Fiona Walker's Blog, page 4

Book signing: Let’s Get Christmassy at Daylesford

On Weds 13th November I’ll be at Daylesford for their annual Cotswold Christmas Fair, where I’m again joining the Borzoi Bookshop team to sign copies of Country Lovers on the eve of its publication, so please do join me if you can.

[image error]

It’s a glorious event of full-on festive shopping set in a winter wonderland of marquees bursting with fashion, accessories, furnishings, posh nosh and tipples from the very best of creative cooks, craftsmen and designers, along with a sprinkling of gift-perfect authors with pens poised to personalise a copy for you or a loved one.

[image error]

All tickets and sales at the event raise money for WellChild. And as well as all those hundreds of stalls, there are workshops and demos, tasting sessions, and there might even be a few famous local faces milling about. What country lover could resist it?

[image error]

For lots more information about the event, and about Daylesford and WellChild, visit the website: https://cotswoldfair.com/

 

The Country Lovers Countdown Begins

It’s that time of year when I dust down my Facebook password, recall my Twitter handle, flick through the Instagram filters and start bribing the dogs to pose for click-bait pictures. My access-all-areas jaunt onto social media can mean only one thing: there’s a new Fiona Walker novel coming out this month!

(Cue public displays of authory dancing to Elvis Costello’s Every Day I Write the Book.)

[image error]

Country Lovers is published in hardback and e-book on Thurs 14th November. It’s my eighteenth novel, and the second book set in the village of Compton Magna, a Cotswold hotbed of hunky heroes, rebellious women and party-loving locals that put the ‘shake’ in Shakespeare country. If you could sum everything that makes a Fiona Walker book unique in one beautifully wrapped package, I hope you agree it would be this one:

[image error]

Here’s the all-important appetiser from inside the flyleaf (complete with some humblingly generous quotes from writers I love and admire):

Love affairs, village rivalries, horses, jealousy and secrets…

There’s no such thing as bad timing, only timing. Supposing you met your perfect match on the worst night of your life?

‘An all-encompassing whirlwind of activity, wit, fun and frolic. I loved it!’ JILL MANSELL.

‘If it’s brilliant country fun you’re after, but you can’t afford your own horse (or even if you can), read Fiona Walker immediately!’ JENNY COLGAN.

‘Fiona Walker is a class act, the best of her genre. Witty, clever, fabulous and fun, she’s a natural storyteller.’  SANTA MONTEFIORE

Glamorous Ronnie Percy has been back home in the Cotswolds for a year. But not everyone has forgiven her for abandoning her family twenty-five years ago.

Ronnie’s daughter Pax is fighting for custody of her small son as her own marriage disintegrates. Now she is furious to have to spend New Year’s Eve waiting to meet some stranger, invited by her mother to help run the family stud farm. The staunchly loyal head groom, Lester, is even more annoyed. Does Ronnie think he’s lost his touch?

Luca O’Brien, Irish charmer and reputed heart-breaker, is known throughout the countryside as the Horsemaker. But what happened to Luca’s beautiful stallion, Beck, now broken and unrideable in the Compton Magna stables? And what is Luca running away from?

Passionate, sexy, gripping, and laced with wicked humour, this is bestselling Fiona Walker at her dazzling best.

[image error](I hasten to add that final summary was written by my fabulously enthusiastic editor at Head of Zeus, not your blogger, but if dazzling is required, the Walker fairy lights are on max for this one).

More Country Lovers updates soon, including some exciting audiobook news, blog tour dates, the ubiquitous celebrity-reading-my-new-book deep fake photo op and the home-made professionally produced promo video across all my social streams.

There’s also a chance to come and get Country Lovers signed by yours truly at the Cotswolds’ loveliest Christmas Fair the day before publication. I’ll post about that in the next couple of days, so please check back…

 

For now, in time-honoured tradition, I’ll round off with a pet packshot. For The Country Set, Max the Shetland stepped nobly up to the plate in the garden after we lost my late great companion and regular house model, Pudding the Weimaraner, who quite often ate the books she was asked to pose with over her sixteen years in the job. This year, sharing top honours are Zara the greyhound – who also stars above – and Percy the cat:

You can pre-order Country Lovers at all good bookshops or online via this link, and you can read an extract from the novel and the story behind it here. If you’d like to follow me on Twitter or Instagram or like my Facebook page, please click the links below. I’d love to see you there!

Country Lovers Cover

I’m thrilled to be able to officially introduce the gorgeous cover for my next novel Country Lovers:

[image error]

It’s published on 14th November. You can pre-order the hardback from Amazon by clicking HERE, and the ebook HERE.

To find out more about Country Lovers and to read an extract, click HERE.

A Video: Writing’s Ups, Downs and Turnarounds

When I’m writing through another sleepless night, eager to macramé a dozen intertwined plot threads into a finished manuscript, I regularly remind myself that there’s no excuse for taking so long. The American writer Nora Roberts has penned over two hundred novels, most of which have laid siege to the New York Times bestseller list. Her prolific output is nothing to the Queen of Romance: the fragrant and false-eyelashed Barbara Cartland dictated more than seven hundred from a chaise, wearing pink and stroking a Peke. Enid Blyton’s characters jolly japed between school uniforms and mufty in almost eight hundred volumes, making Stephen King thrilling us with ninety and Agatha Christie murdering in seventy-seven look small fry. Writing a book is, after all, a fairly simple process is it not?

As always, I hang my head for not writing faster. The best-selling author alive, Danielle Steel, managed to consistently write seven books a year while raising nine children, divorcing four husbands and even launching a signature perfume, Danielle. She’s been quoted as saying that she sometimes delivers a book in the morning and starts another that afternoon. When I delivered Country Lovers earlier this month, it was just after seven in the morning and I’d worked through the night. Even though my caffeine load rivalled Brazil’s and my urge to carnival dance was up there too, I’m ashamed to admit I didn’t start book twenty that day. On the plus side, nor did I launch divorce proceedings, and Walker’s Eau de Haynet remains a pipedream.

Friends and readers have reassured me that the reason my output trails behind some other goddesses of the oeuvre is because my books are three times as long as theirs, which if you break it down means I’ve now written the equivalent of fifty-seven. That’s a cheering thought. I try very hard to write a novel a year, although occasionally real life’s unexpected twists and tragedies mean one takes longer. When Carrie Fisher said ‘take your broken heart and turn it into art’, her first creative urge may not have been to write big rural romps set in the English countryside, but I’ve long lived by her mantra, and never more so than in recent months. I have it pinned to the wallboard beside my writing desk, a hotchpotch anthology of notes, postcards and my children’s drawings, all of which regularly fall on my head:

[image error]

Last December, I’d almost finished Country Lovers when I had to set it aside for a while. Thank goodness for the old writing truism: ‘put it in a drawer for a few months then look at it afresh’. That’s a very rare privilege for commercial authors these days – something I’ve not done since the nineties – and not one I would have granted myself without enforced time off, but when I came back to this book I was over the moon to find it so cheering, and in the past two months it’s taken flight. The Comptons are a home from home, its characters are amongst my most vivid, and I hope that readers share my enthusiasm for Country Lovers when it’s published later this year. Much more on that soon. Meanwhile, if you want to pre-order it from Amazon, click the cover below.

[image error]

 

 

My Poetry: Ayres and Disgraces, you Betcha (man)

Poetry is my go-to. If I’m stuck writing, I read it, from W B Yeats to Murray Lachlan Young, T S Eliot to George the Poet; all hail Stevie Smith and Wendy Cope. If I’m still stuck, I write it (nowhere near as well as they do):

I’ve been writing poems for as long as I’ve been writing novels, although I’ve kept very few of them, and published none. Most are written for friends and family in celebration or consolation, others scribbled late at night because I’m spitting mad about something and fantasise myself Warwickshire’s vengefully witty Dorothy Parker. Almost all are penned on paper scraps in passing. It’s a great way of getting things off your chest (in jest). They’re not high culture, nor remotely likely to win literary praise, but they are the way I tell stories without a map, a cast list and multiple plot lines, and lots are gratifyingly short. Such as last August’s post-dog-walking quickie:

[image error]

When I revamped this website, I toyed with the idea of a poetry corner as a bit of fun, but my subjects are self-indulgently close to home and I don’t want to irritate lovely book readers with rhyming couplets about Tesco delivery drivers and my eye bags-for-life. Reading a da-dum-di-dum ditty is a big ask unless you’re a devotee. With the digital era of podcasts, memes and vlogs, however, I hit upon an idea that I’d like to share. Here’s an early prototype:

I’m not sure what you’d call it – a poememe? Since then, I’ve twiddled the idea more, and put together the first part of my comic story ballad, A Woman of a Certain Age (above), which introduces Geraldine Friend, a late-to-motherhood neglected wife who’s about to find her second romantic wind. When I first made it, I didn’t think it was polished enough to show anyone beyond immediate family and friends, (I’m still doubtful) but a few of them have been on my case about it ever since. And because it’s Christmas, and because I love them all for their dogged belief – and because I promised I’d do it – I’m gifting it to you all in my final blog of 2018, lovely website visitors, like a hand-knitted reindeer jumper with a too-tight neck and boss eyes at nipple height. It’s already streaming on this website’s Bit on the Sidebar (that’s a little pop-up widget thing I’ve never worked out what to do with) and if it gets a few supporters and shares, I’ll post Part Two. If not, fear not, the sidebar will quietly disappear, and Gerry’s ballad will be archived in this post, along with my narks about ageing:

[image error]

PS) Rest assured, I haven’t for a moment given up the day-job of novel-writing (and fans of The Country Set series will recognise that the Comptons are in the heart of Gerry’s story too). The Country Lovers comes out next year. Much more on that soon.

Peace be with you this Christmas. Along with mistletoe, baubles, twinkly lights and as much merry-making as you can cram in.

A Video: Jolly Christmas Jingle, with love…

Bonfires, Blackberries and Bikinis

I am a functioning bookaholic. As such, my summer reading list is inevitably ambitious. This year, as I piled BOGOFs in my arms in my local bookshop and one-clicked Daily Deals online, I reassured myself that I could race through twenty novels and several memoirs between Leavers’ Assembly and Back to School. Isn’t that what we all used to gobble up each summer?

[image error]

Erm, in my twenties maybe, when a fortnight budget break in Ibiza involved applying Factor 8 in a slow-spit-sunbed rotation alongside competitive reading mates, shaking off Acid House earworms on our Discmans…and simply turning pages all day. Bronte, Bellow and Balzac for show; Conran, Cooper and Collins for joy.

On a busy family holiday these days, reading time is limited to the gaps between cooking, driving, shouting at the sat nav, chivvying the children, keeping the dogs off the furniture and making sandwiches, along with fathoming the rules of obscure board games, drying towels and calculating if we have enough Tesco Vouchers to get into the Eden Project.

I still dream big. Three months ago, those hazy sun-drenched days stretching ahead from late July promised a hammock-load of literary bliss. Adding book after book to my summer reading list, I vowed to gather midge-bites with pride as I eked out just-one-more-chapter reverie on long, warm evenings. I bought reading treats for the children and for Sam too, envisaging us all round a pool lovingly lost in plots.

From the first week of August to the last, the books that I packed in a canvas bag for our Cornish holiday were still waiting there when it went back in the roof-box on the drive to the North York Moors. Even in September, I still fooled myself that summer would linger long enough to keep uninterrupted-book-time within reach. Better still, with the girls are back at school, I could set aside reading hours between writing shifts. But as each allotted hour got sucked up into the vortex of day-to-day, and nights closed in with windfall-thudding inevitability – and The Bodyguard to distract us all – I looked at my beautiful mountain of summer reading and yearned for Ibiza, a Discman and prickly heat.

Now we’re in October, sloes jewelling in the hedgerows, sunbeds packed away. The book award shortlists are coming out, and must-read hardbacks are being published thick and fast in the build-up to Christmas. My reading list is getting longer by the day. According to the pundits, we should already be curling up with a good book in front of the fire. Many of my bedside pile still have sand and suntan oil in them.

Yet amazingly, when I counted them up this week, I found I’d read three-quarters of my summer list without once reclining on a deckchair. In the past three months, I’ve hoovered up tens of finely-crafted plots from up-lit to classics to crime in the same erratic fashion as I do year-round: gritty-eyed shifts of reading insomnia, listening to audiobooks whilst cooking or driving, furtive tablet-time flipping pages during home screenings of the girls’ favourite Pixar movie. Like so many of us balancing the spinning plates of a busy family life, I graze on novels week-on-week without realising it, and I’ve loved every addictive word.

Thank goodness books aren’t like clothes. We don’t shove a big, addictive summer read at the back of the wardrobe like unworn shorts and sparkly flipflops. Escapism has no timetable. I have a few more treats left from my summer reading list to enjoy before I’m ready to hibernate with the Booker shortlist. This autumn, I’m unrolling my towel by the wood-burner, and it’s a heavenly place to be.[image error]

Finally, as I write this, the Kindle edition of The Country Set can be snapped up for 99p today only (Tues 2nd Oct) in the UK and ANZ thanks to the fabulous BookBub team. Click the book jacket to buy it. Bikinis on!

 

Murderous thoughts make for magnificent endings.

A sneak peak extract from next year’s book is now on my website – just head across to The Comptons page to read it. The novel focuses on peace-maker Pax whose life is turned around during a month’s close confinement in the Cotswolds with enigmatic Irish horseman Luca. This one has been a real thinker, which isn’t a self-indulgent euphemism for lying on a chaise longue eating grapes and waiting for inspiration to strike; it’s got characters I love like family, and I really want to do them justice. I felt exactly the same about Tash and Hugo, so I truly hope this is just the start of Pax and Luca’s story.

When a friend asked me how the writing was going the other day and I muttered through gritted teeth, ‘I wish I could find a way to end it all!’ I hadn’t realised this was open to interpretation. Thankfully, she knows me well and brandished the classic advice: “bring in a Dynasty-style Armageddon of plane crash/monsoon/massacre/deadly virus and kill them all off, darling!”

Ah, the temptation, even in the cosiest bosom of the cuddliest author, to elbow one’s characters over a cliff occasionally. When I’m up against it, I close my eyes and fantasise mine go under a combine harvester, spin the Land Rover or peg it en masse thanks to a dodgy batch of Pimm’s. I’m not alone…

[image error]

Lots of us have already turned to the dark side; I know of at least five former chick-lit heavyweights who these days earn their livings on rampant killing sprees, some under pseudonyms. It’s only human to fantasise poisoning the odd cupcake in the little café of kindness by the sea. The young, professional heroes and heroines we coupled together in loved-up endings in London, Paris and New York in the 90’s and noughties are now the Waitrose-shopping, middle-aged middle-classes, and must be punished to survive in fiction. They’re put in peril in thrillers with titles that usually contain at least two of the words ‘Wife’ ‘Girl’ ‘Disappeared’ ‘Lie’ and ‘Gone’, their children snatched from pretty London garden squares, million-pound townhouses embezzled in secret scams, their husbands all closet gamblers and/or murderers while their yummy mummy school gate friends turn out to be predatory psychos. These books are gripping, breathless, beautifully written and make my heart palpitate constantly until I reach the end.

[image error]

In the interest of buoyed-up balance, I’ll keep championing the romance reboot, encumbering our colourful middle England casts with as much emotional baggage as they can carry as they romp their way towards joyful denouements: traumatic pasts, ageing parents, difficult children, boring marriages, dysfunctional pets, a diesel car, thighs that rub together.

You see, I don’t think I’m much of a killer. Even my combine harvester fantasies usually involve a heroic horseback rescue, death-defying clinch, lots of rolling in the hay and a rollicking big-cast after-party in the village pub. It will take more than a heatwave and an approaching Cornish family holiday for me to commit character-cide. Pax and Luca are keepers. At least I hope they are. We’ll find out next year.

June’s a blooming, flaming lovely month for a big new paperback…

It’s summer! That means rain-washed bunting and steamy marquees, painted toenails and flipflops, horseflies, citronella, Pimm’s and baps. Not the circular baked bun in which we cram our egg mayonnaise and cress, nor the lady protuberances we release from bikinis for an all-over tan, but Big, Addictive Paperbacks.

 

 

Baps are the sort of books that don’t just tell the story of A meeting B; they take us right through the alphabet to weave a whole new world from words. They keep us company for days, sometimes weeks, and give us the perfect excuse for an early night, a late lie-in and a lazy afternoon on a sun-lounger. Call them beach reads if you will; my favourites are bed, bath, train, car park and end-of-the-garden reads too. ‘I couldn’t put it down’ is one of the loveliest things any author can be told, which is why you might spot me stealing furtively around Waterstones with a tube of UHU this week. Yes, The Country Set is out in paperback. Cue pack shot:

[image error]

Along with butterflies, orchids, fledgelings and glow-worms, my bouncy baps almost always come out in June: you can time a Fiona Walker paperback by Ascot hats and outdoor opera, and sometimes – as this year – World Cup fever.  What better excuse to buy The Country Set hot off the press and find a quiet spot to curl up with horses, dogs and handsome hunks in breeches?

Published by Head of Zeus, The Country Set paperback edition is priced £7.99. Click on the cat to buy it from Amazon UK:

[image error]

 

A Video: Writing Inspiration, Displacement and Gregory Peck

Like many authors, when I’m stuck writing a particularly difficult section of a novel, I displace. In the good old pre-WiFi days, this involved watching daytime television and cleaning around the loo – anything to avoid tackling the twisted plot – but then the web became our all-consuming lifeforce and I joined the creative tribe who waste lengthy hours procrastinating online, or as we prefer to call it, ‘research’. Self-justification’s an important element to displacement: Rightmove’s a vital resource for creating settings; Netflix is storytelling straight into the vein; weeping over one’s Amazon reviews inspires one to do better; social media, meanwhile, is all about author visibility. And the Mail Online – as shamefully, secretly addictive for many as porn or funny cat compilations on YouTube – is the very bedrock of writer’s block. Like a syrup-of-figs-and-castor-oil protein shake, if the Sidebar of Shame can’t get you moving again, nothing can. Unless, of course, it takes longer to load the front page than it took the subs to write it…

[image error] [image error]

When we moved to this house and discovered it took all day to download The Archers podcast, I’d hoped one upside to our glacially slow rural internet speed would be the Brontë-like simplicity of purpose it brought to my working day. Instead, it simply takes ten times as long as my fellow procrastinating writers to ‘research’.

[image error]At times like this, having written myself firmly into a corner, watching in despair as the busy cursor spins round refusing to show me pictures of a five-bedroomed farmhouse in the Cotswolds where I can imagine my family my heroine’s family living, I remind myself through gritted teeth that it’s worth the wait because the Internet is full of essential support, insight and a great many brightly coloured pie-charts for writers in stasis. Some examples are here, Googled at my desk in slightly less time than it would take to drive to the local town to use Waitrose’s superfast wifi, enjoy free coffee while online, do a full weekly shop, then drive home the scenic route:

[image error] [image error]

My new tactic is only allowing myself displacement activities that are irrefutably related to my books and writing career, like this blog. To this end, I’ve just put together a video for all writers who might also occasionally feel we’ve lost the plot and are in need of a little inspiration and guidance.

Creating it has reminded me why I love doing this job, not least because old movies are one of the cocktails that knock the Mail Online’s shake off the menu. Uploading the b. thing to YouTube also usefully hogged all our narrow country lane’s bandwidth for six hours solid, transforming my plotting shed into a metaphysical garret of silence and concentration. I could do with making one every day to carry on this trend, but I’m dying to get back to the book, so I’m just turning off the router instead. Normal service will resume soon…