Step Into The Story

I'm a huge fan of the Happy Ever After. It doesn't matter which genre I'm reading, I still want to feel warm and satisfied and, yes reassured, when I get to the end of a book. Of course this doesn't work out well for me sometimes. My favourite reads include crime and thrillers and although the ending may satisfy in the sense that the mystery is solved and the bad guys caught, there's an unhappy ending for someone, usually the corpse. If the victim wasn't very pleasant then that's fine. That's why I enjoy watching Midsomer Murders. Maybe that's also why I don't read much gritty crime with random violence in it. I hear enough about that on the news. And then there's non-fiction. I love reading historical biographies but frankly I know that if I'm reading about Anne Boleyn, for example, then there's an appointment with the executioner waiting and history isn't going to change. So even as I read the book I'm preparing myself. Wh...

I have a thing about voices. I think they can be incredibly seductive. In the second of my trilogy books, The Scandals of an Innocent, Alice reflects on the fact that Miles was almost able to seduce her with his voice alone, he was so smooth! Discovering the Carte Noir coffee adverts online was always going to be a treat for me. This is the next best thing to watching Dominic West play Darcy in Pride and Prejudice and the perfect displacement activity for my Friday morning when I should be revising my Arctic manuscript. I don't drink much coffee, but that's beside the point. I love both Dominic West and Pride and Prejudice in just about equal measure so that's my tea break sorted. Here's the link: http://www.cartenoire.co.uk/pride-and-prejudice Oh, and you can also experience Greg Wise and Dan Stevens reading to you simply for your pleasure and gratification. Thank goodness I was sitting comfortably - I almost melted! Enjoy!

This blog post is adapted from one of the articles I have available on my website. It’s about writing “old flame” stories. Both my new book, The Confessions of a Duchess , and the e-book prequel The Secrets of a Courtesan, are old flame stories in their different ways, from which you can probably gather that I’m keen on writing them! (And I love reading them too). There’s something very seductive about the idea of unfinished business and what might have been, of characters learning to love and trust again. But old flame books are, in my experience, very difficult to write. Firstly you have to deal with the reason why your hero and heroine parted in the first place. If it was all down to a big misunderstanding and one blunt conversation will clear everything up, it’s hard to sustain the conflict convincingly for the whole of the book. Then there is the assumption that once everything is clear between the two of them they will fall in love again. Wrong. They need to find each other ag...

Literary Festivals are marvellous things. They are full of thought-provoking talks on topics that can give you endless story ideas, you can meet famous authors who make you feel great because it turns out they experience exactly the same writing process that you do, and you can give your credit card a really good work out. Over the past 10 days I’ve been attending various events at the Swindon Literature Festival. Now in its 16th year the festival is beautifully run by Matt Holland and always provides a fascinating programme with a great mix of writers, thinkers, philosophers and storytellers. Last week I heard the ever-entertaining Julian Clary talk about his latest novel, I went to a talk by Professor Kathleen Burk about the historical and current relationship between Britain and America and I went to a Philosophy Society discussion on the nature of friendship. And today I sallied forth to hear Claire Harman talking about her book Jane’s Fame, an exploration of how Jane Austen conque...

I've found a wonderful new displacement activity! Those of you who read the BBC History Magazine might already be familiar with it. It's called The Six Degrees of Francis Bacon and it works on the same principle as Six Degrees of Separation, which is the idea that each person on the planet is only six steps away from anyone on earth. To take up the History Magazine's challenge you start with any reasonably well known person from any historical period and/or country and find something that links them to another historical figure. You can be as wild and wacky as you like, with literally ANYONE eligible. Within six steps you have to link them to Francis Bacon, Queen Elizabeth I's chancellor. I have wasted (I mean spent in useful research) literally hours and hours on this conundrum. Then I thought that as a Regency author, why not devise The Six Degrees of Jane Austen ? Or The Six Degrees of Georgette Heyer ? I'll report back when I've worked it out. Or if you get...