Juliet Bell: Two authors for the price of one

Today we welcome Juliet Bell to the blog to celebrate the publication of her first novel, The Heights.

Juliet Bell is the collaborative pen name of RNA members Janet Gover and Alison May.

Juliet was born at an RNA conference, with a chance remark about heroes who are far from heroic. She was raised on pizza and wine during many long working lunches, and finished her first novel over cloud storage and skype in 2017. 

Juliet shares Janet and Alison’s preoccupation with misunderstood classic fiction, and stories that explore the darker side of relationships.
You can follow Juliet on Twitter @JulietBellBooks or find out more on her website. 

Two hundred years since Emily Brontë’s birth comes The Heights: a modern re-telling of Wuthering Heights set in 1980s Yorkshire.

A grim discovery brings DCI Lockwood to Gimmerton’s Heights Estate – a bleak patch of Yorkshire he thought he’d left behind for good. There, he must do the unthinkable, and ask questions about the notorious Earnshaw family.

Decades may have passed since Maggie closed the pits and the Earnshaws ran riot – but old wounds remain raw. And, against his better judgement, DCI Lockwood is soon drawn into a story. 

A story of an untameable boy, terrible rage, and two families ripped apart. A story of passion, obsession, and dark acts of revenge. And of beautiful Cathy Earnshaw – who now lies buried under cold white marble in the shadow of the moors.

So we have two guests for the price of one today. With that in mind, we suggested that Janet and Alison ask each other some questions about their writing. Over to you Janet…

Photo credit: Julie Cohen

  

JANET: Writing a collaboration meant we had to plan what we were doing in some detail. We became plotters which is not the way you normally write. What was the hardest part about that and what was easier than you expected?

ALISON: I am definitely not normally a planner. Generally, as a writer, I’m the queen of ‘getting a vague idea and then just writing until it’s book length and hoping for the best.’ For a collaboration, that doesn’t work, because it means you’re forever accidentally killing people off that your writing partner might have been intending to feature in the next chapter.

And I do find writing to a set plan much more difficult. For me that sense of possibility and the unknown is a big part of what motivates me to keep writing – if I know exactly what’s coming next all the way to the end, why would I need to write the book? But I guess what made up for that was the fact that there was half a book out there somewhere being written without me. Sure – I knew the story and what events would take place in those chapters, but I didn’t know exactly how Janet would put them down on the page. I think that kept the sense of mystery alive.

JANET: After we decided to adapt Wuthering Heights, we both reread the original. Was there anything when you reread it that you had forgotten or that surprised you?

ALISON: So much! I’ve never thought of Wuthering Heights as a romantic novel, and I’ve certainly never seen Heathcliff as a romantic hero – although I know some readers do. But even beyond that I was stunned by how bleak a lot of the story is, and how self-involved even the ‘nicer’ characters are.

I spent much of the reread wanting to shake pretty much everyone on the page, which sounds like it should probably mean that I didn’t like the book. That’s not the case at all. I love Wuthering Heights – it’s big and ambitious and all-consuming, but it’s also unrelenting, and I think I’d forgotten that unrelenting darkness.

JANET: We use Skype and online storage when we write together, because we live in different parts of the country and are both a bit geeky. What piece of technology do you love most – and hate most?

I’m not sure if it really counts as a ‘piece of technology’ but it’s the same answer for love and hate – social media! Twitter, facebook, Instagram – I have a love-hate relationship with them all. I love being connected to friends and family so easily. Being a writer involves a lot – A LOT – of time spent on your own inside your own imagination. It’s really easy to get very isolated, very quickly, and chatting on Twitter and Facebook is a massive help with that.

But it’s also a huge timesuck, and it pushes crises from around the world into your eyeballs in real-time in a way that I really don’t think the human psyche is evolved to deal with, and it invites you to compare yourself with everyone else’s (carefully edited) social media perfect lives.

And every now and then I think I ought to go social media cold turkey, but then I get a message from a mate I’ve not seen for months, or read a really interesting Twitter thread about Harry Potter, or feel in desperate need of a picture of an otter, and thoughts of stepping away are instantly forgotten again.

Photo credit: Julie Cohen

ALISON: So now, it’s my turn to ask the questions! So Janet, how did you get started writing fiction? I know you were a journalist - what led you into making up, rather than reporting, stories?

JANET: It was actually the other way around. I always wanted to make up stories. I think I wrote my first ‘book’ when I was about 9 years old. I typed it on my parent’s typewriter, and made a cover for it with a drawing of a pony and the title in fancy font. My parents were practical people and realized that making a living as an author isn’t guaranteed or easy. They encouraged me to find another way of fulfilling my need to write while paying my bills. Journalism did that.

After some years, I moved out of being an on-the-road reporter into management, so I wasn’t actually writing any more. That was when I seriously started writing fiction. It’s much harder and much more fun that writing facts, but in its own way, much more rewarding.

ALISON: Why Wuthering Heights? It was you that very first suggested the adaptation - what is it about that book that captured your imagination?

JANET: I grew up in a fairly isolated part of Australia. The snow storms and rain and mists of the Yorkshire moors were very different from my hot dry world, but had much of the same feeling of wildness. I love wild places, wild animals and I guess by extension the wild souls of Cathy and Heathcliff.

Wuthering Heights touches on so many themes, love and hate, isolation and prejudice, dysfunctional families and abuse and… well the list goes on. Any one of these themes is thought provoking, but finding so much in one book is amazing. Every time I read it, something different captures my imagination. There are scenes and phrases from the book that have never left me.

ALISON: The setting in The Heights is as much a part of the story as the characters – they’re all deeply associated to the place where they live. I think of you as a bit of a citizen of the world - you've lived in Australia, the UK and New York and worked all over the world. Where do you think of as home?

JANET: I’ve called a lot of places home. We moved every few years when I was small, and Australia certainly has a lot of space to move around in. I’ve spent so much time in hotels in about 50 different countries in my day job, I even say I’m going home when I head back to the hotel at the end of the day. I guess home isn’t really a physical place in my head. Home is where I can relax and be myself, be with people I care about and there is often a cat involved.

At the moment, home is west London. I love living in London. It is an amazing city. A few weeks every year I go home to Australia where I wake to the sound of kookaburras laughing in the gum trees and often find a kangaroo near the house (yes – seriously).  It probably sounds corny, but I guess “home” is all the places that have made me the person I am.

Photo credit: Julie Cohen

Thank you Janet and Alison. The Heights is available now in ebook from Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, and Google Play.

Janet Gover grew up in a small Queensland country town, surrounded by books. After studying at Queensland University she became a television journalist, first in Australia, then in Asia and Europe. During her career Janet saw and did a lot of unusual things. She has met one Pope, a few movie stars and is on first name terms with a dolphin. She now works with television technology and travels extensively with her job, including some unusual destinations such as Iraq, Kazakhstan and the Kingdom of Lesotho. While living in Hong Kong, she met an Englishman, whom she subsequently married and she now lives in West London.

Her first fiction was published in 2002 – a short story inspired by a holiday in Wales. Her first novel was published in 2009. She now has ten published novels, one of which won the RNA RoNA Award for an epic romantic novel in 2017.  
You can find out more about Janet on her website, or on facebook or by following @janet_gover on Twitter.

Alison May is a novelist and short story writer. She lives in Worcestershire with her husband, no kids and no pets. There were goldfish once. That ended badly.

Alison writes romantic comedies and commercial women’s fiction, and has been shortlisted in the Love Stories and RoNA Awards. Her next solo novel, All That Was Lost, will be released this autumn by Legend Press.

She is also qualified teacher with a degree in Creative Writing and runs novel writing workshops and courses. Alison is currently Vice-Chair of the RNA. 
You can find out more about Alison on her website, or on facebook or by following @MsAlisonMay on Twitter.

RoNA Awards 2017: Epic Shortlist

This year’s shortlisted novels explore a variety themes including loss, desire and betrayal in settings from the East End of London, through to Paris, Australia, and India. 

Jean Fullerton’s Wedding Bells for Nurse Connie takes us back to 1948 where for Nurse Connie Byrne, preparing for the start of the NHS and to marry her sweetheart, Malcolm, life looks pretty straightforward – that is until Dr MacLauchlan arrives...  

Readers have commented on the authentic detail in your novel; can you tell us more about what your starting point was?  

Not only was I born and grew up in East London but I have spent much of my working life as a district nurse in East London. My first job on the District was in the London Borough of Newham which is made up of the old areas of East and West Ham, Stratford, Forest Gate and Manor Park and the old neighbourhood around the Royal Docks in Canning Town.

Like Connie I visited people with diabetes to give them their morning insulin but unlike her I didn’t have to boil a glass syringe for ten minutes beforehand and I never had to ask my patients to bake gauze squares in the oven alongside the evening meal to sterilise them. There were hundreds of other ways mine and Connie’s practice differed, but what never changes is how nursing involves human drama, joy and tragedy. I believe that my family and professional background breathes authenticity into Nurse Connie’s world.           

 Little Girl Lost by Janet Gover takes us to the Australian outback, where when Tia Walsh rides into town on a Harley-Davidson, Sergeant Max Delaney senses that she spells trouble. Tia’s trouble is not of her own making, but her dangerous past is not far behind. Then a little girl goes missing in the harsh terrain, and nothing else matters except finding her safe.

 We asked Janet to tell us about the inspiration behind this novel:

It came from a song that has haunted me for years. ‘Little Boy Lost’ (by Aussie songwriter Johnny Ashcroft tells the true story of a child lost in the bush. The boy was found, safe and well, after what was then Australia’s biggest search. That song always brings a tear to my eye. It started me thinking about being lost – and how there is more than one way to be lost.  That’s where this book came from.

Pamela Hart’s The War Bride is the story of war bride Margaret Dalton who when arriving in Sydney in 1920, to reunite with her ANZAC husband Frank, finds out from the Army that he already has a wife. Devastated, Margaret must find a new home, a new job… and, perhaps, a new love. But what if the Army was wrong?

This is a fascinating story; we asked Pamela where the idea came to her: 

I found the germ of the story for The War Bride while I was researching my last book, The Soldier’s Wife.  As soon as I heard about a Margaret who came to Sydney as a war bride only to find that her husband had abandoned her, I knew I had to write her story.  The book is set around Sydney Harbour, especially around Lavender Bay, which is where I teach writing for the Australian Writers’ Centre. Any time I was running low on inspiration, I just had to walk out my classroom door and gaze at the harbour in all its many moods, and I was right back in 1920 with my characters. 

Leah Mercer’s Who We Were Before follows protagonists Edward and Zoe, who two years on from the death of their young son couldn’t be further apart. A weekend in Paris might be their last hope for reconciliation, but mischance sees them separated before they’ve even left Gare du Nord. Lost and alone, Edward and Zoe must try to find their way back to each other—and find their way back to the people they were before.

This novel confronts some difficult themes and we asked Leah what led her to tackle them in her novel:

It was written shortly after my father died, and it provided a much-needed outlet for my own grief. I hope it shows that healing can happen when sadness brings people together, instead of driving them apart.

Ann O’Loughlin’s The Judge’s Wife is a tale of enduring love and scandal that begins in 1950s Dublin and unravels across decades and continents, digging up long-buried family secrets along the way. This is the love story of Grace, the judge’s wife, and Indian doctor Vikram Fernandes. The Judge’s Wife asks whether love really can last forever.

We asked Ann what inspired the rich detail in her writing:

So many things!  A small piece of marble pushed into my hand by a workman at the Taj Mahal, the beautiful jewellery, gowns and outfits sent by a rich relative in twice yearly parcels from the US to my West of Ireland home and a year in India living amid the coffee estates of South India which changed my life.  All of these gave me glimpses into different worlds and helped me build the background to the story.

Workshops and Groups: Developing Your Novel

Welcome to Nikki Moore who is back with another in our Workshops and Groups series.

It’s hard to believe that we’re already well into February - the year has flown by so far but at least the

evenings are starting to get lighter... With the longer days in mind, if you’re thinking about how to fill your time and are an aspiring writer or published author with a novel-in-progress, why not check out a workshop run by two multi-published RNA members?

Here’s what you need to know;

Workshop Title: 
Developing Your Novel – Tutored Writing Retreat with Alison May and Janet Gover.

Workshop Details: 
Friday 6^th May to Sunday 8^th May 2016 at Ettington Chase near Stratford-Upon-Avon.

Workshop Brief / What the Tutors Say: 
The weekend is all about having time and support to work on your novel. There will be a mixture of group workshops, exercises, one-to-one tutorials, and lots of individual writing time, in a fantastic country hotel in the heart of Shakespeare country. We have two tutors leading the workshops who will be on hand all weekend to provide a sounding board, chat about writing or offer a pep talk should you need one.

Aimed at: 

The weekend is aimed at anyone who has a novel-in-progress – whether that’s a finished draft or an idea they want to get started on. Workshops will cover vital writing techniques including character and dialogue, plot structure and setting, self-editing and how to present your book in the best possible light to an agent or editor. Bring your questions and problems. We’ll tailor the weekend to your needs.

Each participant is also invited to submit the opening of their novel for a detailed analysis and one-2-one discussion with Alison or Janet.

Course Tutor Biographies:

Alison May

Alison May is a qualified teacher and writes romantic comedies and award-winning short stories.  She has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Birmingham, and has taught creative writing for colleges and universities, writing conferences and literary festivals. You can find out more about Alison here.

Janet Gover

Television journalist turned award-winning novelist Janet Gover writes women's fiction, romance and

short stories. From horse riding instructor to university lecturer, Janet loves teaching and leads workshops at writing conferences in the UK and abroad. You can find out more about Janet here.

 

Booking details:

The weekend costs £395, which includes the tutorials, workshops, accommodation, meals and access to the hotel gym and swimming pool. For RNA blog readers, there’s a £25 discount if you book before end of February and quote ‘RNABLOG’ in your email. Bookings close on 7^th March.

Full details about the weekend, and Alison’s other courses, can be found here or email Alison  alison@alison-may.co.uk  for more information.

Why not treat yourself to a weekend devoted to your novel in beautiful surroundings with like-minded people?

Nikki Moore - Bio

A devoted Dorset girl, Nikki Moore has a HR day job, two kids and a lovely boyfriend to keep her busy alongside the writing. Published mainly by HarperImpulse, she’s the author of the #LoveLondon series, which has been in the Top 100 short story charts on Kobo and the Top 20 in the Amazon UK bestsellers Holiday chart. Some of her books have also been nominated for awards. Nikki is a strong supporter of aspiring authors, loves to chat about writing and reading, and can often be found on Twitter when she should be writing.

You can find out more about Nikki via her blog. or Twitter @NikkiMoore_Auth

Thank you, Nikki and good luck with your workshop, Alison and Janet, we hope you have a great weekend.

The RNA blog is brought to you by,

Elaine Everest & Natalie Kleinman

If you would like to write for the blog please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com

Janet Gover - Globe-Trotting Author

Today we welcome the RNA’s own technical genius. I give you…Janet Gover.

A lot of people know me as the RNA’s resident geek – doing my ‘techie’ stuff at conference and also creating the big screen presentations at the Awards nights and parties.

Last year, I had the fabulous experience of attending the Romance Writers of Australia Conference – not as a worker, but as the finalist for their Romantic Book of The Year Award. The shortlisted book was Flight To Coorah Creek; the first novel of a series set in a remote Australian outback town. As an expat Aussie living in London, it was an amazing feeling to be nominated by readers back in my homeland. Of course, I immediately booked flights back to Australia for the RWA conference.

RWA presents the awards at its conference. Because of the vast distances involved, there is only one national event each year. It’s always held in a five star hotel – which is fabulous, but expensive, especially when combined with an airfare from the other side of the planet. But there was no way I was going to miss it. Even the delayed flight, lost luggage and an unexpected stop in an airport about 1700 miles from our destination was not enough to deter me.

Apart from the five star hotel, the RWA conference is much like the RNA conference – but bigger. I had a lovely couple of days meeting with authors and publishers and RWA members. There was the same community feel we all love about our RNA events – and the RWA welcomed me with open arms. The gala awards dinner was in the Grand Ballroom at the Hyatt Hotel, which holds more than 1,000 people. And there I was, with my book, up on a big screen presentation not that very different to the one I do each year for the RNA awards. It was such a thrill. I didn’t win – but as a shortlisted author, I received a lovely silver pin.

I made my way home to London (my luggage came with me this time) to find that I had been shortlisted for another award – this time in the US. It was the Aspen Gold Reader’s Choice Award conducted by the Denver chapter of the Romance Writers of America. The American RWA, as we all know, has many thousand members, so a shortlisting for a chapter award is really an achievement- and for an English author writing books set in Australia… well, I was over the moon.

I couldn’t attend the ceremony… I was teaching that weekend at a tutor led writing retreat here in the UK (a double header with the brilliant Alison May). At the retreat, everyone raised a glass to wish me luck. Perhaps it worked. The day after I got home, I received an email to tell me I had won my category. I actually tied for the win with an author who has TWICE been on the RITA award shortlist. Wow! I was quite beside myself over that! A few days later, I received the award in the snail mail, and that plaque now hangs proudly in my office. We all know how hard the US market is to break, and an award like this for a writer from England is rare – even more so when the book is set in Australia. It just goes to show that readers cannot be so easily categorised or predicted … and are always happy to enjoy a the right book, whatever its origin.

That was the highlight of a hugely busy year for me… and here’s hoping 2016 will be just as much fun!

BTW… After the success of last year’s tutor led retreat (and I don’t just mean that I won the award that weekend), I’m joining forces with Alison May again for two retreats this year:  Developing Your Novel in May and Advanced Novel Writing in October. You can find out more about there on my website here : http://janetgover.com/?page_id=1891

And who knows – with luck maybe we’ll find another reason to celebrate that weekend too – if not for me, maybe for someone else.

Links:

Website: http://janetgover.com

Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/janetgoverbooks/

Twitter : @janet_gover

Books : http://www.choc-lit.com/productcat/janet-gover/

What a wonderful year you’ve had, Janet. Here’s wishing you as much success in 2016 and into the future.

The RNA blog is brought to you by Elaine Everest & Natalie Kleinman

If you would like to write for the blog in 2016 please contact us on elaineeverest@aol.com