Jenny Haddon: Planning With Other Writers

We welcome Jenny Haddon to the RNA blog today to tell us about her exciting project.

Last year Tule Publishing invited me, together with Liz Fielding and Jessica Hart (Pamela

Hartshorne) of the RNA together with Montana-resident Anne McAllister, who has spoken at the RNA Conference, to write a four book series. We had all written for Harlequin Mills & Boon, though both Jessica/Pam and I hadn't done so for some time. We knew each other

Imagine delighted. The drawback was that I'd never written one of a series before. I'd written a couple of novels which turned out to have sequels sitting inside them. But I'd never planned a Book 1 of 4 from the get-go. Jessica, however, was firm. An overall plan was essential. We concluded that we needed four key resources, held in common on Dropbox and Pinterest.

The story that emerged was built around a Royal Wedding, to be held in a classic English village church. So the world of the series required the invention of a royal principality and an English village.

RESOURCE 1 - Royal Seat

I mostly invented the principality, since my hero was the royal in question – His Serene Highness Prince Jonas of San Michele. I could show you place on the Slovenian coast where I imagined the capital. I prepared notes on the principality's history from the middle ages to the present day, economy, geography and language.

OK, I'm a bit of a nerd on things like that. But it did mean that we weren't suddenly going to be throwing up history or traditions which were different from one book to the next.

RESOURCE 2 - English Village

In the spring Anne came to stay in England and we all visited Castle Combe which inspired the village, the manor house in which my heroine and Jessica's hero were born and the church where the royal wedding took place. We inhaled the atmosphere. We lodged notes, maps and photographs in our resource centre.

RESOURCE 3 - Backstory, ages and appearance of characters

We'd agreed most of the details before we started writing, especially during our girls' day out in Wiltshire. We kept facts in documents held at Dropbox. Though we still had to negotiate sometimes, by email of course, when we suddenly found something we wanted to add. It was astonishingly harmonious. On Pinterest we pinned photographs of people who inspired our characters. (My Jonas, to my surprise, turned out be a David Tennant lookalike.) Liz found the wedding dress, too.

RESOURCE 4- Timeline Spread Sheet

We started with the earliest action that occurred on the page in any of our books. Backstory and ages

were for individual characters were we set up spread sheet showing the timeline of serious plot points, where the characters were, which books certain scenes occurred in and ended with the latest.

There was one killer weekend where nearly every key character in everybody's book was in one place at the same time. We had to break the timeline down almost by the hour for that!

I have learned an enormous amount during this return to category romance, in the company of some of the best in the business - including our editor, author Kelly Hunter. Planning, and then keeping readily accessible records of decisions on time and place, are lessons now well and truly learned. About time!

PUBLICATION DAYS

Charmingly, the publisher has co-ordinated the launch of our books as closely as we tracked our plot encounters.

13 October      The Prince's Bride, Sophie Weston

16 October      The Baronet's Wedding Engagement,  Jessica Hart

18 October      The Bridesmaid's Royal Bodyguard,  Liz Fielding

20 October      The Best Man's Bride, Anne McAllister

Series link        https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B075SJ561Y/

Thank you for your interesting piece, Jenny and good luck to you and your fellow authors.

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

Penrith Conference - 2009 Joan Hessayon Award Winner, Allie Spencer and Another First Time Attendee's Thoughts

One of the treats of the conference is that the winner of the Joan Hessayon New Writers' Award gets presented with the beautiful cup for a second time - now with their name on it. So here's a photo of Katie Fforde giving Allie Spencer the newly engraved cup for her first book TUG OF LOVE (also in the picture is the wonderful Jan Jones who won the award in 2005 for her novel, STAGE BY STAGE. She is also one of the two people, Roger Sanderson - the other, responsible for the brilliant conference)

Huge Appologies - the following report is from Liz Gill not as stated before!

Monday, July 13th
I felt guilty at the conference, sitting in stuffy halls in one of the most beautiful places on earth on one of the few sunny summer weekends of this year. I could have been walking around Grasmere, eating peaches by the lake and watching my cousin’s black Labrador, Fern, run in and out of the water after imaginary pheasants. I could have had tea and carrot cake in a little courtyard café while the stream flowed past, the Methodist chapel glowed in the sunshine and spuggies sat on the tabletops, wide eyed and eating crumbs.
I had intended leaving the conference at lunchtime on Sunday and driving, roof down, across to the Durham dales to where I have a static caravan, to gain the rest of the day but instead I stayed to hear Rachel Summerson reading her childhood efforts at novel writing and Jean Fullerton talking about the research she does for her historical novels in East London. Rachel made me laugh more than I have done in weeks and Jean inspired me and made me want to start writing as soon as I got home and it was well worth the sacrifice of the outdoors both then and on Friday and Saturday, listening to the talks, seeing old friends and making new ones.
I am sitting outside my caravan now in the morning sunshine. At least I didn’t have to get up early today but I feel a slight pang for that too because I remember the lovely lady serving breakfast and saying when I asked for one egg,
‘Why don’t you have them both? There’s only two and this one would feel lonely without the other.’
So I did.

Elizabeth's latest book DREAM BREAKERS

1967: Jenna Duncan's only ambition is to marry the boy she loves and have a little terraced house away from her dull job and her parents' boring life. Ruari Gallacher has other ideas. He wants to be a professional footballer. Winners and losers can change places but when you have sacrificed the person who matters most to you can it ever work out?

More attendees are posting their conference experiences, photos, and reports on their blogs. Today Carol Townend has posted her notes from Jessica Hart's session. All the links are listed on the yesterday's post here and will be updated daily with new additions.

Keeping on the conference theme, tomorrow's post is from attendee Anna Louise Lucia, resident of the Lake District, will sharing one of her tips which never fails to get the writing flowing again.