C.L. Taylor's Blog, page 6
March 3, 2019
Signed books,events and an update on book seven…
It’s 3rd March and in one month and one day the hardback (and ebook and audio book) of Sleep will be published. My editor Helen recently asked me how I was feeling and I said, ‘surprisingly calm’. Surprisingly because I’m normally extremely nervy before a book comes out. I don’t know if it’s because a month is still a relatively long time, if I’m too busy with book seven to give it much thought, too tired from being ill and then my son being ill, or if I’ve managed to achieve some kind of elu...
January 2, 2019
New year, new book
It’s 3rd January today but I don’t feel as though the year has started yet as my partner and son are still on holiday. Correction, I don’t feel as though my WORKING year has started yet. I’m not great at working on an ad-hoc basis, grabbing a bit of time to write here and there. I need long stretches of time, ideally alone, when I know I won’t be interrupted. That’s not to say I’m NOT working. A huge part of writing is thinking and that’s something I’m doing a lot of while I walk the dog, fol...
October 17, 2018
Introducing…Sleep!
I’m so thrilled to be able to share the cover of my sixth psychological thriller with you. Isn’t it stunning?
All Anna wants is to be able to sleep. But crushing insomnia, terrifying night terrors and memories of that terrible night are making it impossible. If only she didn’t feel so guilty…
To escape her past, Anna takes a job at a hotel on the remote Scottish island of Rum, but when seven guests join her, what started as a retreat from the world turns into a deadly nightmare.
Each of the...
June 27, 2018
Writer, missing in action!
Huge apologies to anyone who follows this blog and has been wondering where I’ve got to – life has been hectic recently. My last post was on publication day for THE FEAR and, since then, I’ve either been out and about promoting it or bent over my laptop trying to finish my next book. Here’s a quick rundown of what’s happened and what I’ve been up to…
My fourth Sunday Times bestseller
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I used to raise my eyebrows when established writers would worry on social media about impending publication....
March 22, 2018
The one about the book tattoo…
It’s publication day for THE FEAR and I couldn’t be more proud of this book. I’ll freely admit that I struggle with endings – I find them the hardest part of a book to get right – but something almost miraculous happened as I was writing the first draft of THE FEAR and I suddenly realised how to tie all the threads of the story together as I hit 85,000 words. I’m also proud of this book because, as a Goodreads reader said, it isn’t just about a dark and disturbing crime it’s also about sister...
February 15, 2018
The one where I got glammed up
Earlier this year I was invited to the Specsavers Nielsen Bestseller Awards to receive two silver awards for The Acccident and The Lie (for sales of over 250,000 copies).
It was SUCH a glamorous affair. The wonderful Mariella Frostrop was the MC and so many amazing authors were honoured with awards including Paula Hawkins, Maggie O’Farrell (I had a bit of a fan girl moment when I realised I was standing behind her in the queue), Peter James, Phillipa Gregory, Dougie and Tom from McFly, Jill M...
January 6, 2018
What inspired your novel?
Plotting a novel: if all else fails – draw little stick men and women to try and make sense of your idea. It works for me (sometimes).
It’s a question that comes up in interviews a lot:
‘What inspired your novel?’
It’s always a difficult question to answer, not least because it’s normally at least 12 months since I wrote the book and 18 months since the first spark of an idea.
The more novels I write the more I realise how much an idea twists, squirms and transforms after the initial spark. T...
November 10, 2017
Introducing… The Fear.
Last week I shared the cover for my next psychological thriller on social media but, if you missed it, here it is!
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THE FEAR is a book I’ve wanted to write for a while. I had the first inkling of the idea after I finished THE LIE but it wasn’t fully formed so I tucked it away in my brain and wrote THE MISSING instead, then THE ESCAPE.
Earlier this year, after I finished writing my YA thriller THE TREATMENT, I had roughly six weeks before I had to start writing again. Normally I need about thr...
October 11, 2017
Why I decided to write a YA novel
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A week tomorrow my first young adult novel THE TREATMENT will be published. It’s a thriller, about sixteen year old Drew Finch who rescues her brother Mason from a residential reform academy after a stranger gives her a note saying that the students are being brainwashed.
The first inkling of the idea came to me in 2011, when I was pregnant with my son. I wrote 20,000 words of what I thought was a middle grade idea about a bunch of kids who develop super powers after a trip to the Hadron Co...
August 21, 2017
A ‘Dead Good’ summer
I can’t believe it’s been nearly two months since I last posted on here. In some ways time has flown but I seem to have fitted quite a lot into the last sixty-odd days so here’s a (probably not very quick) round up.
First off was the HarperCollins author party in the V&A. It’s always a treat and this year was no exception. Here’s me and CJ Daugherty in the garden.
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At the end of July I headed north to the Theakston’s Old Peculier Crime Festival in Harrogate. The weather wasn’t quite as glorio...
