Fiona Walker's Blog, page 7

March 2015

A blog about swimming pools, and why writing can feel like diving in at the deep end…

When my first book was published, I posed in Crouch End Lido for the Sunday Times Magazine. I had a lot of chutzpah and a waist in those days. Being a complete newcomer to the perfectionist whims of professional photographers, it amazed me how many hours it took. I was in the water so long that my skin went as wrinkly as a Shar Pei and my contact lenses felt fused to my eyeballs, but the excitement of having my own stylist on hand with waterproof mascara was thrilling, along with the rallying cries of my fellow swimmers who floated in and out of shot while we all broiled in refracted July sunshine. It was all a far cry from conjuring up metaphors at the dead of night.

Nowadays, in my less glamorous working motherhood era, any time spent in a swimming pool inevitably involves rescuing my Little Duckling Level 2 smalls who have bobbed off towards the deep end in inflatable rings with dragon heads, or swimming blind as I’m dive-bombed by the older ones, and then – very briefly, if I get a moment – doing a vigorous breast-stroke for a few lengths, chin high as a ship’s head (although if anyone gets a camera out, I sink below the surface faster than James Bond spotting a Russian periscope).

Yet I still plunge straight into the water with the same enthusiasm as I always have. I’ve never been a cautious swimmer. If I have to suffer the indignant sting of a belly flop, so be it. Being lifted up by that big blue expanse of deliciously cool water is far too tempting to resist. And now my family shares pool-time with me, I alternately dolphin my way alongside them and power off into a brief harbour of undisturbed water to float on my back and find peace.

I’ve always written in much the same way as I swim. I dive straight in and move as fast as I can until I adjust to the water temperature, then use that wonderful buoyancy in a more graceful way than I can ever hope to on dry land. Writing needs the weightlessness of total submersion. Having my children in the pool is a great privilege; I make no secret of the fact I write for them and for their future, but if I’m totally honest, I write best when I’ve struck out alone into quiet water for a while.

It’s perhaps no coincidence that my latest novel is a beautiful, shimmering blue rectangle of a book; I can’t wait to reveal its 2015 summer cover (with the next blog, I hope). While writing it last year, I was so totally immersed that I barely surfaced, my feet never touching the bottom.  It tells the story of Jenny, who has a week away from her day to day family life and the wreck of her marriage, and steps into somebody else’s world instead, looking after their home while they’re away on holiday.  She sets out to be the perfect custodian, but everything about the house she’s sitting, from its beautiful book-lined rooms and joyful family portrait to its luscious walled garden and turquoise pool, is not as first appears. The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week is a novel which finds the funny side in losing one’s inhibitions, and I hope it has great heart without taking itself too seriously. Admittedly it made me well up with hopeless regularity whilst writing it – as well as giggle in solitary, high-five delight in the early hours – but if I wrote a book that didn’t make me cry, laugh, whoop and stay up all night writing addictively, I’d never believe in it enough to let anyone else read it. The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week is one that I really believe in. I do hope you dive in and settle in a quiet spot for as long as it takes to fall in love. I’d suggest you set aside a week….

It’s out in paperback this coming summer, but if you want to read it right now, you can find it on e-book here and hardback here.

January 2015 (2)

I’ve retreated to the old milking parlour at the Smallest Farmhouse in Warwickshire in order to write without interruption. I know this sounds rather romantic – and there’s a certain Hardyesque appeal to throwing on a big scarf and chasing my muse across a windswept farmyard – but it’s not without its drawbacks, namely:

Cold: It’s sub-zero in here; my current displacement activities include watching my own breath condense, counting my goose bumps and timing how long it takes for my knuckles to turn blue. A small oil-filled heater nicknamed Wall-E is now my constant companion, and I tug him lovingly around my writing lair. He’s fast becoming a rival in my affection for my writers’ sidekick and beloved old dog, Pudding, who has sensibly deemed it too cold to stay out here with me after dark. If Wall-E were to wag his flex and rest his chin on my knee, he’d top of my Bonio list. Not that biscuits, canine or human, can be brought in here for fear of attracting even more…

Mice (okay rats): They’re discreet, but they’re here. They mostly party on down when I’ve cleared off, and as I write later into each night, I keep imagining them hanging about outside, glancing at their watches and grumbling like a pensioners’ supper club who find the WI talk has overrun at the village hall. Sam has laid all sorts of dastardly poison and traps and thinned the Glastonbury main stage crowd down to a small side-stage gathering, but those remaining are a hardened bunch that won’t give up. We’ve ignoring one another for now.

Unreliable electrics (possibly as a result of above): If I crank Wall-E up too high, the trip switch flips. I now keep a torch beside me at all times and save and back-up my work with OCD repetition. In its post-milking life, the parlour was converted into offices for a hot air ballooning company, and there are an amazing array of dusty switchboards on the wall labelled ’24 hour Weather’ and ‘SOA Flight Info Line’, along with row upon row of plug points, most of which sport ominous red tape marked ‘Do NOT use’. I do not use them. Wall-E, the PC and I glow gently in one corner listening out for crackling wires and ratty scratching, which isn’t easy because of the…

Noisy cattle: These aren’t actually here in the milking parlour with me – the farmer only raises beef cattle these days – but half a dozen chunky Charolais crosses are being fattened in byres just a thin brick wall away, and they crash about companionably night and day, scratching on everything in sight and mooing at one another (I think ‘lowing’ is the technical term, but from my close quarters, it’s definitely more of a ‘moo’). Having experimented with music to drown out the sound, I’ve discovered Tom McRae has a wonderfully soothing effect on them. Handily enough, he has the same effect on me, and the words are flowing…

I’m therefore delighted to report that despite its eccentricities, the milking parlour in the SFW is at maximum productivity while Tom McRae shuffles, cattle are lulled, rats lie low, electrics hold up and this author has a novel bursting to get out through her fingertips. Pudding and Wall-E are even starting to bond thanks to a dog bed pressed to his sturdy, warm side.

The book I’m working on now follows a couple through the first ten years of their relationship, and continues in the same writing direction as The Woman Who Fell in Love for a Week, which digs deeper emotionally than my previous books, but still has a furnace of warmth and humour at its heart. The Woman Who Falls in Love for a Week will be published in paperback in the UK and Ireland in early summer, but for anyone who would like to read it now then it’s already falling as softly as snow into laps and e-readers, and you can follow this link to find it. If you also find time to review it online, I’d be enormously grateful because it can make such a difference for other readers (and for one anxious writer in a chilly milking parlour in Warwickshire who will dance around her heater with glee if you enjoy it and are kind enough to pass the word on).

January 2015

Great excitement here. My latest novel, The Woman Who Falls in Love for a Week, has been soft launched today, a term which makes me imagine it floating gently towards readers on a lilo or hiding amongst the furls of a duck-down duvet, although it’s mostly winging its way through cyberspace, because it’s now available as an e-book as well as in hardback for anybody who wants to dive in without delay. The fabulous new cover which will star on the front of the paperback is still under wraps for now, so it’s currently dressed in its Antipodean dust jacket, which is a fitting touch given that there’s an Australian twist to the plot. The book nevertheless has a quintessentially English setting, a heavenly old rectory that my heroine Jenny is looking after while the owners are away on holiday. Action takes place during a heat-wave, and as I hug the dogs for warmth whilst typing this, I can think of nothing I’d rather escape to than a scorching summer day. I hope The Woman Who Falls in Love for a Week whizzes your way on its virtual lilo if you feel the same. The magic Amazon links are here and here. Dive in!

November 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.

August 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.

Now closed: WIN a copy of The Country Escape!

It’s not long now until The Country Escape is published, hurray! But if you can’t wait to get your hands on a copy you can enter our competition to win one of ten advance reading copies. All you need to do is fill in your name and email address below. Don’t forget to read our terms and conditions here first. Good luck!

Hidden amid lush parkland, Eardisford is the ultimate English country retreat and it’s just been sold for the first time in its history. Romantic daredevil Kat Mason has been bequeathed the estate’s lakeside sanctuary, Lake Farm, until she dies or marries. But the new owners want her out now . . . 

In rides charming playboy Dougie Everett, the man hired to sweep Kat off her feet and off the property. Dougie loves nothing more than the thrill of the chase, but does he risk losing his heart along the way?

Pre-order the book.

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WIN a copy of The Country Escape!

It’s not long now until The Country Escape is published, hurray! But if you can’t wait to get your hands on a copy you can enter our competition to win one of ten advance reading copies. All you need to do is fill in your name and email address below. Don’t forget to read our terms and conditions here first. Good luck!

Hidden amid lush parkland, Eardisford is the ultimate English country retreat and it’s just been sold for the first time in its history. Romantic daredevil Kat Mason has been bequeathed the estate’s lakeside sanctuary, Lake Farm, until she dies or marries. But the new owners want her out now . . . 

In rides charming playboy Dougie Everett, the man hired to sweep Kat off her feet and off the property. Dougie loves nothing more than the thrill of the chase, but does he risk losing his heart along the way?

Pre-order the book.

Name

Email

Enter

January 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.

November 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.

July 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.