Fiona Walker's Blog, page 6

Archive blogs May 2013 – Nov 2014

The trouble with cutting and pasting archive blogs is that none of the links work and the pictures disappear. It’s rather like picking up an ancient copy of Country Life in a waiting room to find all the best property ads and competitions ripped out, and a moustache drawn on The Hon Binkey Briggs-Slater’s photograph as she poses prettily in front of daddy’s stately pile with a Vizla. You are spared my pretty posing – and moustache – thank goodness. But for what they’re worth, here are some more old blogs….

May 2013

Posted on 21/05/2013

Since my last news blog, I’ve worn another set of letters off my keyboard, which must mean the first draft of next year’s novel is almost done, hooray. My brilliant master-plan to deliver the manuscript by the second May Bank Holiday isn’t quite timing out, alas, and this website update is being written during a quick coffee break between tidying up my typos after another night shift spent wrapped up my fictional world.  I do wish I’d learned to touch type – it’s one of the more prosaic bits of advice I always give aspiring authors – because even after 13 novels and many hundreds of thousands of words, I still have head-scratching moments when I stare at my fingertips wondering where on earth B is. Right now, the ERT keys are indistinguishable from one another. Given that I put so much of my heart into my books, H and A should romantically be the next to go, so if my characters exclaim  ‘aha!’ in surprised tones a lot in the final chapters, or roll around laughing non-stop, you’ll know why.  However I’ll save more details about that book until I’ve delivered the draft, because – as Valerie Singleton would say nervously to camera while shaking sticky-backed plastic cut-offs from her bell bottoms – here’s one I prepared earlier:

The Summer Wedding will be out on 6th June – a gorgeous buffet of bubbly women, dashing heroes, high spirited-horses and hot air balloons.  I hope it’s a real summer treat that finally brings out the sun and lends readers a big smile. I really enjoyed writing the characters in it; they’re such a warm-hearted bunch and were a lot of fun to create, with strong friendships and great loyalty.  As well as finding out more about the book here, you can read a sample chapter…and even watch me postulating excitedly about it on video here. (ED: No idea where that went, but jolly relieved it did – I think I waffled at length beside a flower arrangement in my publisher’s office after a boozy lunch)

I’ll be doing a few interviews, features and events to promote the book in coming weeks, and will try to keep readers updated via the twittering, wall-posting world of social media, links to which are here. Last week, I briefly abandoned the battered keyboard for a joyful afternoon at a fund-raising Ladies Lunch for Katharine House Hospice in Stafford, where I was lucky enough to have been invited to speak to a gloriously receptive audience of generous, jolly women. I also found a huge display of The Summer Wedding in the foyer courtesy of Stafford Waterstones, who had been given special dispensation to sell early copies at the event. It was the first time I’d seen my new book piled high, and it’s a moment that never fails to make one stop in one’s tracks and feel absolutely awe-struck that a clever creative team can take me from these all-night writing shifts in which I laugh, cackle and cry as I type frenziedly, through the many edits and design decisions to the finished, bound book ready to unfold its world in somebody else’s hands.  I wish I could report that I said something wise and profound (or even ‘aha!’ in best Alan Partridge fashion), but I’m afraid I just smiled like a loon and spluttered ‘I wrote that’, which must have come as a relief to the charity committee at least.

I hope The Summer Wedding brings a lot of joy and entertainment this summer.

July 2013

Posted on 09/07/2013

Phew! The first draft of my next novel, The Country Escape, is finished just in time for the school holidays. The second draft is due to be delivered just before the start of next term, alas, so come the Walker family holiday I’ll be the one buried up to her neck in sand on the beach with a red pen in one hand and a manuscript in the other. Thankfully the girls are accustomed to Mummy hawking three hundred pages of pen-marked A4 around everywhere in the same way their beloved battered rabbit and chewed blanket are brought wherever we go. They think my comforter is printed loose leaf, and they’re probably right. I’m much happier when I have something physical to work with and I relish the editing stage where characters really come to life, plot twists are tightened and the end – inevitably written with drooping eyes at 3am in the first draft – is lovingly re-crafted with tears and laughter galore.

Meanwhile, it’s very exciting to know that The Summer Wedding is being tucked into suitcases and handbags, propped on bedside tables and sun-loungers and devoured on e-readers and iPads. I’m incredibly grateful to everybody who has taken the time to send a message or tweet to let me know how much you’ve enjoyed it, and a big thank you to all those kind enough to review the book on Amazon and Goodreads for other readers to see. It’s wonderful to learn that the characters are already such favourites, particularly Laney and Simon, the ‘Taylor and Burton of the small screen’ who were huge fun to write. Hearing readers’ reactions kept me tremendously bucked up as I put in lots of late night writing shifts on the new book, and I hope The Summer Wedding continues to entertain throughout this summer and beyond.

As well as editing The Country Escape, I have a Christmas short story collection to put together which I started work on this week, although it’s hard to imagine reindeers pulling sleds full of gifts when the sun is blazing outside and the dog’s panting beside me. I might test the family’s powers of observation by getting out a few tinsel garlands to drape around my office before revving up the Carols from Kings CD to get in the mood. For those of you enjoying the heat without the need for novelty light up Christmas tree earrings, I wish you all a very merry summer indeed.

November 2013

Posted on 27/11/2013

‘I must write shorter books!’

It’s a wail that could be heard coming from my study in the early hours more than once when I was editing The Country Escape, due out next summer and consequently due in to the publisher earlier this month, a task that involved lots of all-night marathons. I’m now very familiar with the local fox population’s barks, the badgers crunching the fallen walnuts outside my window, and the owls’ cries that seem to echo my own: ‘Write shorter books!’

As family and friends point out, I’m not paid by the page and writing shorter books might mean they get to see me occasionally. Having now written fourteen big romps you’d think I’d have learned to listen to advice, but I’m terribly addicted to chunky, all-encompassing reads and so changing my ways is taking a lot of self-discipline. I’m happy to report that I am gradually getting there. When I cut the the first fifty pages of The Country Escape manuscript, it quickly became scrap paper for my daughters to draw on.

‘Why are you looking at the back of my dinosaur angel picture, Mummy?’

‘This comedy Wassail ceremony is really rather good – perhaps I’ll put it back in.’

‘No! I want to add glitter glue and butterfly stickers and give it to Grandpa.’

Bowing to family pressure, I’ve left the morris men and mulled cider in the drawer with the Crayolla pens, and I’m sure The Country Escape is a much better book for that. Grandpa certainly seemed to think so judging from his shocked expression when he read the Herefordshire orchard orgy extract on the back of his handmade birthday card.

My addiction to huge bricks of total escapism is deeply entrenched, alas, and it’s what I love to read as well as write, relishing the weight of pages gradually moving from right to left hand as I stay suspended in the world of disbelief for as long as possible. I’m just the same when I watch films and television – an hour’s drama is never enough. Give me a box set of Downton Abbey and I’ll want to binge-watch the lot in one sitting, no matter how early I have to get up the next day. In the interests of research, however, I have started to read shorter books, although admittedly most of these are read out loud a chapter at a time at 7pm to two sleepy children, and I find myself muttering under my breath about the lack of an emotional narrative arc in Pixie Hollow. But others have been a revelation, and I’m increasingly excited by the brevity challenge.

My agent and editor have both been gently steering me to write shorter books for some time, and not only because I’m becoming an ever-more workaholic recluse in order to keep up the output. As they wisely point out, fiction trends have changed a lot since I first clicked my knuckles over a keyboard and eagerly introduced ten characters in the opening chapter of French Relations.  In those days, the bonk-buster ruled women’s fiction – minimum 600 pages, lots of characters leaping in and out of bed, rearing manhoods compulsory, goldfish optional. I absolutely loved reading them, but longed for them to be funnier and more down-to-earth, hence I wrote my own. In the two decades that have followed, however, the glow of television, computer and mobile phone screens has started to out-shine the humble page in many households, and long books have fallen increasingly out of fashion. Readers no longer have the page-turning time or concentration we once did. There’s a legion of other demands on our downtime, hundreds more television channels and instant playback, the Internet on virtually every screen in the house, social networking transforming solitary time. On top of this, there are a lot more books being published.  With BOGOFs in bookshops and 99p e-book deals online, the 700 page single read is no longer the bargain it once was, and reading it on a smartphone can give even the most compulsive texter RSI of the thumb. Retailers understandably express concern that thick books take up valuable shelf space and require continual restocking : ‘Your novels are three units wide, Fiona,’ I was told by one bookseller friend who went on to suggest, ‘if I published you I’d divide them up into trilogies and triple the turnover.’ Much as I admire his tenacity – had Fifty Shades of Grey been published a decade ago, it would almost certainly have been one huge bonk-buster, not three – I have an old-fashioned compulsion to give my books a beginning, middle and end rather than Part One, Two and Three. My task is simply to put the three much closer together. Now I’ve started to plot out my fifteenth novel, I’ve changed my screensaver to Less Is More.

‘Is that your new title, Mummy?’ asked my oldest last week.

‘No, darling. It’s Mummy’s new mantra.’

Apparently speculation is now rife at the school as to which of the Year Two mums will feature in ‘Mummy’s New Mantra’ and just how steamy it will be. I can’t reveal anything about that book just yet, except to guarantee that it will be shorter than my previous ones.

Meanwhile, The Country Escape is being professionally pruned and tweaked as I type, and it will be published in June 2014. I’ll write more about it in my next blog, and a gorgeous new cover look will be revealed on this site soon too. Also available from December 6th is an e-book collection of short stories, Season’s Greetings and Other Stories. Another collection will be coming out next March.

I wish you a wonderful build up to Christmas, and a big thank you to everybody who sends messages via this site and via Facebook and Twitter. It’s always a terrific shot in the arm and I’m enormously grateful.

January 2014

Posted on 15/01/2014

I’m not a very accomplished Facebook user – in fact I’ve not dared go back there since five-year-old Winnie decided to ‘share’ multiple snapshots of her Christmas Pet Spa app on my wall when she was playing it on the family tablet a couple of weeks ago. The sight of a fluffy white seal pup in a sparkly pink Alice band captioned ‘My Sweet Cutie Pie’ came as a shock to old friends who clearly thought my new year’s resolution was to take up laudanum, although it nevertheless received more ‘likes’ in the few hours it was up there than most links I share.

It’s therefore with some trepidation that I prepare for my first Facebook ‘chat’ tomorrow, and this is a rather last minute call to anybody interested in taking part to join me there…. So for anyone who has always wanted to write a book – especially if you’re trying to do it whilst caring for small children – I’ll be taking part in an hour’s live Facebook Q&As as a part of Mother & Baby Magazine’s Working Mum’s Club on Thursday 16th January at 1pm.  Simply follow the link to https://www.facebook.com/motherandbaby and I’ll answer any questions on the subject you’d like to put to me. If you’ve missed it by the time you read this then it should remain online for you to check out later, no doubt containing embarrassing spelling errors and typos on my part.

On which subject, I have just spent the past week working through the line-edited manuscript of next summer’s novel The Country Escape and dived beneath the desk more than once to see a goofy bit of Walker phonetic spelling corrected in the margin (‘Yo Sammity Sam’ had a polite note ‘did you mean Yosemite Sam?’….ditto ‘Kahoonas’….and my failed attempt at a sausage dog pun doesn’t bear repetition). Despite that, I’m really proud of this one, which I think is incredibly good fun with characters that I hope readers will fall in love with as much as I have. Set in and around a Herefordshire estate, it features an animal sanctuary which comes under threat when the neighbouring stately pile is sold to a hunting-mad billionaire, and having re-read it, I’m rather embarrassed to admit that I found myself giggling quite a lot at my own jokes (when I wasn’t hiding under the desk at the sight of my typos). I can also happily report that my mantra to write shorter books has yet to be chanted because The Country Escape remains a big, action-packed romp through one of the loveliest corners of Britain, and I’m thrilled that the editor agreed that it’s fast and furious fun as it is without needing to be cut back. It will be published on 5th June. The cover is still being finalised – more news as soon as it’s done; we have a wonderful illustrator on board who has created some of my favourite jackets, so I can’t wait to share the end result.

Whether you find me on here, typing badly on Facebook chats, tweeting as rarely as a Golden Oriole or hanging furtively around the end of the fiction author alphabet in Waterstones, I’m always grateful for your enthusiasm and interest in my books and look forward to adding more news to this page soon.

August 2014

Posted on 11/08/2014

Life has recently imitated art in the Walker household. Normally, you can find me spouting happily away on here every couple of months, especially when I’ve just delivered a manuscript or I have a new book out, so I must apologise for being usually quiet this summer.  My latest novel The Country Escape is now out, and I’ve been dying to share the news, but just as it hit the shops, the plot came back to haunt me…

The heroine of The Country Escape, Kat Mason, is an intrepid soul who lives in a remote farmhouse on an old country estate, where she has no internet or mobile signal, and the phone line is pretty unreliable too.

This summer, we moved to the Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire which we’re renting while we take on a project to do up as our forever home. The SFW has no near neighbours, and – despite promises from well-known phone providers both mobile and landline that we would be connected upon arrival – we’ve spent our first month here totally incommunicado.  Until this week, the only way for me to send a text or check email on my clever bat-phone has been to wade through the nettles and thistles to the furthest corner of the orchard. Actually making a phone call involved climbing a tree there, where I was cut off on average once every two minutes (such fun whilst on hold to a call centre for the twentieth time that day). Surfing the internet was a non-starter, although I did manage to DM a Facebook friend by clambering perilously high up a knobbly cider apple tree when the wind was blowing in the right direction. The children – who have kept an eye on my antics from the trampoline which enabled them to bounce high enough to see me over the SFIW’s overgrown garden – thought mummy’s wobbly attempts at scaling branches in order to shout and weep at polite foreign customer services personnel hilarious compared to their deft leaps from bough to bough. I’m only grateful the sun shone most of the time. The day a huge thunderstorm suddenly broke while I was stuck on hold up my usual tree was not one I care to repeat.

In many ways it’s been utter bliss to be cut off from the world. The Country Escape is the first book release in years that I couldn’t obsessively check on Amazon for reader reviews as soon as it came out, nor suffer the self-conscious agony of spreading the word in a  painfully embarrassed British way on Twitter and Facebook. For a writer, such peace of mind is sheer inspiration. In between bouts of irritable tree-climbing, I’ve loved the lack of interruption, dreaming up new plots while unpacking endless boxes, wondering what possessed me to put my printer and reference books in storage whilst the laminator and industrial shredder made it into my tiny writing corner. Like Kat Mason in her quiet Herefordshire retreat far from constantly streamed newsfeeds, I’ve valued the simplicity of our first weeks here, although they day we finally got a phone line, I greeted the Ocado homepage with tears of joy.

Now, a month after our arrival, the SFW is finally connected to outside world (in one room at least, the walls being too thick for Wifi to travel to the smart phones or tablets beyond that). The first thing I received when I logged online was the copy-edited manuscript of my next book, followed by over seven hundred emails and – by far the most welcome sight – some really generous messages from readers who have taken the time to make contact to say how much they loved The Country Escape.  A huge thank you to all who contact me here; I’ll climb trees the world over to reply and let you know what a difference you make. In a year of non-stop curve balls – many the sort which would attract a margin note from my editor of ‘this wouldn’t happen in reality’ – knowing that my work gives so much pleasure has lifted my spirits no end. The Country Escape is a very joyful book filled with characters I’m immensely fond of, from daredevil Kat and the eccentric locals she befriends to one of my favourite ever bad-boy heroes, not to mention the legion of animals that were such fun to write. I hope you really enjoy it.

As soon as I post this, I’m going to sit down to look at that newly edited manuscript. The novel in question, entitled The Woman Who Fell In Love For a Week, will come out next year. Speaking as a woman who has almost fallen out of a tree every day for a month, I can’t wait to escape back into it. If life is going to imitate art again, this plot is definitely where I now want to be. I’ll explain why in my next blog. For now, thank you for visiting this page and all my very best wishes from the Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire, now firmly back on the superhighway.

 

November 2014

Posted on 01/12/2014

The Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire has incredibly steamy windows. Whilst I’d love to claim this as a side effect of all my passionate romp-writing, I think it has more to do with cranking up the central heating in an old, damp house. Dora and Winnie are the ones doing most of the steamy writing as they pull on school coats and hats in the unheated glass porch each morning and leave loving messages and smiley faces behind. Meanwhile, I’m largely ‘plotting’. Having now edited, cross-checked and signed off the final page proofs of next year’s book, I’m hard on the case of the one that follows, with the working title Make or Break. I’ve got the central characters, a gorgeous setting and a story outline; my editor and agent both love it; I’ve filled one huge notepad with ideas and research, and I’m dying to just sit down and crack on, but plotting is an addictive displacement.  I remember hearing an author once describe a book idea as a cathedral that immediately becomes a garden shed once you start to write it. I’m currently on the steps of the cathedral, looking up, trying to memorise every intricate detail before I step into the shed and start hammering.

There’s going to be an awful lot of hammering in store in coming weeks, both at the keyboard and at our Forever House which lies a few fields away from the SFW and is awaiting its renovation work. The previous owners – who infused the house with so much cheer and had such legendary parties that they must feature in a book – have given me a terrific excuse to pay a daily visit in the form of Ted, a talkative hand-reared guinea fowl, who roosts in a tree by the stream that runs around the garden. With his comedy walk and insatiable appetite, Ted is an unlikely muse, but he’s become something of an inspiration as I wander around the empty house and its overgrown boundaries every day, plotting non-stop. Animals have always been central to my books, and one of the things that’s made me hesitate at the start of this new one has been the lack of fur and feather in my carefully crafted outline. Now I’m excitedly plotting a few in, and the cathedral is resounding with the squawks, barks and gobbles of an open audition. I can only take one or two into the shed with me, so I have to choose carefully. When I wrote Snap Happy many years ago, I challenged myself to depart from my usual dogs and horses and the book featured a pet turtle and a parrot. Fiction’s first romantic guinea fowl could be another benchmark.

There was no such dilemma with The Woman Who Falls in Love for a Week, which comes out next year. One of the central characters, a German pointer named Gunter, was my constant fictional companion from the very start, an inadvertent Cupid and incredibly disobedient best friend who is left in the care of house-sitter Jenny while his owners are away on holiday. The novel takes Jenny out of her everyday world as a hard-working single mother to the sumptuously cluttered village home of the Lewis family, hers to look after during a summer heat-wave, along with the skeletons in its bespoke cupboards, neighbours skinny-dipping in its turquoise pool, and a gardener intent on pulling more than just weeds. As the title suggests, it’s a week that changes Jenny’s attitude to life completely. Writing it was extraordinary; it was one of those rare books that just flew along and made total sense from the start.

Now, as I settle down to do it all again and move from cathedral to shed, I’m determined to keep the windows of the SWF steamed up for the foreseeable future. To cheer me on, I just have to look across at them and see ‘Good luk riting yor buk Mummy!’ disappearing into mist.

 

Archive Blogs Sept 2011 – Oct 2013

I never know what to do with old blogs, but as an inveterately nosy flipper of vintage web-pages and lover of ageing diaries, I’ll pop them up here in three chunks to act as a reminder to me to keep my blog updated. These old ones are really only for devotees of my shamelessly sporadic waffling – which means close family, spambots and Colin from Milton Keynes who thinks I’m the Fiona Walker who once played Dr Who’s assistant in the 70s. They start from 2011 (the last time my website was overhauled):

September 2011

Posted on 01/09/2011

Welcome to my brand new website! It’s like walking back into a shop that’s been made over by Mary Portas; I don’t know where to find anything anymore, it’s so glossy and slick. Being me, I want to scuff it up a bit and create a comforting mess, but that’s what this Blog is for. I hope to keep this page updated regularly, which my clever web-master assures me that even a Luddite like me can do.

While my site has been offline for its reinvention, I’ve been busy editing. My next novel is now almost ready to go into proofreading stage. It has a new title, The Love Letter, which I think is gorgeous and sums up so many themes in a book about reading between the lines in life and romance. It also reminds me of all the times I’ve poured my heart out on paper at moments of high romance and drama in my life, yet never posted the results (probably because it would have to be sent freight due to the fact I write so much, along with illustrations and even chocolates Sellotaped to the page as I recall). How differently might life have worked out had my loving outpourings actually been delivered to the object of my affection after all? And in the case of my heroine, Allegra, some things are definitely best not taken as read.

The Love Letter is also going to get a new jacket look, which I’m eagerly waiting to see. I always find it a very strange process as a writer, taking so long to create a fictional world that comes to life in one’s imagination, and then handing over the responsibility for naming and illustrating it. The jacket has such influence over whether people buy the book. I was immensely lucky with my first few novels that I had a ‘look’ which was very unique. More recent jackets have toyed with new images, from the cartoony to the glitzy, and I hope the publishers will be able to find a look that stands out for me again. As a wise agent once told me, ‘you are responsible for what’s on the inside, not the outside – the jacket is just one page of five hundred’. I am consequently running backwards and forwards through the plot making sure everything’s as tight as can be, all loose threads tucked in, the characters fully formed, the jokes punchy and the twists fast and furious.

A big thank you to all visitors to my website who take the time to write to me and let me know what you think of my books. Apologies if I’m slow replying; I have no email program on my ‘writing’ computer (one if many cunning tactics I have had to employ to try to stop myself seeking distractions), so I have to set time aside for replying to lots of emails at once, and that time often gets used up by a crisis, although I always get there eventually. Kiss and Tell has received some fabulous feedback on here and via Amazon and other sites, which is immensely cheering in such a difficult market. It’s also absolutely romped along as an eBook, which is great to know. Please do post something up about it if you can, especially in the equestrian world where I long spread the word that ‘grown up pony books’ do exist!

Life is Worcestershire remains lovely, with the children growing apace – Dora starts school next week, Winnie’s following fast behind and both are bursting through shoe and clothes sizes faster than the Incredible Hulk in a grump. Sam is teaching dressage morning noon and night in the ‘back garden’. The horses are a great joy to us all, and I’m plotting how to get lots into my next book, which I’ll start next month. I particularly long to write in some Spanish horses inspired by our Iberians here; they have such fabulous characters – all that Mediterranean heat and passion, and so much heart. As for heroes, I have an idea for an adventurer this time, all dusty walking boots, backpack and leather bushman’s hat with testosterone and charm in abundance. In fact, dreaming of him is keeping me going as I finish crossing ts and dotting is with the final The Love Letter edit, so whilst it will be hard to let go of the two gorgeous men inside those written pages, I know there’s compensation waiting. I’ll miss my heroine, Allegra, most of all. She’s such fun and she feels like a firm friend now, but of course I’m really looking forward to readers getting to know her.

October 2011

Posted on 07/10/2011

There’s great excitement in the Walker household because we’ve been invited to the Horse of the Year Show VIP gala evening on Sunday 9th Oct, before which I’ll be signing copies of Kiss and Tell in the retail village at the Equestrian Bookfair stand (010A) at 5pm. If you’re going to be at the show that day, please stop by and say hello. I’ll be dressed up to the nines, although I should hastily point out that’s far from normal. The evening is black tie which threw us into a panic because, whilst I’ll can sport the one party frock that still fits me, Sam doesn’t possess a dinner suit and we’ve left it too late to hire one. Several begging phone calls later and my old local amateur theatre group have kindly opened their costume store to dig out a range of suitable satin-piped finery. These won’t be with us until just before we set off, so Sam’s now convinced that he’ll be striding into the NEC with massive flares flapping six inches above his socks and a jacket with collars wider than a Boeing’s wingspan.

My writing wardrobe is a far cry from the marabou-trimmed sequin glamour I once imagined lady novelists selected as day wear. Most often, I’m found in riding gear, particularly when I’m in the early stages of a book and still imagine I can get away with a pastime outside marathon writing sessions. This is alternated with school-run casuals in a vague attempt to look less like a horsy bag lady and more like a Boden-tastic yummy mummy at pick up time. As the book I’m working on progresses, all pretentions of elegance get jettisoned in favour of comfort and superstition, particularly in the end stages when writing all night is the norm. I used to have an ancient denim shirt that I always wore for the last few chapters of the book; I saw this threadbare coffee-stained rag as an artist’s smock meets magician’s cape, the fact that I actually looked like Bruce Springsteen’s butch drag-queen twin quite escaping my attention. When this finally fell apart, I adopted a lucky jumper which my family kindly tell me makes them think of a dead sheep. Matched with odd socks, uncombed hair and specs in place of contact lenses to enable my eyes to stay open for eighteen hour stretches at the computer, and the result is frightful. Typically, I reach this stage of the book just as another is published and needs promoting, so this swamp monster has to have an extreme make-over to go on show. In the days immediately leading up to shooting the promo video for Kiss and Tell (as seen this website), I was writing The Love Letter around the clock in the dead sheep jumper.

Thankfully that’s not yet the case as we head for HOYS, although I have been beavering away excitedly at the plot for the new book all week, and simply can wait until I really start to bring the characters to life, that magical moment in any writer’s working life when a group of imaginary friends suddenly feel real. I always know that’s happened when I can be reduced to tears of laughter talking about scenes that I would love to write them into, but in which they would be entirely out of context (my editor and I are both guilty of weeping with glee over something I threatened to do to Lough in Kiss and Tell). Once I know the characters inside-out, it’s deliciously uplifting to make fun of them; it makes them more real somehow, and stops me taking myself of the book to seriously. Right now, I’m at the shy stage where I’m still making introductions and trying to find out what they have in common, like an over-eager hostess at a party. Give me another month or two and I’ll be mentally putting them in mankinis and leotards and making them play pass-the-orange-between-your-knees.

Another focus this week has been book jackets. Sphere have now shown me the new visual approach for The Love Letter which has led to a few lively conversations as we seek the perfect ‘Fiona Walker’ look, summing up warmth, humour, romance and fast-galloping plots. Like most authors, I have a mental picture of the cover I would love, which undoubtedly goes against all the flow charts and market research demographics that the publishing industry has at its disposal of how popular women’s fiction should be packaged. One really has to take all those statistics on board, particularly in the current climate, so I’m well aware that I’m a small part of a large team who creates the finished ‘look’. However, it would be fascinating to know what readers who like my work would envisage on the book jackets if you had carte blanche? This could be something entirely original, or a look that another author already has. And which of my covers do you like/dislike most? Please do drop me a line or leave a comment if you have time. I promise to post our findings in a forthcoming blog, and to pass on any winning ideas to the dynamic Little Brown creative team.

January 2012

Posted on 18/01/2012

At last, an uninterrupted hour to update my website! Writing one book a year certainly isn’t for the idle, particularly if those books come in at two hundred thousand words of romping, big cast action. Add in running a second business from home and raising a young family, and it’s starting to occur to me why I don’t get out as often as I used to, or update my blog as much as I’d like. My To Do list is now almost as long as one of my first drafts, and when my agent enthusiastically encouraged me to ‘set time aside for Twitter and Facebook this year’, I laughed slightly maniacally and pencilled it in for the 5am diary slot. The poor dog, very low down the list, has taken to lying on top of my feet to remind me that she exists and would love a walk. Unfortunately this tends to mean that when I do stand up, my feet have gone to sleep and I’m incapable of crossing the carpet let alone several stubble fields. Perhaps she should try tweeting me instead?

At this time of year, I really miss the lengthy daylight hours of summer, but winter is traditionally my most productive writing season, and this is no exception. From November to the beginning of New Year has been a creative juggle, swapping between setting out my next book, going through the copy edit and later galley proofs of The Love Letter and writing a ten thousand word short story which will come out as an e-book exclusive in March, a month before The Love Letter publication. It’s entitled Sealed with a Kiss and is an exciting new development in marketing books, a ‘trailer’ to lead up to the main novel. I’ve written many short stories and it’s a format I love. This involves characters from the book itself, in a completely self-contained mini plot. It was great fun to tackle, and I’ll post a download link on here as soon as I have details.

From now on, it’s back to my latest novel with gusto as a part of the ten week siege my family have grown accustomed to, traditionally taking up most of January, February and March, when I spend almost every waking hour in my office living and breathing my imaginary world, only revisiting ‘real life’ in small, bad-tempered doses (after falling over the dog) and occasionally enjoying a cheery weekend off. I would love to be a bit more organised and balanced about it, but this is the only way I know how to do it, and I’m absolutely dying to get back to all my new characters and their plot twists. This will therefore have to be a very brief blog update before my self-imposed exile. I can however promise to be blogging away merrily from April when the Love Letter publication date approaches and I’ll get a short burst of liberation to promote that and research new ideas. Publication date is 26th April and a sneak preview should be appearing on this site very shortly along with a first glimpse of the all-new book jacket look. Watch this space.

Finally, I must again thank all of you who visit this site and send messages through the contact page, or leave comments here on the blog. It’s wonderful to get so much feedback and to know what readers think about my work. My replies to messages tend to be sent in lovingly-written if badly-spelled doses between writing marathons, so if you don’t hear back straight away, rest assured I’m on the case. I also really enjoy reading all the blog comments left here, although my technological prowess was until recently limited to working the kettle and I’ve yet to fathom how to reply and post your comments online for others to read, but bear with me and I will work it out eventually. When my wizard-like ‘moderator’ passed over mastery of this site to his confused apprentice (me), I knew I was wholly unqualified to take on that role. There’s never been anything moderate about me for a start, and by the time I learned to program the video recorder, VHS had become obsolete. Thank heaven for books and the total escapism they provide to both writers and readers. For now, I am switching off the phones, closing the door and hoping to write almost non-stop through coming weeks until my random 5am tweets are accompanied by a spring dawn chorus not frosty winter night fox barks. At least I know the dog will keep my feet warm…

February 2012

Posted on 25/02/2012

As if by magic, details of The Love Letter have appeared on the website along with its little sister, Sealed with a Kiss. Hooray! You can see a preview of the first chapter of The Love Letter here on the site, and read even more chapters exclusively when you download the prequel story.

Right now I’m writing for up to eighteen hours a day and totally immersed in the plot of my next book, so seeing the finished version of The Love Letter is a huge incentive as I’m reminded what will come at the end of this all-consuming process, a lovely chunk of entertainment bound between glossy covers that one can take to bed, on the train, on holiday or just hog on the sofa. Most writers are passionate readers and I’m no exception. We have books everywhere in this house – piles in colourful towers and spirals, climbing the stairs, three deep on shelves and toppling from windowsills. Lots are unashamedly broken-spined and bath-soaked with page corners turned at reluctant intervals indicating train stops or Sailing By. We keep meaning to organise them into some sort of system, but never find time, and I rather like the anarchy of horse manuals shouldering up to chick lit leaning against Booker nominees, with Carl Hester sandwiched between two Trollops. I’ve always been mildly irritated by people who only put their most worthy volumes on show and yet have many sets of shelves buckling under the weight of well-read paperbacks in the spare bedroom – unless, of course, I’m staying in that bedroom in which case I’ll probably be up all night reading.

Nowadays of course paper pages are rivalled by the data bytes that can fly invisibly into one’s electronic reader to be savoured at the stroke of a touch-screen. I’m embarrassed to admit that we’re still a household for which ‘kindle’ is something one does with screwed up Sunday supplements in the wood burning stove. It was on my Christmas list last year, but I got a slow cooker instead, which has enabled me to savour deeply infused flavours at the push of a button, if not carefully crafted prose. Thankfully, I also got a lot of fabulous door-step books which I’ve been happily lost in ever since. I know I’ll succumb to an e-Reader soon, particularly as author friends tell me they’re great for reading through drafts and making edit notes, which would save me acres of paper – and spare me the moment I realise my four-year-old has covered most of Chapter 4 with Crayola and pencil stab marks. Readers also tell me my novels work really well on Kindle because they’re very addictive and one can take them to places that a chunky book would be impractical, so the percentage bar clocks up like wildfire.  Whilst I will always love feeling the weight and beauty of a book in my hands, I’m all for the eBook and its potential. The short story prequel to The Love Letter, Sealed With A Kiss, is the first digital-only work I’ve written. At 40 pages, it’s ‘movie length’ – in that it takes about as long to read as takes to watch a film – and is a completely self-contained story in its own right. Available for download on the 30th March for just 99p, I hope those of you with the wizardry to do so agree that it’s well worth clicking on.

Full-length and full-bodied, The Love Letter is out on 26th April when readers can choose whether to have it spirited through the ether or land chunkily in hand. I hope the narrative will last considerably longer than a movie takes to watch, although I was amazed to receive several emails saying that Kiss and Tell had been consumed in two days flat – all 900 pages of it! That’s hugely flattering because those rare books I find myself hooked on reading day and night are memorable treats, so to have created that experience for others is wonderful…even if I find myself regularly apologising for lack of sleep, neglected children/animals and grumpy husbands/boyfriends. If it’s any consolation I get exactly the same grief…

Once these eighteen hour shifts are over, I will be out and about talking about my writing life and promoting The Love Letter throughout late April and May, including an appearance at Chipping Norton Literary Festival on Saturday 21stApril in a panel event with the amazing A-list authors Katie Fforde, Jill Mansell and Veronica Henry, chaired by the gloriously funny and knowledgeable Jane Wenham-Jones. Given that ‘Chippy’ was firmly in my old stomping ground during the ten years that I lived nearby, I can’t wait to go back there. I’m also in Fowey in May for the Du Maurier Festival, appearing alongside the deliciously funny Ruth Saberton, writer of three romantic comedies, which promises to be a hoot. As The Love Letter is largely set in the South West, it will be great to be a part of that area’s loveliest literary festival. I’ll make sure all dates and details of events I do are posted up on this website, also on my Twitter stream and Facebook page, so please do keep checking. I’m here every time I surface for air, I promise!

April 2012

Posted on 26/04/2012

Hooray! It’s finally time to lift the flap on The Love Letter. I was going to try to put together another video blog today, shot live from my launch pad – and may still squeeze it in if I manage to lay off the creme de menthe frappes and Mariella doesn’t make a mess of the cheese straws on the carpets as usual – but just in case time defeats me and I have to shelve my camera skills and Winnie’s latest cover designs until next week, I’m writing a quick and excitable standard issue blog to celebrate the new Walker book release.

Last time I updated my news page I was burning eccentrically bonkers writing hours, which remained the case until a few days ago when I delivered the latest manuscript – working title Hot Air to link in with its hot air balloons and steamy days – and finally got to sleep at night (although in truth I’ve been staying awake far too late playing with my new birthday treat Kindle because I’ve missed reading so much).

I’m tremendously pleased (and relieved) that I delivered the first draft in time to promote The Love Letter, although the wonder of going on ‘blog tour’ this time means that I can give interviews from the comfort of my own home, staying in my pre-deadline writer’s uniform of coffee-splodged lucky top and trews and barely moving from the computer. Watch out for the Walker Blog Tour Bus speeding through terrific book sites like http://www.onemorepage.co.uk/, http://dizzycslittlebookblog.blogspot..., www.novelicious.com, http://sbroadhurstreviews.blogspot.com/ and  http://shazsbookboudoir.blogspot.co.uk in the coming week or two with lots of writing advice and gossipy novelist lowdown.

I’ve been out and about in person as well as virtually this month; the glorious and shiny new Chipping Norton Literary Festival invited me to share a stage with Katie Fforde, Jill Mansell and Veronica Henry last weekend, talking about commercial women’s fiction under the chairmanship of Jane Wenham-Jones. It was huge fun to be a part of such a talented line-up and share so many tips and experiences with a lovely, giggly audience. The festival is destined to be an annual must-go, and its organisers got the Walker shimmy as I headed back to my car, something between The Vicar of Dibley after a snog and Shirley Bassey heading to the microphone. You can always tell a good festival from the bounce in the stride of its participants as they head away afterwards. As I positively calypsoed up a very steep Cotswold hill to the car park, I met the glorious Julie Cohen sailing the other way bearing bags of strawberries and chocolate (props for her talk on how to write sex scenes) and had to resist a great urge to do a few high kicks. I would have loved to stay for the workshop (particularly as the newly delivered book has several margin notes to editor saying ‘shall I add a sex scene here?’) but I had an unmissable date with my former neighbour – immortalised as Pixie in the Lodes series – which I would miss for nothing. The gossip we shared could now fuel at least two more Lodes sequels, but they will have to be shelved under ‘to write’ as I focus on pastures new, especially the spectacular North Devon coast which is the setting for The Love Letter.

And I am heading even further along the South West peninsular next month to appear alongside the lovely Ruth Saberton at the Du Maurier Festival in Fowey. Here’s the link to the event which will take place at 2pm on Thurs May 10th, when Ruth and I will talk rural romps, bonk-busting comedies, horses, heroes, impossible deadlines and anything else you wish to ask of us. We are a scurrilous and friendly pair, so it promises to be a very fun day.

As soon as the blog tour bus slows down, I’ll start editing Hot Air into shape for publication next spring and begin plotting out a new book to follow, so I will keep the website updates coming, and really hope that The Love Letter cheers and entertains everyone who reads it in the meantime.

 

February 2013

Posted on 04/02/2013

Writing can be a selfishly all-consuming profession, and living with a writer takes great resilience; I’ve lost count of the times I’ve promised ‘I’ll be up in half an hour’ as Sam goes to bed, only to find I’m still writing at two in the morning, swept up in my imaginary world. Similarly, I’m continually saying ‘I’ll write another website blog this week’, but then the novel I’m working on sucks me back in. Having always maintained that I’m easily distracted, I’ve recently realised that I’m quite the reverse. I’m obsessively driven and perfectionist. When I’m immersed in writing a novel, I’m thinking about it all the time. And on the rare occasions I can let it go, I’m mentally plotting the next one…

If this sounds nobly workaholic, it’s also a rather cowardly defence mechanism. Real life may be hammering down tough blows, but make-believe is my force shield as I bury my head in the joy of words, armed with a thesaurus and a witty epigram. Why waste sleepless tears on fate’s unfair twists when one can invent a big, raucous party with characters falling in and out of love, beds and ornamental ponds?

In the past nine months, I’ve been totally absorbed in writing and editing. This morning, I posted off the typeset proof pages of my latest novel with the final corrections marked up. It’s truly finished, hooray! The Summer Wedding, as it’s now entitled, is published in the UK on the 6th June. I believe it is amongst the most joyful novels I’ve written, and the characters have been great fun to develop, so much so that they now feel like terrific friends. Set between the Chilterns, LA, Andalucia and Kenya, it’s an unashamed romantic romp, featuring steamy summer days, gorgeous Spanish horses, bed-hopping and hot air balloons. The plot focuses on a group of four friends who studied drama together at university twenty years ago and share secrets that start to unravel when a daughter decides to get married. By the time it’s on sale this summer, I’ll have completed another novel’s first draft, for which I’ve also spent recent weeks researching and plotting, but I’ll post more about that anon.

Whilst I’ve been so busy working – and woefully neglecting this website – I’ve been enormously grateful to everyone who has so kindly contacted me via email, and on Twitter or Facebook, to write to me about The Love Letter and my other books. Receiving messages is such a lovely form of encouragement which really makes my typing fingers fly, and I hope I’ve replied to everybody personally, although I worry that I’m not very organised, especially when I’m writing feverishly. I once sent a long, enthusiastic thank you to a man who had emailed to say how much he enjoyed French Relations, not noticing that he’d added a PS saying that everything I’d written since then was total codswallop.

When I wrote French Relations twenty years ago, my life had taken a few wrong turns and I’d no idea how to make it better apart from seeking that high of total absorption in a book, and when I ran out of novels to read, I wrote one instead. To my delight, writing went on to become both the perfect distraction from my worries and the solution to them, leading on to a career that I’ve considered a tremendous privilege. So much has changed in publishing in the two decades since then that it’s hard to believe French Relations came out before Amazon existed, when mobile phones were the size of books rather than displaying them, bookselling chains lined the high streets without a Costa concession in sight, and the only e-book in circulation was by Irvine Welsh. It’s been a thrilling journey, yet the art of story-telling remains timeless. Blogging is a modern twist I’m still mastering. A wise friend tells me the secret is little and often. I’m going to try to heed her words, but if there’s nothing new on here in a few weeks time, please forgive me. It means I’m totally wrapped up in writing the next book.

 

May 2017

Please forgive my long absence; I’ve been writing fiction at such a fast and furious pace all year that I’m amazed my fingers aren’t an inch shorter. I’ll wave them in the air between typing this now to excitedly announce that my latest book, The Country Set, is finally done if not yet quite dusted. It’s currently away being polished by my clever editorial team and will be published by Head of Zeus in hardback and ebook later this year. The novel is the first in a new series revolving around the residents of the Compton villages, the best kept secret idyll north of Oxford. I can’t wait to share an early glimpse of its characters and setting on here in coming weeks when I also look forward to revealing a new-look website to coincide with the series. The redesign will mark the return of a regular blog about my writing life, as well as lots of information about all eighteen of my books from French Relations to The Country Set. If there’s anything you’d like to see featured, or if you just want to say hello, I’d be delighted to hear from you. You can find me on Twitter @fionawalkeruk and Facebook, or simplest of all send me a message via the contact form here.

New website and series…

This is going to be my shiny new website. It’s still a work in progress, so please bear with me while I don my hipster geek specs and learn the ropes. Soon, all the information about my writing life, published novels, chaotic social media and occasional public events will be here. In the meantime,  www.fionawalker.com will remain up and running in its old guise, and that is still the best place to go for information all about all of my previous books from French Relations to The Weekends of You and Me. To read about my forthcoming novel, The Country Set – the first in a series featuring the Compton villages – watch this space…

March 2016

A Blog in which pictures tell a thousand words.

It’s publication day, which means I did a lot of anxious fretting this morning about what I should say on social media to share the news without coming across as too much of a bare-faced self-promoter. I love scrolling through timelines, but I don’t do it often – certainly not when I’m flat out writing as I am now – which means it’s always very obvious when I’ve been asked by my publisher to plug a book using my ‘social feeds’ (a term that always makes me think of trays of canapés). I usually sidle onto Twitter and Facebook a few days before the novel comes out to see how the land lies, favourite lots of things (that’s the easy part – I end up scrolling around for hours wondering why I don’t do this more often), make a few excited comments about neglected friends’ posts and then maybe post a photo of the dog to make up for the brazen launch day ‘tra-la!’ that’s coming. If you are a Fiona Walker friend or follower and you see a photograph of an elderly Weimaraner on my timeline, you’ll know that publication day is nigh. Here’s this year’s (eagle eyed blog readers will spot that I’ve added a cat for variety):

The thing that hampers my social media skills even more than my self-effacing Britishness is our terminally slow rural broadband speed. The only streaming that goes on around here involves the girls pulling on wellies to splash in the brook at the end of the garden. I used to love the idea of posting a regular vblog to share writing tips and news, but I was put off when my first video took about three days to upload onto YouTube and crashed every time the neighbour tried to watch Netflix – and that was when we lived in Worcestershire, with four times the speed we have here at the Forever House.

And yet social media is ever-more about being visual and writers are increasingly told: ‘Don’t tell people what the book is about – show them!’ The written word is now squeezed down to a strap-line beneath a constant feed of images, far too many of them taken in mirrors whilst standing in the bathroom in pants. I’m always fascinated by the loos in the background; the Margot Ledbetter in me wants to tweet back asking them to close the lid and fold a point on the end of the loo roll next time. But there’s no getting away from the modern maxim that a picture not only tells a thousand words, it’s quicker to share. Unless, of course, you live six miles from the nearest telephone exchange.

This may take me a while, but in the spirit of publication day ‘tra-la!’ing, I’ve got a few pics to share with you which I hope help to illustrate what The Weekends of You and Me is all about. It would actually take a hundred and twenty images to sum up the story on the thousand-word-to-a-jpeg ratio, but I have to leave something in the pot for the return of the pet photo countdown in August when the paperback comes out.

The Weekends of You and Me is an unashamed love story:

I hope it’s a classic one.

For women of all ages.

Who like a good laugh.

And who like a sexy hero…

…a really sexy hero…

…that loves dogs.

You can buy The Weekends of You and Me now by following this link to ebook and this one to hardback. Please, if you feel able to,  review it, share it, retweet it and post about it. I’d love my words to have a chance amid so many pictures. Those of you who are brilliant at such things have my eternal gratitude. But I hope it’s not too old-fashioned to wish more than anything that this big love story is simply read and enjoyed.

 

February 2016

A blog about weekends away, lucky omens and pastures new:

I’ve just swept three months’ worth of old receipts, pen lids, rosettes and dog treats off the dresser so that I can share a snapshot of the advance copy of The Weekends of You and Me which arrived this week. Isn’t the jacket lovely? It’s published in hardback and e-book in the UK on the 10th March.

When I was writing The Weekends of You and Me, my computer’s wallpaper was a photograph of a track leading up through rolling fields to woodland. Hidden out of sight on the hilltop amid the sweet chestnuts and Scots pine, I imagined an old stone cottage. It’s here Harry and Jo first get together for a wild weekend of second-chance love and make a vow to come back the following year. The novel picks up their story each year for a decade as they escape to the cottage for a few days, determined to put the outside world on hold and recapture the spark, no matter how complicated family life gets.

I really hope you come to love Jo and Harry as much as I do, especially those of you only too familiar with that life stage in which children, careers, ageing parents and cheek-by-jowl domesticity makes it all too easy to forget the heart-lift of loving someone for who they are.

By coincidence, the hardback was waiting here when we returned from a weekend away, and the girls are hugely excited by the illustration because we’ve been staying in a little stone drover’s cottage up a track by a brow of woodland: ‘That’s our half term cottage! You wrote a book about it!’ It was actually a last-minute booking somewhere we’ve never been before, but the fact it so closely resembled my fictional romantic bolt-hole –  it even snowed on Valentine’s Day just as it does in the book – did make it feel like a bit of much-needed kismet might just be at play, and it doesn’t stop there. I have to admit here that I’m so superstitious when a new novel is about to come out that I look out for lucky omens everywhere. When Well Groomed was published, I counted horseboxes like magpies on every trip; with The Summer Wedding, I spotted bridal cars and hot air balloons with similar zeal. This time, it’s starlings – you have to read the book to understand why – and I’ve been enormously cheered to find a small gang of them staging a regular and noisy fly-by over our garden. But that was nothing to the moment we drove to the Welsh Marches last Friday and Sam almost left the road, pointing to the horizon where starlings were swirling in their thousands like smoke. When you read The Weekends of You and Me, which I truly hope you will, you’ll appreciate why I still have a bruise from pinching myself. (In case you’re worried that it’s a Hitchcockian feather-fest or a steamy tale of amorous  twitchers in hides casting binoculars aside, I should point out that neither Jo or Harry are bird fanciers and starlings have a purely walk on/fly in part.)

When I last wrote this blog, we were about to move from the Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire to our forever home, a lovely if chaotic ongoing project which still has a resident builder, a skip outside and a half finished writing room full of timber. What I didn’t know then, as I packed fifteen different Fiona Walker novels in multiple formats and languages into cardboard boxes, was that I’d soon be moving publishing house too. The Weekends of You and Me marks the end of my tenure with Little, Brown. The team that has published Kiss and Tell, The Love Letter, The Summer Wedding, The Country Escape and The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week is a family that I will miss enormously, and I leave them with a love story that I hope is my best yet. You can buy The Weekends of You and Me here.

I can’t wait to share news about my brilliant new publisher and our future plans, which I promise I’ll do on here soon; all of you who so generously bear with my blog silences to check back regularly (thank you!) won’t have so long to wait this time. For now, I can joyfully share the fact that my foot is firmly in the stirrup on a creative venture that takes me galloping to the best home turf – to rolling acres, village scandal, horses, dogs and country life in all its lusty, divot-flinging glory. I’m already so busy writing, I must apologise as always for my somewhat anti-social media. When lost to a new book, I fall off the twitter perch and don’t show my Facebook in public much, but I promise that I do reply to anybody kind enough to send a message, tweet or email and I am always tremendously grateful when my books get a mention. My greatest passion in life is to tell good stories. I do hope the starlings are right about this one.

October 2015

A year ago, I excitedly blogged from the Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire to say that I was starting work on a new novel. At the same time, work began on renovating our Forever Home, a lovely but dilapidated cottage tucked high in the hills of what was once the Forest of Arden. I made a bet that I’d deliver my book by the time it was ready to move into in April. The race was on…

The Weekends of You and Me tells the story of Jo and Harry, who escape to a remote holiday hideaway, Morrow Cottage every year for a ‘just the two of us’ break from parenthood, work and family crises. It follows their weekends together through a decade that takes them from passionate fling in 2006 to make or break weekend in 2015. It was a technically difficult and rewardingly emotional book to write; Jo and Harry became my allies, and the intensity of having just two characters on the page for so much of the story meant I grew to care about them more than almost any couple I’ve written since Tash and Hugo (who some readers will know I’d bring back in every book if I could!). I also loved creating Morrow Cottage, the remote Shropshire bolthole that waits for them year after year, and in which they leave the outside world behind.

It’s probably no coincidence that Morrow Cottage has a roaring wood-burning stove which must be lit as soon as Jo and Harry arrive, because the old dairy in which I write at the SFW gets very cold indeed in winter. Despite a brace of electric heaters at my sides, I spent more than one late night through the early months of this year with my breath clouding in front of a monitor as I typed after hours. The imaginary Morrow wood burner kept me warm, along with the thought of having somewhere toasty to write at the Forever Home that I don’t share with quite so many spiders, or any rats, and that doesn’t have Hereford bullocks kicking the other side of the wall all night like neighbours demanding I turn the music down. The ‘Mummy shed’ – part of a new timber-framed garage – will be heated courtesy of the cottage’s eco-friendly new bio-mass boiler.

I delivered The Weekends of You and Me in May, but I still won my bet. At that point, the Forever Home had no kitchen, no working loo and a lunar landscape of dust and debris in every room – and my cosy writing space was nothing more than a sketch on a piece of paper. We hastily revised our moving date to the summer holidays.

Modernising a lopsided, half-timbered cottage that’s as damp as a riverbank and sits skewwhiff on its sixteenth century oak sole place is a mammoth undertaking, and none of us had appreciated the horrors hiding beneath the historic layers of paint and paper that covered every wall (and in some cases were the only things holding them up). It doesn’t stop us loving the place – it is so filled with character and kindness – but it meant our shoestring budget has had to stretch to lace up more and more holes, and our dreams of moving there before the roses blossomed around the door were always under threat. Getting in before the flower-heads turned into hips became our priority, and I clung onto my dreams of autumn plotting and proof-reading in a snug study.

The old dairy at the SFW was far from cold when I edited The Weekends of You and Me through June and July, and the pungent scent of cattle byre that floated through the windows provided authentic rural inspiration as I gratefully reshaped Jo and Harry’s decade of love and drama in the Shropshire Hills, happy to be lost in their world.

By the time I delivered it back to my publisher and the girls broke up from school for summer, the Forever House had gained one working loo and a succession of skips overflowing with builders’ teabags and fly-tipped white goods. Not one room in the cottage was habitable. My writing shed remained a distant dream, along with the garage that would house the eco-boiler. We pushed the move-in date back to September. I no longer felt quite so jubilant about winning my bet.

We all mucked in through the holidays, beadily observed by resident guinea fowl Ted and his hareem of lady pheasant friends. While Sam trundled around them in a mini digger moving mountains of soil, I designed a budget kitchen which almost fits, as long as we breathe in when we walk past the fridge and don’t mind loading the dishwasher with the door at a forty five degree angle. The girls and I then painted every wall in sight – and a lot of ourselves – in chalky emulsion, only to find the plaster all had to be cut back when big patches of damp showed through. Outside, a large concrete slab was finally laid where the garage, boiler room and Mummy’s Shed were going to be erected. We all jumped for joy on it until we discovered that it had been set out to the wrong dimensions and the timber-framers would now have to completely redesign it to fit there. We nudged our moving in date back to October.

As soon as the girls went back to school, I worked through the second edit of The Weekends of You and Me and found Jo and Harry’s story waiting to be shared, full of life and love and reasons to be cheerful. For readers who have been kind enough to spur me on by sending emails asking me to hurry up and write the next one, I promise there’s not long to wait now.  It’s currently with the proof reader – the final stage before typesetting – and it comes out early next year.

This is my last blog from the Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire, where the apples have dropped for the second time since we started living here, and the windows are once again steaming up. We move out in just over a fortnight. I can’t wait to get started on the first of many novels I plan to write in the Forever Home, although I think I’ll be working at the kitchen table for the time being…as long as nobody wants to open the dishwasher. The old cottage is far from ready, but it does now boast two working loos and there’s a shiny eco-boiler under a tarpaulin in the timber-framed outbuilding. Let’s gloss over the fact that building hasn’t yet got a roof, internal walls or power and the Mummy Shed still lacks finishing touches like doors and windows. They’re all on the Moving House To Do list, along with ‘Write Your Blog’ which I can now tick off.  I apologise that I do this so sporadically, but I hope today’s update makes up a little for its randomness. I’m incredibly grateful to everyone who visits my website, and I really hope The Weekends of You and Me brings lots of pleasure to readers when it’s published in 2016. It can be pre-ordered it in hardback here and ebook  here.

I wish you all a wonderful autumn!

 

June 2015

The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week has shrugged off her hardback dust-jacket and is beach ready – now out in gorgeous, holiday-friendly paperback, hooray! Along with the percussion of flip flops, the scent of suntan cream and the shimmer of a heat haze over a Saturday getaway traffic jam, the lure of the holiday read burning a hole in one’s bag is a heavenly sign of summer. And this one is bursting at the suitcase seams with love and laughter.

Whatever your plans this summer, I really hope you enjoy escaping with Jenny Rees in her sun-scorched week of high jinx, finding love the second time around. You can read an extract here – and the Amazon click is here. Or, if you’re anything like me, you’ll trolley distractedly past it in the supermarket, reverse thinking ‘that looks good for the holiday’, throw it in, and then find yourself reading it addictively whilst unpacking your shopping an hour later, then in bed, then during your lunch-break, then in the car waiting for school pick up, then in the bath. I’m crossing my own bath-wrinkled fingers that The Woman Who Falls in Love for a Week joins you on the beach, by the pool, on the train or in the garden. Wherever you find her, I hope Jenny becomes a friend and ally, and that her story moves you and makes you laugh.

Lots more news from me soon. For now, may the sun shine, the days be long and happy and the books you read take you to the best places imaginable. I hope The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week is amongst them.

Win a copy of The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week!

With just over a month to go until The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week is published we’d like to give you the chance to win one of ten gorgeous proof copies of Fiona’s fab new book!

‘A perfect summer read’ Jojo Moyes

Dive into a summer of surprises . . .

Jenny loves to house-sit: looking after a stranger’s perfect home and pretending to be someone else – just for a bit. Her latest booking is a beautiful rambling country house owned by the über-successful Lewis family. Freed of teaching duties for the summer, Jenny plans to do nothing more exhausting than walk the (very naughty) dog and laze by the glorious pool.

Then Jenny discovers skeletons in the Lewis closet that further threaten to disrupt her idyll. That is, until a seductive new friendship offers her a second chance: to open herself up to love again and to finally live life on her own terms.

All you need to do is enter your name and email address below to be in with a chance of winning. Don’t forget to read our T&Cs first, here.

Good luck!

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New book jacket!

I’m bouncing up and down on my diving board with excitement to be able to share the new cover for The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week; I think it’s stunning and I hope you agree. Hannah, the clever designer at Sphere, has worked her magic to create something that reflects the book perfectly – it’s bright, warm and sexy, beckoning readers to dive straight in.

I’m an absolute pain for a designer to work with because I have a rudimentary but dangerous understanding of Photoshop, a passion for amateur art (I’m addicted to The Big Painting Challenge right now) and I’m a terrible book jacket snob. When a new cover is sent through by Sphere with a proud ‘tra-la’ after many hours of in-house think-tanking, image research and hard work, I inevitably reach for my mouse with indecent haste to rearrange it, whirling the selection brush, eyedropper and rectangular marquees like a tabloid picture editor adding thigh gaps to fashion spreads. I can never stop myself doing this although I’ve long since realised that it’s just a part of the psychological process of letting go. It’s hard for published authors to accept that we’re only responsible for what is on the inside of books, not the outside, especially when market forces mean not all book covers can be beautiful, unique works of art, but must by necessity fall into derivative trends. Having seen so many wonderful female writers’ books drown in a sea of cartoon pink when Chick Lit was at its height, I’ve also developed an illogical twitch about covers that look alike, but right now I keep standing back from this one in awe. I truly love it. Looking at it feels like high summer has arrived early.

Not that I’d wish spring away, this magical, bud-bursting turnaround when we start accelerating towards longer days, painted toenails and balmy evenings. Last weekend my arms were finally liberated from long sleeves in the sunlit garden of the future forever home where we’re battling brash, woodworm, damp and an ever-dwindling renovation budget. On reflection, wrestling brambles in a polo shirt was probably a mistake given this season’s first freckles are now cross-hatched with red scars from wrist to elbow, but they’re happy reminders of the life waiting outside while I work in the dairy of the Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire on creative night shifts. My writing base at the forever home will be a small room behind the garage, and I wistfully stand in the spot where it will be every time I visit, much to the consternation of Ted the resident guinea fowl whose exotic bird brain can’t fathom why the woman who should be feeding him keeps roosting amid piles of hard-core and rubble close to the septic tank. It’s where my imagination will take off, I tell him. And in years to come, after many months of sitting in that spot day and night, alternating between despair and delight as a book takes shape, I hope the end result gets to wear a jacket as lovely as the one I’m revealing today.

I must quickly add a footnote about the quote from Jojo Moyes, who’s been so generous in her praise for The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week, which is a huge compliment. Her book blog recommending it amongst other fabulous reads is here . I’ve adored Jojo’s writing since I stayed up all night over a decade ago to finish a proof copy of Sheltering Rain (which later became the inspiration behind A Horse for Emma, an addictive read that every character in Tongue in Cheek drops in the bath and feels is their own private discovery).  To be bigged up by such a terrific writer is one of those ‘whoop’ moments that no guinea fowl will ever understand, but I know lots of readers – and authors – will appreciate is very special indeed.