Fiona Walker's Blog, page 3

Learning on the Job

How many of us started Lockdown 3 with Dolly Parton in our heads 24/7 singing ‘Here You Come Again’? I know I should be grateful it’s finally exorcised the Kylie Minogue earworm that’s been there since Glastonbury 2019, but oh…

I’m writing this from the far end of the dining table, pausing to issue a librarian ‘shhh’ every few minutes. In front of me, Dora and Winnie – in Year 8 and 9 respectively – sit on opposite sides, headsets on and laptops open like a customer service call centre. Or at least a centre whose teen workers wear slippers and PJs with hoodies, occasionally mumbling French conjunctions or sniggering ‘you’re on mute again, sir’. This is a vast improvement on our first week of home-schooling, throughout which they out-shouted each other while teachers on Microsoft Teams bellowed ‘Who’s just altered my PowerPoint?’ The headsets have proved a life-saving purchase, but there’s no escaping the fact that my peaceful writing days are once more gone…

Like oh-so many parents, I’m now flexing the day job with the roles as teaching assistant, tech support, dinner lady, referee and font of all knowledge.

But I promise I do have book news to share, which I’m going to announce in my blog here next week, by which time I hope this Warwickshire home education call centre will be a haven of silent academic absorption and that I’ll have remembered all my social media passwords.

For now, this end of the dining table is officially in The Comptons and I’m not leaving them until I’ve galloped the Saddle Bags up a few more hills far from interior angle calculations, the rise of fascism and Caliban’s monstrous legacy. Admittedly I’m having to dismount and hand them my fictional reins regularly to reboot the router or Google the effect of pressure on particle movement, so I’m not getting as much written as I’d like, but the fact there’s no lockdown in my imagination’s landscape makes it all the more important to keep going in the belief that life will imitate art one day soon.

I’ll be back with book news next week, but meanwhile I do hope everyone reading this is bearing up, that you and your loved ones are safe and in good heart (and staying sane if you too are supervising home learning) and that you’ll forgive me for writing the next Compton novel so slowly. Right now, I can’t quite bear to leave…

Creature Comforts and Wild Joys.

Who doesn’t love a British autumn? Even this one, more locked in and lonelier than most, has so much to offer: it’s aflame and awash with colour again, a constant reminder that even on those days we want to stop the world and get off, the seasons come and go regardless.

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This morning, just before the school run, a lanky dog fox wandered through our garden, as close to the house as the boot scrapers, taking advantage of the camouflage of overgrown flowerbeds we’ve yet to dig over. Scarred, rusted and wet, he was no greetings card of anthropomorphised red foxy charm, but timeless and defiant amid our accidental rewilding. Big as a spaniel, he turned to watch us watching him through the window. I hurried for my phone to photograph our visitor, but by the time I’d tripped over the greyhounds – still upside down on their beds, legs akimbo, luxuriating in the full-bellied warmth of human companionship – he was already slipping away, camouflaged amidst the remains of a border of dry goldenrod.

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His visit has cheered me up enormously, one of those shared magical encounters a family rarely forgets, albeit unremarkable compared to the global historical shifts that headline each news week, especially right now. Such small personal moments punctuate our bigger collective memories: do you remember that dog fox visiting the garden? Wasn’t it the year of the pandemic, when Biden had just won the US Election?

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Last year, when a procession of muntjac trotted brazenly past the French windows, my mother – gravely ill with bone cancer but determinedly holding court downstairs with visiting friends – regaled us with the story of how they’d been introduced to England by the Duke of Bedford in the early 1900s, soon escaping Woburn to rampage through crops and herbaceous borders all over the UK. She died just a few days later. As all those who have lost loved ones know, grieving starts with death and works backwards, sometimes terribly slowly. This small, positive and personal moment so close to her death has stayed with me. She was thrilled to share a fact none of us knew, and it’s now something I always recall when I see the little Chinese deer that regularly rootle around outside, just as I remember the male pheasant and peacock double-act who ‘adopted’ my parents’ garden when I was a girl, a bromance we all delighted in, also the badgers who partied on our lawn all night in Worcestershire despite Sam manfully marking his territory, the feral cats who serenaded me when I wrote in my ‘shed’ in Somerset, and the old hare that crosses the driveway outside my study window here when I write until dawn. Nature’s tapestry is always out there to run our hands along for comfort, a map that helps us navigate tough times.

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Which brings me to books – the reason I write this blog – and the part the nature plays in my big bouncy ones, that reliable four-by-four seasonality I plunder like so many writers, sharing joy in our rural landscape, its wildlife and its guardians. To me, the British countryside is inevitably a central character in its own right, whether the rest of my cast escapes to it, as they often did in my early books, or are a permanent part of it as they are in the Comptons series.

Right now, I’m busy writing a novel that starts with spring bursting from deep winter, which feels very upside down, but is a lovely reminder that all too soon we’ll be there again: buds creaking open, days lengthening and sun strengthening. This third Comptons book has been rather delayed which is why it’s still a work in progress, but thankfully writing throughout winter is my mainstay so I’ll be nose to the grindstone from here on in to get it finished, albeit occasionally looking up in the hope I catch sight of a wild visitor or two.

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Bonanza Book Day

Fanfare! Country Lovers is out in paperback today, Thursday 3rd September, although I confess it’s unusually quiet around here for a publication day…

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The whizzy fibre optic broadband that was recently installed in our rural backwater cut out a few days ago when a tractor accidentally snapped the cable, and it’s still dead. With just a patchy mobile signal as back-up, it’s a spooky case of life imitating art: the cast of Country Lovers often do the one-armed phone dance as they try to find a connection in the sleepy village of Compton Magna. Like the book’s heroine Pax, I can only check emails if I perch on a hummock by the compost heap and must drive to Waitrose car park to upload anything as big as this blog…at least that’s my excuse for slurping coffee and munching on a pastry while writing this.

I might be socially (media) distanced at present, but it’s just as exciting as ever to see a book in print, especially after the lockdown delays meant Country Lover’s original paperback publication was postponed. I’m very grateful to all those of you who have patiently awaited it, and also to those readers who’ve already read it in hardback or ebook – or even listened to me narrating the audio version – and taken the time to write a message to let me know how much you enjoyed it.

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‘Stuffed full of star-crossed lovers, misunderstandings and horses’ to quote iNews (who selected it amongst their books of the year), Country Lovers sees Ronnie Percy struggling to save the family farm whilst embroiled in daughter Pax’s disintegrating marriage, her new stud manager’s shady past and a lot of riotous village gossip. You can read more about it here.

I do hope galloping through pages of fresh air and frolics proves the ultimate escape. There have been few times in life that I’ve loved reading more than this one, and today is a true bonanza. It’s the busiest publishing day of the year, and what a crowd of us there are! With more novels coming out this week than any other this year, bookshelves will be heaving and bedside tables piled high as the annual hibernation of curling up with a good book starts early. I’m hugely grateful to everyone who wants to curl up with mine.

 

I always urge readers to support independent booksellers if you can. But with so many books vying for space in shops, I appreciate it may be easiest to have a copy delivered to your door, in which case, here are the links to the buy Country Lovers in paperback on Waterstones and Amazon.

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A Wish, a Reading List and a Pink Supermoon.

As a child, whenever I was upset (which being a sensitive clutz, was often), my mother would say ‘I wish I had a magic wand I could wave to make it all better.’ And I used to wonder why she didn’t have one. Who was in charge of handing out the wands? They weren’t doing their job properly. Mum deserved one, and one day I vowed I would find where they came from and acquire one for her.

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Even after I flew the nest, she’d repeat the phrase whenever I cried on her shoulder about relationships breaking up, then later when I confessed that my marriage was ending, when we were all left devastated by the death of my darling dad, when the career I was so proud of started faltering, when Sam and I were forced to sell the farm we loved so much, and then on the fateful day she confided the heart-breaking news that she was terminally ill: ‘I wish I had a magic wand I could wave and make it all better.’

When Mum died last year, she passed the wand wish into my care. I’ve never wanted its magical healing as badly as I do now that the world feels very small and frightened.

In such an extraordinary time of restriction and separation, it’s not easy to know where to turn in our imaginations. In between obsessively checking live news feeds, I’ve been staring at this screen for far too long each day agonising over what I’m trying to achieve and why it matters. Suddenly, my sociable, fictional world that felt so real just a month ago is the alien one compared to the dystopian reality. I want to shout at my characters to stop all this non-essential cavorting, canoodling and carousing and go straight home to make bread and watch old Miranda repeats. Then lie awake at 3am trying to come to terms with it all.

Rediscovering old, favourite novels is a huge comfort, and I’m enormously grateful for the messages that I’ve received in the past fortnight from readers who are rereading mine: French Relations, Kiss Chase, Well Groomed and Snap Happy are getting lots of mentions in particular. Oh, how I loved writing in the 1990s, those heady days of freedom before cartoon covers and pink glitter were stamped on every commercial novel written by a woman under fifty.

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With that in mind, I thought I’d use this blog to make some of my own 90s retro reading recommendations. These are pure comfort reads, not those books I left casually lying around my single girl flat to try to look streetwise and/or intellectual (And The Ass Saw the Angel on the coffee table, Skinny Legs and All by the bed, Possession by the bath and Martin Amis draped pretentiously everywhere). The books listed below were (almost) all bestsellers and as such will be familiar to many, which I think makes revisiting them particularly apt at a time of such enforced separation.

The book that made me want to be a writer:

Wise Children by Angela Carter

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I love Angela Carter’s work with a passion, and this wonderful tale of an outrageous theatrical family was my solace when I graduated from university uncertain what to do for a living now I knew acting wasn’t likely to be my metier. Every page is a lesson in glorious, joyful, characterful writing. I’ve read it multiple times since.

The book that could have stopped me:

The Old-Girl Network by Catherine Alliott

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The year before this came out, I’d searched far and wide for fictional fun that tickled my twenty-something fancy, eventually giving up and starting to write it myself. I was putting the finishing touches to French Relations when I read The Old-Girl Network. It was fresh, funny, youthful and everything I’d been looking for. Had I found it sooner (ditto Marian Keyes’ Watermelon which came out soon afterwards), I might never have written a word.

The book everyone told me to read:

The Beach by Alex Garland

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I read this ‘authentically’ while visiting my best friend who was working in Thailand at the time, and with whom I went island hopping. I felt I was living it – although mercifully not the grislier bits – and it remains inexorably linked to that trip. (In the same way, I read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin on holiday in Kefalonia, but I was there with my ex-husband and hated the way it ended on both fronts, so it’s not made my list…)

The book I can read over and over again:

Polo by Jilly Cooper

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The fairy godmother of romps has to be here, and this is in my top three (Riders and Rivals being 80s will have to be on another list, as will sneaking Emily off Mum’s bookshelf in the 70s and getting into trouble at primary school for proudly presenting it as my current read). Polo fizzes with outrageous wealth, snobbery, misogyny, glossy ponies and lashings of old-fashioned good vs evil. It’s simply glorious.

The book I pretended not to read:

Toujours Provence by Peter Mayle.

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It was considered deeply uncool among my arty crowd to want to follow the day to day épicerie and degustation of middle-aged ex-pats in the South of France, but I rebelliously read this sequel to A Year in Provence in one overnight binge and then started again from the beginning. Peter Mayle was wry and funny and turned me into a lifelong Francophile.

The book that made me cry:

The Horse Whisperer by Nicholas Evans

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I read this on a long haul flight and cried so much that the passenger beside me pressed the buzzer for the stewardess thinking I was having a fit (I’m not a pretty crier, but honestly). Many books reduce me to tears, but seldom so publicly or inconsolably. If you’ve only seen the film, I urge you to read the novel because the ending’s better (in my opinion).

The book that made me laugh out loud:

The Queen and I

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Having grown up on a diet of Sue Townsend’s Adrian Mole, I knew this revolutionary tale about the Royals going to live on a council estate would make me titter, but what I hadn’t expected was for it to be so affectionate and wise, or that the titters would become so uproarious. It remains a total cheerer-upper of a book.

The book I wish I’d written:

Behind the Scene at the Museum by Kate Atkinson.

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I’ve owned more copies of this novel than almost any other because I keep giving it to people to read. (A copy went to my brother-in-law just last month). There’s something about Kate Atkinson’s storytelling that absolutely captivates me, and her skill with character and time is breath-taking. To incorporate six generations of women and a great swathe of history in less than 400 pages with apparently effortless ease is nothing short of brilliant.

Tonight’s pink ‘super’ moon might not be quite as magical as the wand my mother always wished for, but I think it’s worth heading out into the garden to look up at it and remember how extraordinary life is, how precious, and how much we all deserve to live it to the full. And thank goodness for books.

As my wonderful godmother signed off in a recent message to me (explaining that she’s a bit fed up with everybody saying ‘stay safe’):

Stay cheerful.

Talking Books, Author’s Voice and Thinking Aloud.

Listen in: Country Lovers is now available as an audiobook, and it’s the first Fiona Walker novel to be narrated by its author: me! With all this wild weather blowing around, there’s every excuse to slot in the air-buds or hook over the noise-cancelling earphones and lose yourself in the village of Compton Magna.

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I’ve been listening to it myself, although I’ve only managed one session, played on the kitchen’s Bluetooth speaker while Sam and I prepped supper one evening. He insisted I sound great (which let’s face it, was obligatory given I had a chopping knife in my hand) whereas I think the studio may have brought in an imposter for a second take. Like many of us, I’m mortified when I hear my recorded voice because that’s not how it sounds in my head. Whereas I’d heard Joanna-Lumley-meets-Mariella-Frostrup – warmth and laughter bubbling just beneath the surface – it seems the microphone captured an altogether more excitable woman trying very hard not to flap her hands about or let her stomach rumble. (Although in fairness, I get better as I go along, and by the time Sam and I switched it off to call the girls through for supper, he was rapt, which may only in part be due to consuming a large G&T while his real-life narrator moved on from sharp knives to pans of boiling water).

One surprising upshot was that before sitting down to eat, I had to grab a notepad and scribble a list of inspired ideas to help with the sequel I’m writing, ones which I feared would be forgotten if I suffered a middle-aged data dump mid-pasta. Lots of things suddenly made sense that I’ve been getting my plots twisted over while working on the third book in the series.

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Now I plan to listen to the rest of it over half term, along with the wonderful Jilly Bond reading The Country Set, because I’m certain it will help the book I’m currently working on really take flight. Audiobooks are so immediate and, unlike the written word, we don’t linger over individual paragraphs revelling in their construction. I can get very stuck through the course of a book – not so much writer’s block as a perfectionist’s obsession with the twiddly details – and I hope this will help. Listening back to the Compton Magna novels is a way to access the village’s soundtrack that I hear in my head when writing, not the Joanna-meets-Mariella writer’s voice but all the colourful characters chattering away. Being an obsessive wordsmith, I can be guilty of over-working my sentences instead of letting plain prose do the job, but creating dialogue is different; I’ve always written that quickly and instinctively. It was only when narrating Country Lovers that I realised how swiftly it moves the story along, and only when listening back to it that I appreciated how vividly it brings a world to life. That’s why there’s going to be lots of talking in the third book (although this time I’m leaving out the Polish – and singing – in the hope that I get the narration gig again).

You can listen to a sample/buy the Country Lovers audiobook on Audible or Google Play by clicking the below (and it’s also available on CD and at iTunes):

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Audio-oh-oh-oh!

I spent last week in a recording studio in deepest Leicestershire, shut in a small, sound-proofed booth narrating the Country Lovers audiobook. It’s an experience that has opened my eyes – and ears – to a new storytelling method. What fun! I might have written nineteen books, typed millions of words, invented umpteen characters and added more twists than sommelier at a banquet, but it’s a whole new party with a mic in front of you. Twenty minutes reading aloud to a live audience at a festival or in a library is nothing to six hours a day. I lived in that book, or perhaps more accurately re-lived, and I was so grateful to have the opportunity.

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The wonderful and fast-growing world of audiobooks is one I’ve embraced whole-heartedly as a punter. I listen to lots, often switching between the page and the speaker because I physically read some sections in bed and on trains, then listen to others whilst cooking and driving. It’s revolutionised my reading habits, and I now devour double the number of books I did a year or two ago, which for a bookworm is heaven. I’m not alone; judging from the ever-expanding market, our phone’s earbuds are as often playing stories as they are music on the commute and at the gym.

The voice of the audiobook narrator is all-important, inevitably becoming so fused with that of the author that the two can be indistinguishable. Most novels are narrated by actors, and that makes total sense. I’ve had half a dozen different professional voice artists narrate my books and they’re incredibly skilful, each bringing their own unique energy and drama to the tale, and in my case a cornucopia of accents, some lusty panting and the odd whinny. While some have played more for laughs and others for pathos, there’s a terrific joie de vivre to them all, and I’m incredibly grateful for the way they have brought my stories and characters to life over the years.

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Nevertheless, when the suggestion that I could narrate my own audiobooks came up at a recent publisher meeting, I jumped at the idea. There’s nobody closer to the story than the originator, we agreed, and as I’d dabbled with a drama training in my ancient history and love doing readings, it seemed a wonderful way to add something new. Not that I could get the job without an audition, so I sent a test demo to the studio, recorded in the plotting shed with background chair creaks and dog yawns. I passed the grade, only later realising that it would involve a week away from home, five days’ recording and a lot of lozenge sucking.

On the studio’s advice, I marked up the book with different coloured highlighters for each character’s voice (note to self: write fewer characters) flagged up descriptive words like ‘whispered’ ‘shouted’ ‘groaned’ (note to self: limit gravelly voices, throat clearing, uncontrollable sobbing and lusty undertones) and ran through some of the trickier passages beforehand (nts: absolutely no more drunken Irish folksongs, Polish sex slang and long alliterative descriptions of fecund foxes flirting, fornicating and fighting amid frost-freckled foliage). On the Monday morning of my recording week, I met producer Chris, a head-phoned maestro of the sound-mixer who cued me in and I was off – straight into a bit of furtive vodka-swilling and foreplay in an equestrian team’s staff flat in the Middle East. Chris then patiently endured a week of my many fluffs, stomach rumbles, sarcastic grumbling about the author and one very dodgy attempt at singing Charles Aznavour (which given that every tiny sound in that booth is amplified, takes truly saintly patience). Before I knew it, I was saying ‘the End’, feeling bereft.

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I absolutely loved reading out Country Lovers, an experience that has taught me how tough a gig narration is, but also how rewarding. It takes far more concentration than I’d anticipated to keep the storyline rolling along, the characters consistent and the energy up. Some authors are total sadists when it comes to their cast, and I’ve realised I’m one of them. In Country Lovers the dialogue is a globe-trotting tongue twister: there are Swedish, Polish, Australian, Canadian, Dutch and Arab voices; closer to home, they come from Wilts, Yorks, Glos and Brum. One of the central characters, Bridge, is from Belfast whereas another, Luca is from County Kildare, and switching between them was hell as I muttered “Hiy niy brine coiy” one minute, and ‘dat’s a grand-lookin’ herse dere’ the next. I can only apologise unreservedly to all Irish readers if I wandered off course. Rather alarmingly, I found that my default voice was the Queen, which I put down to streaming The Crown in my hotel room. But I enjoyed every minute of recording it. It brought my big book to life again, all in one place and in all its finished finery, which, after a year or more writing and rewriting, reading and re-reading, was a great privilege to be part of.

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I really hope more fiction writers start to record their own novels as audiobooks. It’s not only a unique way to add authenticity and meaning for listeners, but it crowns the writing process with storytelling again rather than packaging. Lovely as it is to see one’s finished book in the shops when it’s published, the last time most writers will have read it all the way though is at final printed proof stage, a forensic search for misspelling and typos; before that, we’ll have re-read it multiple times whilst editing, so we’re usually quite grateful to wave it through to production with red margin marks flagging up extraneous commas. Which means our enduring memory of any given book is often the small black and white mistakes, not the big story. That is unless we get the chance to read it all aloud afterwards and remember why we love sharing our stories so much…

The audio version of Country Lovers will be available early in the New Year.

The Blog Tour….Part Three

The final leg of my Country Lovers Blog Tour is almost upon us as I whizz around the World Wide Web in a whirlwind of plot twists, fireworks, starry nights and winter warming. Join me if you can!

Please check out the fabulous book bloggers and writers listed below, who will kindly be featuring reviews, extracts, questionnaires, guest posts and giveaways this coming week:

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The Blog Tour…Part Two

The Walker Blog Campaign bus is still revving around the Internet leaving a gorgeously eco-friendly zero-carbon emission digital footprint, along with a well-turned kitten heel and a flick of a Fairfax & Favor tassel…

Please check out the fabulous book bloggers and writers listed below, who will kindly be featuring reviews, extracts, questionnaires, guest posts and giveaways this coming week:

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Country Lovers is out now!

The big day has arrived. It’s here! Country Lovers is available in hardback and ebook from all good bookshops and online retailers:

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In time-honoured tradition, we’ve sought celebrity endorsements far and wide, but they are jolly slow readers these A-listers, and so – with apologies for making everyone’s fingers look like sausages – I’ve taken matters into my own hands and theirs here in the Walker plotting shed.

Whether you’re an old school romantic…

…a middle-aged nostalgic…

…a mucked-up millennial…

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…or just love men who can sing…

…there’s something for everyone in Country Lovers, including musical heroes, messy millennials, some middle-aged nostalgia and lashings of romance old and new.

Please spread the word and share the muddy, toasty, hug-filled country love.

 

 

The Blog Tour…Part One

To coincide with the publication of Country Lovers, I’m curling my virtual lashes, flaunting my digital double entendres and honing my hashtags in anticipation of a mammoth Blog Tour…

Please check out the fabulous book bloggers and writers listed below, who will kindly be featuring reviews, extracts, questionnaires, guest posts and giveaways this coming week:

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