolyn Russell. So, I played around with these ideas and settled on The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell.
I was prepared for the title to change again on publication by Bloodhound Books but the team were happy with it. Phew!
How important are titles to you in choosing a book to read or giving a name to your creative work?
The copyedits for The Secret Life of Carolyn Russell were returned to me recently. I had a fortnight to go through them and found this was just about long enough to complete the changes needed. Here are three things I was reminded about along the way:
Compound words
How could I have got so many compound words wrong? Take two separate words and combine them to make a new word with a different meaning. When you put the nouns post + box together, created is the red box where we post our letters, a postbox. Sounds simple, right?
Several years ago I published a piece called Find out which published author your writing style resembles which has turned out to be one of my most viewed posts. It gave a link to I Write Like where you can paste an excerpt of your writing for the website to analyse. (The facility is now also available as an app.) It turned out the piece I entered used similar word choices and was written in a similar style to Chuck Palahniuk. I’ve always been rather pleased at the match and wondered if my writing had changed over time to reflect another author.
For anyone on Twitter, you may have come across online pitching events that encourage writers to compose a tweet using 280 characters to get their story under the eyes of literary agents and publishers. If the tweet is ‘liked’ there’s an opportunity to submit a query letter, synopsis of the work and the first three chapters for consideration. It’s a good way to bypass the slush pile and I’ve attracted some interest by honing my elevator pitch to the size of a tweet. In previous twitter pitches I’ve used the following to describe my latest novel (the words in capitals suggest comparable titles):
THE WIDOW x HIGH FIDELITY
Menopausal journalist rediscovers her mojo by developing a true crime podcast about a missing West Country teenager in 1979. The dual timeline reveals the girl’s story of infatuation and exploitation with an unforgettable twist.
Earlier this year, I saw another twitter pitch advertised by Bloodhound Books, a leading independent publisher based in Cambridge.
For those of you who aren’t active on social media, I’d like to share the news that my work-in-progesshas been longlisted in the Novel London Literary Award. This competition invites international submissions for complete works of fiction, which may be unpublished, self published or newly published. As my manuscript is up against published novels I don’t expect it will get any further in the competition but it’s good to see my details on the publicity poster. Well done to all longlistees.
I’m continuing to work on the manuscript following feedback from beta readers. I’ve also changed the title from Little Swot to Extra Lessons which better reflects the novel. Here’s the draft blurb:
the writer is a lonely hunter 