To be fair, this is a good book for the intended audience. And I really don't mean to insult that audience. I have nothing against a story with a love interest- love is a big part of life- but when it is the main point of the story, I'm bored.
I want stories about family tension, complicated friendships, identity, grief. I love Celeste Ng, Elizabeth Strout, Claire Lombardo. Recommendations welcome.
I went back to ACX.com to create the audio book for Blood & Water. The process was similar, but I chose a different payment option and I was able to do a search for narrators based on their payment requirements -some do royalty splits, some have flat hourly rates.
Casey Montgomery was able to voice the five alternating narrators in my book by giving them each a slightly different sound. There's something nearly cinematic in hearing it preformed and I really love the way it turned out.
If you'd like to give it a free listen in exchange for an honest review, please join my review team.
I met Jackie years ago in an online writing forum. We later spent time in the same writer’s group and whenever I’ve had to take time away from the group, I beg Jackie to keep sending me her stuff. I’ve been lucky enough to read a lot of her books and I’m rereading her latest now. Jackie is so good at creating characters who feel like real people – the kind you think about long after you’ve finished reading. A big reason for that is her ear for natural dialogue that makes you feel like you’re eavesdropping on an actual conversation. Her new novel, The Bookshop of Second Chances, is like that. I got her to talk to me about her writing style and publishing journey.
Talk a bit about your most recent book. How long did it take to write? Who is your audience?
The Bookshop of Second Chances
is commercial women’s fiction. It’s about Thea, who loses her job and
splits up with her husband when she discovers he’s been sleeping with
her friend. Her great-uncle has left her his house and collection of
books in Lowland Scotland. She goes up there to sort out the house and
sell the books. She meets Charles and Edward, estranged aristocratic
brothers, and decides to stay for the summer, getting a job in Edward’s
second-hand bookshop. And so on.
I’d hesitate to say it’s entirely romance,
although it’s stuffed with romantic tropes, some more foolish than
others. I wanted to see how far I could go with that and still write
something I’d like to read. So the audience is ‘me’ and by that I mean
‘women of 45 plus who like a happy ending but don’t always find older
women in romance novels particularly relatable’.
It took about
five or six months to write altogether – I began in September 2016 and
it was more or less done by the following spring, although I had some
trouble with the ending. I did a million drafts.
Tell me
about your writing process. At what stage of writing do you find outside
feedback helpful? How do you sift through differing advice?
I
have an idea for the beginning of something, and usually an idea about
the central relationship. Then I just hammer it out. I don’t fight it if
I get stuck, but I do make myself keep going if I’m bored of typing. I
work it out scene by scene (at night usually) and sometimes I’ve done
that well enough in my head that actually getting the thing into the
computer seems a bit tedious.
Like everyone, I have good days and bad
days, on a good day I can write 8000 words, but usually I manage much
less than that. I edit as I go along but not in a decisive way – I just
often re-read and amend sections as I’m going. My aim is always to just
get the first draft finished, though, not to make it ‘good’ in any way. I
put the speech marks in at the end, because writing dialogue is my
favourite thing and punctuating it gets in the way. Apparently this is a
bit weird.
I do a number of drafts and don’t share it with
anyone until I’m pretty happy with it. I go on the waiting list for the
Women’s Fiction Critique Group (on Facebook, run by ex-Authonomites). The Bookshop
went to be critiqued in February 2018, so I’d probably waited, I don’t
know, six months for that? I can’t remember. I was writing something
else by then, anyway. So it went off to be critiqued. I think it was the
fourth of my books that went to the WFCG, and the response was pretty
good. I’d been a bit worried that it might be too ‘romantic’ (they don’t
do standard romantic novels) but generally it went down a storm. I was
slightly surprised, even though I did think it was quite good. (British
sense of ‘quite’ there – as in ‘reasonably’.)
I got some good,
useful feedback, particularly about the end as I recall, plus a
significant suggestion about changing the location of one scene. I
usually copy and paste all the comments into a document and work through
them. Critiques are so useful, even if you disagree wildly with what
people are saying. Anyway, I did a ‘final’ draft, and then probably
another three. By 2019 I was trying to make myself submit it. I don’t
always submit my books, I find it quite difficult, even though
rejections don’t really bother me. But submitting is hard work, I hate
writing synopses because my books have very small plots that can look
quite feeble, and the whole thing is wearisome.
Do you plot it all out on note cards or does the ending come as a surprise to you, too?
Ha, no, I don’t really plot at all. I just ‘put some characters in a room and see what happens’. As I say, I usually have a vague idea – I mean the question is always ‘will X and Y KISS?’ and the answer is ‘YES, OBVIOUSLY’ – it’s not very complex. However how they get there and what the ‘apparently insurmountable barrier to congress’ will be is less clear.
What do you do if you get stuck?
I stop and do something else and assume my subconscious will fix it, which is usually does.
Do you read in the same genre(s) you write in? Are there particular authors who inspire you?
Ah,
so this is a tricky one and the answer is… not really. I like literary
fiction best. Which I can’t write, although I do try sometimes. I also
read a lot of non-fiction (which I also write). Recently I have read a
few more books at the lighter end of the women’s fiction spectrum
because one ought to read in one’s genre. But I read all sorts of
things, and I’m basically inspired by everyone who writes well, in
whatever genre.
In terms of my own genre, Georgette Heyer
is my greatest inspiration because her books are funny, and her
characters are almost always convincing, however silly her plots may
appear. My favourite authors include Iain Banks, Douglas Coupland,
Claire Fuller, Terry Pratchett, Hilary Mantel, Susanna Clarke, Sarah
Perry, E M Delafield, Stella Gibbons, and Kate Atkinson, who I
absolutely love. (Interestingly, Atkinson says she’d write books even if
they never got published and I would too – that is, after all, what
I’ve done my whole life up to now.)
Can you describe your path to publication?
Well. Simon & Schuster UK have a Digital Originals imprint and every year in July they have a one-day open call for commercial women’s fiction submissions. Last year I noticed this on the actual day, and the extremely short deadline was very motivating. I sent off ‘five hundred words about me’ plus my first chapter. That week they came back and asked me to send the full manuscript. I’d never been asked for a full before, so this was quite the thrill.
Then everything went very, very quiet. In October one of the team shared a pic on Twitter of their Kindle with my words on it, which was exciting, but then it went very quiet again. In January they started talking about #OneDay2020, so I assumed it was a no, and planned to email and ask for a formal rejection (for my Rejection Spreadsheet). But when I opened my emails that morning there was one asking me to go to London for a meeting. Obviously I cried.
Anyway, I went to the meeting (I was extremely, surprisingly nervous) and we talked about the book and my soon-to-be-editor suggested a couple of revisions. I went home and did those and then we signed the contract. As an editor myself, receiving my copy-edits was really exciting, and, dare I say it, enjoyable.
I’ve been very lucky, as they’ve sold the
rights in Germany and the US, so there will be a German edition (for my
German in-laws to read!) and an American one – which will be a physical
paperback. (The US edits were extremely bracing – I also had to write an
extra chapter for them.) Plus there’s going to be a large print library
edition, and US and UK audio books. I’m astonished frankly.
What can we expect to see from you next?
I’m
writing two new things at the moment and hoping they’ll want to publish
one of them. One’s about a woman who runs away from home, and the other
one is about a woman who owns a fancy house that she rents as a retreat
for artists and writers. I’ve nearly finished the first drafts of both,
and am at the stage of having no idea whether they’re any good.
Check out this review for Unclaimed Baggage on Reedsy:
"Jenna is the type of person who would rather allow all her coworkers to mistakenly think she’s pregnant than correct a stranger who asks her when she’s due. She allows her anxious, depressed (gay) best friend to sleep in her bed for weeks because she doesn’t want to cause him emotional distress. Even though her sister, Julie, is unemployed and lives at home (never mind that her mother is a perfectly able-bodied adult), she reluctantly leaves college and moves home to care for her dying stepfather.
As the book progresses, we see Jenna’s sense of self and boundaries develop. She meets Sam, who doesn’t use her to meet his own needs. He loves her without asking her to change and allows the relationship to move at her own pace, emotionally and physically. Above all, he allows her to be fully herself—messy family and all.
As she’s navigating all these dynamics, Jenna learns a family secret that makes these complicated relationships downright opaque and must figure out how this unexpected revelation fits into everything else she’s trying to hold together."
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Unclaimed Baggage just went live last week and0 Reclaimed Baggage will be out next month so I've been doing a lot of promo lately. I thought I'd share some of it.
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