Helena Fairfax and a European Union with a Happy Ending

Helena Fairfax is usually to be found interviewing literary agents on the RNA blog. Today we're delighted to welcome Helena as one of the authors in the 'Letterbox Love Stories' anthology, a recent release by the World Romance Writers Group.

My first two novels were published by Canadian publishers MuseItUp, and since then I’ve made wonderful cyber friends across the pond. I joined several American author groups –  the excellent Marketing for Romance Writers, for example, and Exquisite Quills – and I’ve found tremendous support there, as well as a wealth of advice from fellow group members.

Late last year I was approached by American author Gemma Juliana, and  she asked if I’d be interested in being part of a new, international group of writers. Gemma’s idea was to put together a series of anthologies in order to reach out to new readers on both sides of the Atlantic. I’ve collaborated with Gemma before on a Christmas anthology (Exquisite Christmas came out last year) and it was great fun to do…so of course I said yes!

The World Romance Writers Group now consists of nine authors: three of us are RNA members –Lindsay Townsend, French author Marie Laval, and myself - plus British author Jenny Twist, who lives in Spain, Canadian Denysé Bridger, and Americans Cara Marsi, Gemma Juliana, Rose Anderson, and Lynn Crain, who lives in Austria.

Right from the start we decided the setting for all our stories should be Europe – but with such a range of writers, and from both sides of the pond, what should be their common theme? We talked about and discarded several ideas for something to bind our first anthology together until finally we hit on a theme that excited all of us: What if you received a letter that changed your life forever?

With that one simple idea – and with 10,000-15,000 words to play with - we each went away and worked on our own individual story. The imagination is a great thing, and I found it fascinating to watch completely different stories grow out of this one premise. And this is how our anthology, Letterbox Love Stories, was born. Our stories range in time from the medieval to the contemporary and even the futuristic, and have a range of settings across Europe, from Turkey to northern England – but they all begin with a letter.

Here are the blurbs of the RNA members’ stories, as a taster...!

Come Date Me in Paris, by Helena Fairfax (that's me :) )
When a letter arrives telling Alice she's won a place on a TV blind date show, she should be excited - only trouble is, the show involves cooking for your date, and in the country of haute cuisine, Alice can't even boil an egg. Forced to throw herself on the mercy of her chef neighbour, Edmond, Alice asks him for lessons. But will she be cooking up a romance...or cooking up disaster?

Sons of the Wind, by Marie Laval
Provence 1826. Ten years after her brother disappeared in the marshes of the Camargue, Venetia Rigby receives a letter suggesting he is alive. Will Philippe Dantès, half-gipsy master of Terres Mortes, help her find him when he has his own demons to fight?

Plain Harry, by Lindsay Townsend
Recovering from a brutal marriage, Esther is living quietly as a widow when a letter from her brother Sir Stephen destroys her contented life by ordering her to marry Sir Henry - but who is this “Plain Harry” and how will he treat her? Set in medieval England when women had few rights, this story shows how love can flourish between the unlikeliest of people.

* * * 

Each of our stories is very different but besides the letter theme they all have one other thing in common - they all end happily! 

We’re very excited to say that Letterbox Love Stories was released on 4^th July

And if you’d like to find out more about our World Romance Writers group, please visit our website, where you can find out about my own story, Come Date Me in Paris, here on our blog.

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Helena Fairfax

Helena Fairfax was born in Uganda and came to England as a child. She's grown used to the cold now, and these days she lives in an old Victorian mill town in Yorkshire. Helena walks the Yorkshire moors every day with her rescue dog, finding this romantic landscape the perfect place to dream up her heroes and her happy endings. Her first novel was written through the RNA’s New Writers’ Scheme and was shortlisted for the Global Ebook Awards, and in 2014 she was shortlisted for the Exeter Novel Prize

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If you wish to write for the blog or be interviewed please contact elaineeverest@aol.com

A Recipe...for Romance or Ice Cream for the Heat

This weekend's recipe comes from Kate Hardy who writes medical romances and Modern Heat romances for Harlequin Mills & Boon. Before M&B, she wrote rather raunchier novels for Headline and Black Lace - so for the kind of medical drama you see on TV, mixed with a bit of passion and a touch of danger, you'll definitely enjoy meeting Kate's heroes and heroines! She also writes health books and local history books as Pamela Brooks.

There are a lot of parallels between writing romances and cooking. Firstly you need the right ingredients: character, conflict, and resolution. You need to prepare them – that’s your outline – and then put them together in the right order. You need to cook it for long enough (i.e. don’t rush it, and take the time to polishing your draft. And finally you get the sheer pleasure of enjoying the finished product: in my view, a good book is definitely food for the mind and the soul.

So the obvious thing for a romance writer who’s also a foodie is to, um, use food in the books. In my current release, ‘Surrender to the Playboy Sheikh’, I have a good excuse as the heroine is a top-class chef and ends up working with the hero. But I admit that I tend to sneak food into all my books – which is why there’s an appropriate recipe for each book on my website.

My family also know exactly where I’m setting a book, because it affects what I make for dinner while I’m writing it; an Italian setting means we’re eating Italian for the next two months. For ‘Breakfast at Giovanni’s’, my RNA award-winning café book, I made my best friend drink lattes with me in every café in Norwich (it was research). For my Norwegian book, we had to try gjetost cheese and make proper Norwegian vafler. And for the current release… let’s just say pomegranates feature heavily, and there’s a very nice Circassian chicken recipe.

I’m currently thinking about writing a book set in a gelateria, so we’re already practising for that. Easiest recipe ever: whizz 400g washed and hulled strawberries in a blender with 1 tbs lemon juice and 75-100g sugar (depending on how sweet you like it), add a 500g pot of 0% fat Greek yoghurt and whizz briefly, then pour into an ice cream maker and let it do all the hard work for the next 30 minutes

Enjoy.

Kate

For more recipes check out Kate's Recipes Page on her website.

Kate Hardy's July release is SURRENDER TO THE PLAYBOY SHEIKH.

One Writer's Quest For Fitness - Veronica Henry

As anyone who follows me on Twitter knows, I am on a draconian fitness regime. It was my twentieth wedding anniversary in May, and I realised I was three stone heavier than when I got married. Something Had To Be Done! I looked at the causes and it was a no-brainer: sitting on bottom in front of laptop all day, regular trips to the fridge/kettle/biscuit tin, and over-dependence on the old Pinot Grigio. I’m sure I’m not the only writer with these symptoms, and I decided that if I didn’t want to keep piling on the weight in the same fashion, I had to take steps. After researching several diets and regimes, I decided to plump [!] for the one diet that is guaranteed to work – eat less and move around a bit more. Here are the changes I implemented:

1 Stop drinking! It was just a habit, after all – a fast track to relaxation, a way of getting all those characters in my head to shut up. But as another friend says, wine = liquid Mars Bars. You wouldn’t eat three of those in a night, but a bottle of PG can go down in a trice.

2 Keep word count and calorie count roughly equal – about 1500 a day. Both of which are totally do-able.

3 Avoid anything beginning with B – namely bread, booze, butter, biscuits. Brie, Bollinger, Battenburg, Beluga. You get the picture. [Broccoli allowed!]

4 Attempt some form of physical exercise every day. It’s amazing how a knotty plot problem can resolve itself while you’re out walking.

Four weeks in and I have lost nearly half a stone, am more toned, don’t get those sluggish slightly hung-over days, and my skin is dramatically less puffy and wrinkled. I’m hoping that by my publication day on 23 July I will have lost a stone – not that I am parading down Oxford Street in a tutu and angel wings to promote my book like Jordan, but it’s nice to have a target.

Veronica's latest book MARRIAGE AND OTHER GAMES is released on the 23rd of July 2009.

When girl-about-town Charlotte discovers her husband has been arrested for fraud, she flees to the wilds of Exmoor to nurse her broken heart ...

This weekend's post will feature a recipe for ice cream to beat the summer heat by author Kate Hardy.