June Moonbridge: When you love what you do…

Welcome to June Moonbridge who tells us how she fits her writing into her life and what works for her.

It came to me one day. The desire to sit down and write again came to me so powerfully that I was just unable to ignore it. That was the time when I finally made up my mind and decided to try and

write my next novel in English. That was around three/four years ago.

I was published before. I have had my first three novels published at the start of the millennium, but then – as they say – life got in a way. In a way I could never imagine. For almost a decade I pushed aside that part of me. Finally, somehow life sorted itself out and I was able to accept so many things I didn't know about me and with that also the knowledge that – in fact – there is still a writer in me. There, I said it. Out loud.

My days usually start early in the morning, at five am. Although I'm not a morning person – bleurgh – I'm forced to get up that early so that I get to my office on time. Although many people think my writing 'time' starts at 10pm – that is usually when I finally manage to sit down and let my fingers dance with the keyboard – that is not so.

My writing day starts almost immediately when I leave the house. While driving to (and of course back) from work, my mind is basically working full time. Observing the world that passes me by, thinking of the next scenes or even the last one in my novel(s), plotting. Letting myself be inspired by so many things around me, I basically become a sponge while I'm behind the wheel of my car. Unfortunately that's also the problem, as most of things I'm unable to write down and by the time this is possible – things are forgotten or changed – several times.

Not being a morning person, that means, I never was able to write in the morning. Of course it happened several times that I wrote the whole night and was scared by my own alarm clock in the morning, but I never considered that as writing in the morning.

As most writers that haven't yet given up their day job, I had to adapt. Knowing the only time I could write was/is at nights, I did. When I write and work it means I sleep three or four hours per day. Simple.

The week has seven days and to be honest I don't write every day. I don't write an exact number of words every day. That's just not me. That's the solemn reason I could never commit to the NaNoWriMo month and I don't. And I'm fine with it.

I write when my muse calls. That can be seven days (nights) per week or only one or two. It also depends how my 'other' 17 hours went. The difference up to 24 hours per day is divided to sleeping time and actual writing time.

So many people ask me, how can I live and work with only three or four hours of sleep per day. I usually answer that question in an extended way. Not anymore.  

... It came to me one day. The desire to sit down and write again came to me so powerfully that I was just unable to ignore it....

It's simple; when you love what you do, nothing is impossible.

All That the Heart Desire

At twenty-five, Desire Hart has experienced enough grief for a lifetime.

Changing everything in her life - her identity, her hometown and her country of residence, Desire is determined that nothing will prevent her achieving from finding her missing son. Not even love.
On a spring evening, she meets the golden boy of F1 racing, Lorcan Shore, and finds herself falling

for him. Struggling to suppress her feelings, she realises he could help her get closer to the child she believes is her long lost son.

But nothing goes according to plan. Her identity is revealed by the press, Lorcan has a terrifying accident, and the trail to her son finishes in another dead end. So Desire does what she does best - she runs away.

Set against the glamorous backdrops of Monaco, Paris and Nice, ‘All That the Heart Desires’ mixes romance and mystery as Desire struggles to come to terms with her past.

Will she learn to accept love into her life again?

Available on Amazon worldwide as an e-book or paperback

Amazon.co.uk: All That the Heart Desires

Amazon.com: All That the Heart Desires

About June:

June joined the RNA in 2016 after her debut novel in English was published.

Working in a mainly male-dominated businesses; she can choose the best steel for your project, but please don't ask her which lipstick brand you should use.

After having two children, and learning her second child has autism, she married their father and carried on working. Work and family life left her with little free time. But the desire to write didn't die…

Links:

Blog: Dreams under the Moonbridge

FB page: June Moonbridge, Author

Twitter: @JMoonbridge

Thank you June. Such an interesting piece and shows how we all write in different ways

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

Nicola Cornick: The art of suspense

Thank you so much to Nicola Cornick for writing today’s article and giving us much food for thought on how to add suspense into our writing.

I’ve always enjoyed adding a bit of intrigue to my historical romances but when it came to writing a big romantic historical mystery novel I knew I was going to have to weave a whole lot more suspense into the story. For a pantser writer like me, plotting 3 different timelines was a bit of a nightmare in

itself but I knew that the art of writing a suspenseful story needed more than tight plotting. It needed twists and turns, that element of surprise that makes readers think: “I didn’t see that coming” and it needed PTQ, page-turning quality to keep them reading until 4am.

One of the best ways to learn is to study the masters of the particular skill you want to develop and so I turned to my heroes, to Mary Stewart, Daphne Du Maurier and Susanna Kearsley. “I met him in the street called Strait” Mary Stewart writes at the beginning of The Gabriel Hounds, and I’m hooked already by that hint of exoticism and the need to know who “he” is.  Daphne Du Maurier is another author who uses atmosphere for great suspenseful effect, building up the reader’s journey back into time in Frenchman’s Creek until you are there with her characters centuries before.  For me, a sense of atmosphere and place can contribute a great deal to a story as you wait on tenterhooks for something you know is about to happen…

In a podcast on suspense, thriller writer Harlan Coben says that he always knows the ending of his books and the final twist and surprise. Once he knows where he is heading he can lead the reader astray on the way. He uses misdirection and plays with readers’ perceptions so that they think they know how a story is unfolding but then he springs a surprise.

Harlan Coben distinguishes between suspense, which is keeping the reader gripped and turning the pages, and surprise, which happens when the books takes you somewhere you didn’t expect. He suggests that a corpse is useful for creating suspense – readers want to know who committed the crime – but that he finds a missing person more interesting.  Anything that allows for an element of hope raises the stakes in a suspense novel.

Research into suspenseful films, TV programmes and books has suggested that an average of three plot twists is the optimum to use. Too few twists and readers are bored; too many and they are overwhelmed. You need a balance between these two states and it is better that the twists grow organically from the story rather than appearing from left field. Sometimes, though, a great twist can be too much. This happened to me when I got to the end of House of Shadows. I had a wonderful idea for an epilogue, something that added a huge final twist and put an entirely different slant on the end of the story. Alas, this was a twist too far. My editor suggested I take it out – unless I was planning a sequel!

Another way in which to create suspense is to build up the emotional investment the characters have in their home, family, friends, all the things that are important to them. As they wrestle with problems and difficulties you can cut to the people who are really significant to them as a way of emphasising the conflicts they are going through.

As I mentioned, that final twist is very important but at the same time a romantic suspense novel has to do exactly what all other romantic novels do and be a powerful and human story. So when you hit your readers with that final surprise, it not only has to make them gasp with shock but it also has to move them emotionally.

Links:

Amazon

Blog

Thank you, Nicola and good luck with House of Shadows.

If you would like to write about the craft of writing please contact the blog on elaineeverest@aol.com

DRAMA AND ROMANCE WITH KATE NASH

Welcome to, Kate Nash who has come along to tell us about writing drama and romance for Pulse.

Romantic suspense is a well known sub genre of romantic fiction but actually at Pulse we are open to any kind of romantic stories with a dramatic quality to the writing. What do we mean by dramatic writing? The simplest answer is stories that read like television or film. If you story is full of action and suspense but also has well developed characters with convincing character problems to solve, as well as of course thrilling romance, then perhaps it's a story for Pulse.

We're looking to publish stories that are lean and fast paced, full of action and dialogue. They can feature a central developing romance or can feature more than one romance plot line. Alternatively they can feature high stakes drama as the primary plot and a developing romance as a secondary plot line. They should be written from the point of view of the central characters.

Dramatic writing is the mainstay of the crime and thriller genre but romances of all kinds can also be dramatic reads. For contemporary romances we're looking for writers writing for today's world: we want to see communication by email and text message and storylines that involve contemporary problems. We would love to see stories involving dramatic occupations such as the emergency services but office romances can be dramatic too in they are packed for example with emotional drama such as Chrissie Loveday's A Computer Guy for Christmas which we published this Christmas. Historical backgrounds offer plenty of scope for drama. Gracie's War by Elaine Everest is set during the Second World War while Sally Quilford's Lonesome Ranger takes place in the Old West.

Whether you're thinking of writing for us or not, if you want to up the drama in your writing, here's some things to think about.

1    Think suspense! Actively think about how your story will unfold to keep the reader interested and guessing. Withholding information creates suspense. So can plots involving a race against time or other external force.

Drama can come from external factors but don't forget the potential for emotional drama in romance. Up the emotion and make the emotional stakes for your heroine as high as you can.

       Think reality! Even if your story is set in the past, put yourself in the shoes of your central characters and give them real and complicated problems to deal with. Remember that fiction must make sense so their problems must be convincing and not too easily solved.

 Convincing drama comes from convincing characters with convincing problems to solve. These problems are at the centre of your story and if you get it right then you'll have all the dramatic conflict you need for a really compelling story.

      Kate Nash is editor at Pulse.

           Submission guidelines are available on the website:

           www.pulseromance.com

           Thank you, Kate.

Brought to you by the blogging team of Elaine Everest, Natalie Kleinman and Liv Thomas.

Please contact us at elaineeverest@aol.com if you wish to be featured on our blog. 

How Do You Write? Sabrina Philips Shares Her Love of Paper and Pen

Author Sabrina Philips explains her writing process:

I’ve always enjoyed the physical act of writing. As a child I adored handwriting classes at school, loved writing long letters to pen friends, filling both sides of the notepaper until it curled up. One of the things that attracted me to my day job working at a Register Office was the prospect of writing marriage certificates with an old fashioned pen and ink.

I also feel at my most creative with a pen and paper, and when it comes to writing a book, I do a huge amount by hand – all my ideas, character sketches and planning. The story itself I do write straight on to screen though – for two reasons. My writing process involves pounding out a hideously messy rough draft to begin with, which isn’t always written linearly, so being able to just copy bits and paste them where they need to be as I go along is so much more practical. Likewise, the only way I can make any progress in the early stages of a book is by forcing myself to write a certain number of words a day. If I didn’t have a way of measuring word count and just told myself I needed to fill a certain number of pages in my notebook, I know the naughty child in me would just write bigger to fill the pages more quickly.

However, when I get stuck on a particular scene or piece of dialogue, I always go back to pen and paper. Maybe it’s because it’s slower than typing and it gives me more time to consider the words. Maybe it’s because if I hit a brick wall, doodling while I ponder the problem it’s far more likely to result in a solution than me quickly checking my email/Twitter/a blog ‘while I think’. Or maybe it’s because a pen scribbling over the page is the image I still most associate with being a writer. I’m not sure, but I do know it never fails to give me a fresh perspective.

So how about you, do you still write with a good old-fashioned pen and paper? Or has the image of ‘being a writer’ long been replaced by keyboard and screen in your mind? I’d love to know your thoughts.

Sabrina’s third book, Prince of Montéz, Pregnant Mistress is now on the shelves.
http://www.sabrinaphilips.com/

Anna Jacobs on Writing in Several Genres

Author of over forty books Anna Jacobs explains a bit about writing in several genres:




I never quite know how to explain myself when people ask me what sort of books I write. I can’t really call myself a romance writer at the moment, except in the broadest terms, because I’m writing in two neighbouring genres: historical sagas and modern novels about families and relationships. All contain romances, but they’re not ‘pure’ romances.

What does that mean? Well, in a ‘pure’ romance, the developing romance is itself the story, while in a romantic novel, there is another story, in which a romance is included. In my books I often include subsidiary romances as well. You can’t have too much of a good thing.

I have written ‘pure’ historical romances in the past, including two regencies (Jane Austen style). And I wrote fantasy/science fiction for a few years as Shannah Jay.

People often ask why I write in several genres. Why not? doesn’t seem to satisfy them as an answer. Basically, I get ideas for different types of story, so why not use them?

There is also a very big spin-off for me: the variety keeps me from getting bored. I don’t have a very high tolerance for boredom, you see, which is why I like hanging out with RNA members, who are a very lively and interesting bunch, like their books.

The variety also stimulates my creativity. I write three longish novels a year, which means coming up with lots of new plots. Moving from one era to another, one type of novel to another, helps, for some reason. I don’t struggle to find plots, my future characters wake me up in the night and show me ‘movies’, then I rush to take notes.

The biggest problem with writing in two genres is when I get an idea for a new story while I’m in the middle of something else. Then my imagination may have to move from the 1860s to the modern day - and quickly back again. It keeps me on my toes.

What I regret most is that I don’t have time to write in the genres I’ve ventured into in the past, because I still keep getting ideas for them. But I’m afraid I need to sleep every single night, and to spend time with my own personal hero.

If I do find a way to speed up my writing, however, watch out. I’ll turn my imagination loose on the entire universe again.


Anna has two novels coming out this month, both modern. The hardback is a brand-new story IN FOCUS, which has an IT background. When a new feature on Pete Newbury's popular TV programme shows his adult image digitally transformed to that of a young child, Beth is shocked to realise he's her 'baby' brother, who vanished without trace 38 years ago.

The other book is SAVING WILLOWBROOK which is out in paperback. Ella turner is struggling to save the farm which has been in her family for hundreds of years, with the help of the hero, her daughter and the friendly family ghost.

http://www.annajacobs.com/