Jessica Hart's Blog, page 4

Clan of the Cave Bear

Does anything beat that moment when you realise a favourite author has a new book out?  I was so excited when I saw that Jean M Auel's extraordinary Earth's Children™ series was at last coming to an end with The Land of Painted Caves, but I have to admit that the damning reviews on Amazon gave me pause.  I passed up on the hardback, which I would otherwise have bought, but picked up the paperback the other day and last night plodded to the end. 
Sadly, the reviews were justified.  This was such a disappointing end to a series that started so spectacularly.  The Clan of the Cave Bear is an amazing feat of imagination and I have bored friends for years about it. Auel takes the little evidence we have for the people who lived during the last Ice Age and creates an utterly convincing world so that by the time you get to the end, you feel that life then must have been exactly like that.  Isn't that what we want from a historical novel?  

I first read Clan of the Cave Bear in Jakarta in 1984.  All of us in the house read it and passed it on, and by the time it was my turn, I'd heard so much about it, I couldn't wait to get stuck in.  I read it on this verandah, with the rain hammering down on the roof, and I only have to look at the cover now to be transported back to that wicker chair and the stifling heat and the cries of the street sellers pushing their carts along the gang outside the gate.
Lots of my favourite books are associated with places. Georgette Heyer makes me think of the outback Queensland.  Bizarre, I know, but I used to have a couple of hours off after lunch when it was too hot to go outside, and there just happened to be a shelf of books including hers in my room.  
I read my first Mary Stewart – This Rough Magic – in an big attic room I shared with my cousins and brothers in Scotland one wet summer holiday.  The roof was unlined, so there were just splintery rafters over head, and the boys played James Taylor's Rockabye Sweet Baby James endlessly at the other end of the room.
The first Mills & Boon I really enjoyed was called Devil Within, by Catherine George, and I read that in Raffles Hotel in Singapore on my way back to Jakarta.  (That was a "light bulb moment" for me.  Until then, I'd only ever read them as a kind of joke, wrinkling my nose at those heroes who threw the heroine across the bed while she was shrieking 'Damn you!' but she ended up loving it really.  Devil Within made me realise that a romance didn't have to be tacky.)   I've still got that copy and I can't read it without thinking about that old fashioned room with the ceiling fan slapping overhead. 
Of course, I've got lots of favourite books that I've read at home, but they don't have the same associations.  There's something about being away, when you're already in a different world, and you get transported to yet another, that burns the whole experience of reading into your mind. 
Do you have any books that instantly remind you of where you first read them?

The terror of the blank screen

Dog walking, so much easier than startingMother's Day (36 hours in Scotland cooking and dog walking) – tick.  Desk tidied – tick.   Head on electric toothbrush changed – tick.  
Nothing, it seems, stands between me and starting time slip number 2.  Except the terror of the blank screen. I've even found myself hoping for revisions to drop into my inbox so that I can put off starting a little longer, which I may very well come to regret.  Be careful what you wish for!

I have an idea, and I even have a working title (The Memory of Midnight) and I know that all I have to do is to start a rough draft.  I need to rattle off scenes without worrying about how to link them together, without caring about punctuation or even making sense, without thinking much at all.  Because at the end of it, I'm just going to throw it away and start again.  I might retain a glimmer of an idea, or a snatch of conversation, but that will be about it. 
It's frustrating, as it feels like such a waste of time, but it appears to be a vital part of the process for me.  After 60 books, I know this.  So I should just get on with it, right?  Instead I'm thinking about doing a story board, as suggested by the wonderful Blake Snyder in Save the Cat! 
I'm thinking that rather than sit here and start typing, I'll pop along to Staples and buy some blank cards and carefully write out scene locations and character view points and what changes in the scene.  Then, the theory goes, I'll pin them to my board and plot out the story arc, making sure I can tick off (more ticking off, my favourite thing) set up, catalyst, debate, fun and games, 'all is lost' and all the other points my story needs to hit.  Then I will have a perfect plan that I just need to follow.  I'll give myself a timetable, and set off and in a month or two, the job will be done.  Easy.
I wish, wish, wish I could write like this.  I tried it with Time's Echo, and successfully wasted a lot of time setting out a board that I never looked at again.  I blame the fact that a time slip has two parallel stories and it got far too complicated making them both fit the arc, but the truth is, I suspect that I'm just not a plotter. 
So I should just flex my fingers and start writing something, anything.  And I will, just as soon as I've run through every other justification for not plunging right in.  I could do character descriptions, I could research.  I could brainstorm motivations and goals. 
Or - I know! - I could read books on how to write.  I've still got Robert McKee's Story and Christopher Vogler's The Writer's Journey to study.  Why didn't I think of that before? They've been sitting there on my shelf for months, but whenever I've picked them up before, I decide they look too hard to get to grips with, and I put them back.  Excellent. I'll get them down right now.  That's at least a day before I have to square up to the blank screen again.  Phew.    
How do you get going on a new story or project?  Do you faff around like me, or just plunge in?  All tips welcome!

Time sucks and photographs

One of the very many things they don't tell you when you get your first book deal is how much time you spend as a writer not writing at all. There are accounts to be totted up, contracts to puzzle over, proofs to check, dues to pay, research to be done, books to post out, emails to be answered, contests to enter and judge …
And then, of course, there is the dreaded promotion, the biggest time suck of all. Somebody recently described my generation as 'electronic immigrants': we're doing our best to fit in and be part of it, but it's just not our language.  There's always going to be something alien about social media for me, but I've got the message: it has to be done. 
Kippa Matthews, a patient manSo I am having two new websites designed at the moment, one for Jessica Hart and one for Pamela Hartshorne.  I spent most of today having a new author photo done for both, and my jaw is now set in a frozen smile.  There's something very unnatural about smiling at a camera rather than a person.  I don't know how models do it.
I suspect I'm too vain to photograph well.  I'm always too worried by what I'm going to look like and is the scar on my nose going to show and what's my hair doing, and is my smile too gummy - all the kind of things that nobody else notices at all – so I never relax.  I've noticed that a lot of men, who don't care what they look like at all, look great in photos.  
Anyway, it's done, so I'll see the results next week  In the meantime, I have done my talk on medieval shipping in the wonderful 14th-century Merchant Adventurers' Hall here in York, so that's another job off my list.
Funnily enough, one of the characters in my next time slip is going to be getting on a ship so on this occasion I got to combine promotion with research.  For all those of you wishing you could have been there to find out ALL about medieval shipping (and I know there must be hundreds of you out there, even though not a single one of you sent me a picture of a keelboat as I asked so nicely), here's a picture of a 15th-century hulk or carrack.  It's absolutely amazing where these ships got to, mostly without charts or compasses, not to mention watertight decks.  

Black holes and heroic professions

I'm still getting over the loss of The West Wing on my evening viewing front, and can't quite into watching anything else yet – although I was grateful for all the recommendations I had.  When I was in London last week, I saw an advert for Castle on the Tube and was very excited to think that it had made it across the pond after all.  Apparently it's on its third season too! Sadly, it was on a channel I'd never heard of, but maybe it'll make its way to Freeview on of these days, and I'll be ready for it!
In the meantime, I have been grouchily channel-hopping, with only one programme that caught my interest long enough watch it.  Bizarrely, this was a documentary about black holes.  This was a bit like The West Wing in that I was riveted without having a clue what they were talking about. There's something incredibly attractive about those cool theoretical physicists, all so clever and articulate about extraordinarily complex subjects.  
Mouth open in admiration, I watched them scribbling out formulae on blackboards or leaning forward eagerly to explain particle physics.  An astronomer put together a virtual telescope the size of North American continent to look for evidence that might throw Einstein's theory of relativity into question, and then got very excited about graphs with lot of wiggly lines on them.  I was agog.  They were talking about time and space, and if only I could have grasped it, I felt as if I might had a brilliant idea.  As it was, I was just impressed.
I've been wondering ever since if I could have a hero who was a theoretical physicist.  The wonderful Susan Elizabeth Phillips has a great heroine who is a physicist – Dr Jane Darlington in Nobody's Baby But Mine.  I love all her books, but that's one of my absolute favourites. I'm ashamed to say that I'm not very adventurous with my characters' professions, largely, I suspect, because I'm too lazy to research but now I'm inspired to try harder.
What is the most unusual profession you've come across in a romance?  Are there any that would be turn offs for you, or that you particularly like come to that?  I've still got copies of We'll Always Have Paris to give away, so if you leave a comment and haven't read it yet, do email me your postal address (jessica@jessicahart.co.uk) and I'll do another post office run.

Copy-editing Consequences

Another day, another hat … I've just been working through the copy-edited text for Time's Echo, and it took ages – must remember not to write such a long book next time! 
It was interesting to read the story again after several months, but I was appalled to see my writing tics so mercilessly exposed in the tracked changes.  I knew about my ellipsis habit but hadn't realised I was quite so much of a comma queen, or how prone I am to repeating subject pronouns ('I repeat myself, and I do it again', 'he turns and he smiles').
Nor did I realise quite how twitchy I would get at having my grammar corrected  It seems I don't know the difference between 'that' and 'which', and many times don't use either. I've always prided myself on my spelling, too, but it turns out I don't know how to spell 'racked' (as in pain) either – was utterly convinced it was 'wracked'.  Having always believed in doing what I was told on the editing front, suddenly I was getting pretentious and miffed about changes to the 'rhythm' of my sentences until I had to give myself a sharp talking to.  All in all, a salutary experience!
I was sent a style sheet, with an A-Z of various words in the book with their standardized spellings, and jumbled together they make an odd kaleidoscope of the story.  Here's G, for instance:
Gaia, the gang, gaol, garth, girly, god-daughter, good day, Goodramgate, goodwill, goodwives, google (vb), goth (person), the Groves
And W:
wagon, wainscot, wardmote court, warung, wastepaper basket, watchtower, website, well-to-do, whoreson, Wicca, Widow Dent, wildflower, willowherb, wisecraft, witch-hunt, wits' end, woollen

Or P has a good range of contexts too:
pagan, paperwork, paralysed, pasar, passers-by, Pavement, William Paycock, Paynley's Crofts, peapod, peddler/peddling, Pinot Grigio, pockmark, Polyfilla, posset, post-traumatic stress disorder, potholed, praetorium, Vivien Price, pseudo-scientific, psychoanalysis
They remind me of a strange kind of Consequences, where you have to take a bizarre collection of things that have no connection to each other at all and make a story … oh, except I already did that, didn't I?

Back to earth with a bump

Am just back from London, a visit so packed with activity that I feel quite disorientated to be back in my quiet house ...  
I was staying with best friend, walking companion and Chief Plotting Advisor and on Saturday we decided on a little warm up for the Dingle Way with an 8 mile walk in Kent. 
We started with a visit to Hever Castle, the childhood home of Anne Boleyn.  It's a place we have been trying to get to for at least five years.  Every time we made a plan before, there was some kind of crisis and we had to cancel, but this time we got there, it was absolutely worth the wait.  It is a lovely building, smaller than I was expecting, but extraordinarily atmospheric and somehow intimate. 
We ended up spending twice as long as expected going round the castle, but by then the sun had come out and we had a beautiful afternoon to walk from Hever to Leigh, across open fields, along rivers, past two more impressive castles, through peaceful churchyards, around the ancient chiding stone and into the pub at Chiddingstone for a top lunch.  A very English day.
A complete contrast yesterday right in the centre of London.  I started with coffee at the top of the National Portrait Gallery, with its view across Trafalgar Square to Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament.  Then lunch with my fellow authors from Mills & Boon on the RoNA Rose shortlist and our editors, followed by a trot round the corner to the RNA Awards ceremony in the grand setting of the Gladstone Library, with pink champagne and canapés and, later, chocolate mousses decorated with sparklers.  

No rose bowl for me this year; the RoNA Rose award went to Sarah Mallory for her wonderful historical, The Dangerous Lord Darrington, so huge congratulations to her. Sarah was sitting on our table,  so at least we were all able to bask in her reflected glow!

I always think I'm not going to know anyone at these events, but there were lots of familiar faces to kiss – here's Jennifer Taylor, with Julie Cohen and Fiona Harper, for instance – and I got to mwah-mwah with the best of them before heading off for cocktails over the road to top off a glamorous day in suitable style.  
Not so glamorous today with an early start to catch the train home, and square up to the 'to do' list once more ... looks like it's back to earth with a bump!

Ouf!

Ouf!  I sent off the book this morning, after rewriting the entire thing in four days flat.  This is NOT a process I am anxious to repeat!  It involved no going out, no email, no blog, no Facebook or Twitter, no wine and precious little sleep. 
Having staggered to the end of Chapter 10 of what I thought was a full draft but which turned out to be only an extremely poor rough draft, I sat down on Sunday to reread it.  Oh, dear, oh, dear.  There was clutching of hair, there was hyperventilating, and yes, even a few tears as I contemplated the end of my writing career.  
But I made myself start again, using the few scraps I could salvage (and believe me, there weren't that many!). Once I got going again, it felt as if had clicked –not before time! – and I kept telling myself that once this chapter was over, it would all get easier, but it never did.  Just like life, eh?
Anyway, it is done.  I finished at 11.30 last night, and after a few last minute tweaks (more frantic scribbling in notebook after I went to bed) I pressed SEND and collapsed over my keyboard.  Then I went out and had my nails done and bought myself some daffodils, and swore that in my next life I'm going to have a nice, steady office job and never even think about writing a book.  (That's the next life where I'm going to be rangy and curly-haired with skin like a peach and a silvery laugh, by the way … I'm going to be sooooo cool!) 
So although the copy edits and medieval shipping remain to be conquered, I am ready to go to London tomorrow for the weekend.  On Monday I'll be having lunch with fellow M&B authors on the RoNA Rose shortlist – Liz Fielding and Kate Hardy among them – and then we'll go along to the awards ceremony.  I daresay I won't mind being a writer so much then! 
Back on Tuesday and back to work, and I'll try and get some routine going on the blog front again then too.  In the meantime, thank you all for your good wishes last time, and have a wonderful weekend wherever you are.

Hitting the wall

OK, I'm hitting the wall here … I'm on Chapter 9, thanks to a very late night session last night, but I'm still not happy with the way things are going and even if I romp home with the last two chapters, I'm going to have to go back and put the first five into the first person, after Frith won the battle for control of the story so spectacularly last week. 
In addition to which, the copy edits for Time's Echo arrived yesterday and I have to write an illustrated talk on medieval shipping, a subject about which I know … er, not very much at all. 
Everything has to be done before the 13th, which would be fine were it not for the fact that I have booked to go to London for the weekend before the RoNA Awards ceremony on Monday 5th March.  I am so looking forward getting away,  but it's going to take four days out of my schedule, and there's a lot of nail biting going on up here …
So, JFDI: I'm cancelling everything, turning off the internet after this, and restricting email checking to twice a day (if I have the willpower).  Then I'm going to sit here until this book is done. 
Wishing the rest of you a much more relaxing weekend – and if anyone out there has a picture of a medieval keelboat, please let me know!

Clearing the mind. Or not.

Chapter 6 done, and now we're on the dreaded Chapter 7, usual point of major crisis.  I'm at the fretful stage of writing, getting anxious about my deadline and Frith isn't helping.  Having forced her back into the third person, suddenly up popped 'I' in the middle of Chapter 6 again.  I thought we'd been through this, and I'd decided that, Oh-So-Sensible Secretary notwithstanding, readers preferred the third person. 
No wonder I'm having trouble sleeping.  I write until about midnight at the moment – although rarely get down to any work until after lunch, so this is not as disciplined as it sounds – and then when I'm too tired to do any more, I fall into bed and lie there with my mind careening all over the place.  No sooner do I switch out the light than I think of something, and have to put it on again and drag out my trusty bedside notebook and pen.  I scrawl down enough to remind myself of it the next morning and try to sleep again.  Five minutes later, on goes the light.  More scribbling.  And so it goes on until the small hours while I toss and turn and wonder why my brain can't be this active when I'm actually at my computer.
The current notebook is nearly finished and is full of incoherent and barely legible jottings that are nonetheless recognisable as the genesis of various scenes from books from Last-Minute Proposal onwards (had completely forgotten that Tilly was originally going to be called Lottie Vale!!)
Lottie, respelt, turned up in a later book.  Market scene email Lotty, I scrawled one night.  Or scene with Blanche?????  Obviously I was in the throes of Ordinary Girl in a Tiara then.  As it turned out, I did write Caro's meeting with the Dowager as an email to Lotty, but clearly changed my mind about the market scene. 
In pub, mats hunting scenes or coaches, Lex thinks of hushed efficiency of office with nostalgia è but DEAL.  Hhhmmnn.  Juggling Briefcase and Baby, for sure, but it looks as if I cut the detail about the place mats.  Weird what seems brilliant in the middle of the night!  On the same page I've written, oddly: evening keep notebook by bed! Er …?
Mr B + H into study, is scribbled on another page.  Not quite sure why study was so important.  I've underlined it twice.  Deep voices shaken cloth in yard straightened carpet on chest – ah, this is Time's Echo.  The scribbles wind round where I've written LINCOLN OTHER LETTER??? and CHAIRMAN? in large letters, which is bringing back vague memories of some editing crisis.   
Interspersed with ideas for scenes are urgent notes to myself about the vital stuff that spins round in your head when you're trying to sleep: TEA BAGS.  Tony's birthday.  Order lamb (underlined three times; clearly a worry). MA – shipping???? BLOG!!!!!  Who knew my life was so stressful?  
I'm feeling quite anxious just looking through the book for last night's notes now, but it's a handy thing to have one beside the bed.  The theory is that once you write a reminder, you can put it out of your mind and relax, although I have to say it doesn't always work that way for me.  If you've got any better tips for clearing your mind, please let me know - I'd really like some sleep before I get to the end of this book!

The West Wing and UST

I'm feeling bereft.  After catching up on the entire series of The West Wing on DVD, I saw the last two episodes last night.  Fabulously satisfying ending, gusty sighs all round, but I'm going to miss those characters so much!   I really didn't want it to end.
I remain baffled by US politics after seven series.  The characters speak so fast, I had no idea what was going on a lot of the time, but none the less I was riveted throughout. I squirmed every time the allegedly British Ambassador, Lord John (!!!) appeared – is that what Americans really think of us?? – but otherwise thought the writing and acting were matchless.  Brilliant stuff.
I was especially happy that Josh and Donna got it together at last. Every successful series has an element of UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension) at its core, which keeps the viewers tuning in, just as the unresolved conflict in a romance keeps the reader turning the pages. The moment the characters in question acknowledge the feelings they have for each other, the UST disappears, and I lose interest.  Remember Niles and Daphne in Frasier?  Gil Grissom and Sara in CSI?
The relationship between Donna and Josh in The West Wing  was brilliantly done.  There was a real connection between the characters, and the chemistry was obvious to everybody else without ever being overdone. A look, a deflected question, a hesitation … the UST was there right until the end and  you were never quite sure that they would work it out.  When Josh was on that  plane, and Donna sat down beside him … phew! 
When I was looking for images, I came across whole websites dedicated to Josh and Donna, speculating about their life after the end of the series.  I've often done this with books too, if I really love the characters.  Being able to imagine what their life is like once the story has ended is the sign of a truly great character.
Do you have a favourite TV "couple"?  Now I've finished The West Wing, I need a new series to absorb me in the same way, and I'm offering a copy of We'll Always Have Paris, awarded on the usual eeny-meeny-miny-mo system, for recommendations below.