The Month Of Love & Hashtags

February... the month of love! Not only do we have Valentine's Day, but we also have the Romantic Novelists' Association's month long celebration of romantic fiction! Now I know this is the last week of February and you may feel it is too late to mention the celebrations, but hashtags have the added benefit of not only following posts and suggestions in real time, but you can also look back on previous social media conversations. So let's not waste any more time... come with me and explore what has been happening in the world of romance...

On 1st February, 2021 The Romantic Novelists’ Association (RNA) announced the shortlists for their prestigious 2021 Romantic Novel Awards. This event is the only national literary awards to solely focus on rewarding excellence in romantic fiction, so I am thrilled that Daniel's Daughter is a finalist in the Historical Romantic Novel Award category. Yes... that's me, top right in the red cardigan and beads!

The presentations of the awards will be held at an online event on the 8th March, 2021. It will start at 7pm and the awards will be presented by actor and presenter, Larry Lamb. You can watch it live, a link to the event will be posted nearer the time here or on the RNA's Twitter, Facebook Page or Instagram Page.

The sub-genre shortlists and awards are below:- 

The Katie Fforde Debut Romantic Novel Award:
Cow Girl, Kirsty Eyre, HarperCollins UK
The Bookshop of Second Chances, Jackie Fraser, Simon & Schuster
The Silent Treatment, Abbie Greaves, Century, Cornerstone
This Is Not a Love Story, Mary Hargreaves, Trapeze
A New Life for Ariana Byrne, Liz Hurley, Hera Books
The Authenticity Project, Clare Pooley, Bantam Press

The Libertà Books Shorter Romantic Novel Award:
A Will, a Wish and a Wedding, Kate Hardy, Mills & Boon True Love
The Warrior Knight and the Widow, Ella Matthews, Mills & Boon Historical
The Day That Changed Everything, Catherine Miller, Bookouture
Second Chance for the Single Mum, Sophie Pembroke, Mills & Boon True Love
The Return of the Disappearing Duke, Lara Temple, Mills & Boon Historical
Cinderella and the Surgeon, Scarlet Wilson, Mills & Boon Medical

The Romantic Saga Award:
The Girl from the Tanner’s Yard, Diane Allen, Pan
The Variety Girls, Tracy Baines, Ebury
The Ops Room Girls, Vicki Beeby, Canelo
Bobby’s War, Shirley Mann, Bonnier Books UK
The Orphan’s Daughter, Sandy Taylor, Bookouture
Secrets of the Lavender Girls, Kate Thompson, Hodder & Stoughton

The Romantic Comedy Novel Award:
The Garden of Forgotten Wishes, Trisha Ashley, Bantam Press
Someday at Christmas, Lizzie Byron, Hodder & Stoughton
Christmas at the Island Hotel, Jenny Colgan, Sphere, Little, Brown
One Winter’s Night, Kiley Dunbar, Hera Books
Sunny Days and Sea Breezes, Carole Matthews, Sphere, Little, Brown
The Switch, Beth O’Leary, Quercus

The Jackie Collins Romantic Thriller Award:
The Forgotten Sister, Nicola Cornick, HQ
The House by the Sea, Louise Douglas, Boldwood Books
Death Comes to Cornwall, Kate Johnson, Dash Digital, Orion
The Twins, Jane Lark, One More Chapter, HarperCollins
Escape to the Little Chateau, Marie Laval, Choc Lit

The Fantasy Romantic Novel Award:
Echoes of the Runes, Christina Courtenay, Headline Review
The Start of Us, Hannah Emery, One More Chapter, HarperCollins
The Reluctant Witch, Amelia Hopegood, Independently Published
The Cornish Connection, Amanda James, Independently Published
Someday in Paris, Olivia Lara, Aria, Head of Zeus

The Goldsboro Books Contemporary Romantic Novel Award:
Where We Belong, Anstey Harris, Simon & Schuster
My One True North, Milly Johnson, Simon & Schuster
One Day in Summer, Shari Low, Boldwood Books
Eudora Honeysett is Quite Well, Thank You, Annie Lyons, One More Chapter, HarperCollins
Christmas for Beginners, Carole Matthews, Sphere, Little, Brown
The Little Shop in Cornwall, Helen Pollard, Bookouture
Mix Tape, Jane Sanderson, Bantam Press
The Takeover, T L Swan, Montlake
The Spark, Jules Wake, One More Chapter, HarperCollins

The Goldsboro Books Historical Romantic Novel Award:
Heartbreak in the Valleys, Francesca Capaldi, Hera Books
The Coming of the Wolf, Elizabeth Chadwick, Sphere, Little, Brown
Spirited, Julie Cohen, Orion Fiction
Daniel’s Daughter, Victoria Cornwall, Choc Lit (THIS IS ME!!!)
The French Wife, Diney Costeloe, Head of Zeus
People Like Us, Louise Fein, Head of Zeus
The Lost Lights of St Kilda, Elisabeth Gifford, Corvus
Rags-to-Riches Wife, Catherine Tinley, Mills & Boon Historical
The Skylark’s Secret, Fiona Valpy, Lake Union Publishing

The Sapere Books Popular Romantic Fiction Award
Sing Me a Secret, Julie Houston, Aria, Head of Zeus
Christmas Wishes, Sue Moorcroft, Avon
Sunny Days and Sea Breezes, Carole Matthews, Sphere, Little, Brown
A Perfect Cornish Escape, Phillipa Ashley, Avon
The Two Lives of Lydia Bird, Josie Silver, Penguin

The rest of February was spent supporting the allies of romantic fiction as well as promoting its diversity.

Love My Library Week, 1st -7th February
Authors and readers shared their library stories in support of their local library.
Hashtag #LoveMyLibraryWeek

Celebrating Independent Bookshops Week, 8th – 14th February
Authors and readers posted about their bookshop heroes and why they love them.
Hashtag #LoveMyIndieBookshopWeek

Celebrating Diversity in Love, 15th – 21st February
5th February. Authors and readers shared book recommendations written by authors, or feature characters, from the LGBTQIA+ community.
17th February. Authors and readers shared book recommendations which are written by authors, or feature main characters, who have a multicultural heritage. 
19th February. Authors and readers shared book recommendations written by authors, or include main characters, who are living with disabilities/chronic conditions.
Hashtag #RNADiverseLoveWeek

Celebration of romance authors and book bloggers, 22nd – 28th February
22nd February. RNA members of the organisation shared their thoughts on what the RNA means to them.
Hashtag #TheRNAAndMe
24th February, at 7pm. Live Event. Author, book blogger and head of publicity at Bookouture, Kim Nash, interviewed a panel of RNA award-winning book bloggers on the RNA Facebook page. Check out the page as the video might still be there!
25th February. Authors and readers shared their favourite books by independent authors.
Hashtag #RNAIndieAuthors.

I hope you enjoyed this retrospective look back on the Month of Love. Do you know of any other category, group or sub-genre the romance industry should celebrate? I would love to hear your thoughts.

You Had Me At Cozy!

Who out there has read a cozy? I'm the first to admit, I stay pretty genre-centric with my reading. I started reading cozies a few years ago as a way to escape the tedious amount of research and reading I was doing for my WWII novels. Helena Dixon's Miss Underhay Mysteries, followed by Posie Parker and Carmen Radtke's Murder at the Races. However, these are also historical fiction. I started to wonder, am I a book snob?

According to BookRiot, there is a big fat line between being a book snob and personal preference. (Whew!) I was just being picky. Okay, time to branch out. For me, choosing a book is a little like going to your favorite restaurant. You know what you like. You get it every time. So why chance a good night out by trying something different, something you might not like? However, trying something new, I reminded myself, is also exciting and refreshing.

I started reading contemporary romantic comedies. Shocker, I liked them. Sandy Barker, Nina Kaye, Aimee Brown, Julie Houston, Paige Toon... and Fiona Leitch. Now, Fiona Leitch has a particular skill of luring you in and blazing you with laugh-out loud comedy threaded into nearly every sentence that, at times, leaves you breathless. Yes, breathless. At least that is what I found when reading her self-pubbed murder-mystery mashups The Bella Tyson Murder Mysteries - Dead in Venice (with the tag: There are worse things than writer's block 😁) and Murder Ahoy. When I heard she'd written a cozy series for Harper Collins, I thought... okay, here we go!

I found Fiona's writing effortless. I'd started to flip back the pages and ask, "How'd she do that?" And this was between tears of laugher. The Nosey Parker Murder Mystery Series is no different. Here's the series blurb:

Ex-copper turned caterer Jodie ‘Nosey’ Parker returns home to Penstowan, the small seaside town in Cornwall where she grew up, after almost twenty years in London’s Metropolitan Police Force. With her teenage daughter in tow, and her slightly batty mother still living there, Jodie plans on having a quiet life running her new catering business. But she soon discovers that life in Penstowan is not as quaint (or boring) as she remembers. Missing brides, bodies in the shrubbery, annoying writers pushed off cliffs and movie star madness all conspire to get this not-so-amateur detective back on the case. Helped by her old childhood sweetheart Tony and hunky newcomer, DCI Nathan Withers, not to mention new member of the family Germaine the Pomeranian dog, finding the killer is bound to be a piece of cake. Murder, mayhem and much consuming of pasties will ensue, to prove that when Jodie’s around, murder is always on the menu…

I wanted to know more about Fiona, her writing, and how she comes up with this stuff! SO, I asked her!

 

Hi Fiona! I read and loved your Bella Tyson series, Dead in Venice and Murder Ahoy, how was writing the Nosey Parker cozies different than writing your other books? 

The main difference is that I’m not allowed to swear in the Nosey Parker stories… I’m kind of joking there, but actually it’s true: because I’m writing to contract, I’ve been far more aware of the market and of the audience I want to attract (many of whom don’t like the kind of strong language that Bella makes liberal use of). With the Bella Tyson books, I just kind of write what I want and hope it finds an audience; with Nosey Parker, I’m actively hoping to attract them. The other big difference is in writing for a hopefully long-running series. I’ve made sure that I’ve introduced a lot of secondary characters who are interesting in their own right, who I can use again and again in further adventures. In the Bella Tyson books, it’s mainly just Bella and Will who are recurring characters. I’ve also had to do a bit more world-building, setting them in a location (based on a couple of real towns) which I can use again and again.

Why are you so funny? No, really. I find I laugh my way through Fiona Leitch books, and I often wonder if you are this funny at home. Is your family constantly in stitches? 

My whole family is funny. I grew up in a household where there was a lot of laughter and playfulness. My mum, my sister and I regularly get each other into bouts of full on hysteria, where we’re crying with laughter and it actually hurts, but we can’t stop. My son and I have the same effect on each other. I suppose I AM funny all the time! Although whether my family are laughing with me or AT me is another matter… I used to want to be a stand-up comedian, until I actually got a really big debut gig through the BBC. It was the most terrifying experience of my entire life, and utterly cured me of the desire to ever do it again.

You know that saying, write what you know? You can plead the 5th here (meaning you don’t have to answer), but are your characters loosely or closely based on real people?

There is one character (in Murder Ahoy!) who is based on a real person, although (unbelievably, as she is a total monster in the book) a watered-down version. All my female MCs do have elements of me in them, I have to admit, although I wouldn’t say that I am quite as nosey as Jodie! Also in Murder Ahoy!, one of the other characters is based on a book blogger who I got to know after Dead in Venice came out, as she absolutely loved it and has since become one of my biggest on-line cheerleaders. I named the character after her and based some of it very loosely on her, but I was quite concerned because that character also turns out to be a bit of a monster and I was worried that she would be hugely insulted, but she loved it!

Who is your inspiration for Jodie, our detective MC? And what kind of research did you do to prepare?

Physically, I had the actor Sheridan Smith in my mind when I was writing Jodie, because I’d love her to play her in the TV adaptation (please let there be a TV adaptation!). In terms of her actual character, I used to work in an office with someone who was an ex-copper and she was incredibly nosey; whenever she saw something going down by the water cooler she had to get involved. It had been part of her job as a police officer, and she didn’t seem able to stop. It was actually quite annoying! But I wanted to make Jodie different to a lot of the cozy sleuths out there, in that she isn’t a complete amateur. I wanted it to be as believable as possible, without turning it into a police procedural thriller. In terms of research, I focused more on the locations (places that I know and love), and on the crimes in each book, rather than on Jodie herself. So I now know a lot about wild flowers in the North Cornwall area; Goldsmiths College art alumni (I went there myself, along with but not at the same time as people like Damien Hirst, Anthony Gormley, Damon Albarn and Mary Quant), and about the toxic properties of pufferfish. 

What is your writing process? Are you a sticky-note writer? Please say it isn’t so. I’ll be instantly jealous. Well, are you?

God no! I don’t get the whole sticky note thing. I never used to plan - I started off writing screenplays, and if you need to go back and rewrite things it’s much simpler with a script than with a novel (the word count of a script is probably about 25% of that of a novel). But I’ve found that I do need to outline novels, particularly when I’m writing a mystery; I need to know where the different twists and turns will be, where I’m going to plant the clues and the red herrings, and if I don’t plan it means I’ll probably be looking at a major rewrite. So I have an outline, sometimes quite rough, sometimes more detailed, but I will find as I’m writing that I have other ideas or I’ll deviate from it, it’s not set in stone. I think maybe the sticky note thing is helpful if you struggle with structure - it means you can write scenes and jig them around to fit - but I’m one of those annoying types who can just ‘do’ structure, so it seems like a waste of time to me.

What else are you working on?

I just finished outlining the next 3 books in the Nosey Parker series, so hopefully I’ll be writing them soon! I also have 3 other books outlined, romcoms rather than cozy mysteries, and I’ve got 2 others written that I’m trying to get out there. I’m pretty busy… 

Murder on the Menu is out now, as is the 2nd installment of The Nosey Parker series, A Brush with Death! A Sprinkle of Sabotage will be released next month. Buy here: mybook.to/Brush

Fiona Leitch is a writer with a chequered past. She's written for football and motoring magazines, DJ'ed at illegal raves and is a stalwart of the low budget TV commercial, even appearing as the Australasian face of a cleaning product called 'Sod Off'. After living in London and Cornwall she's finally settled in sunny New Zealand, where she enjoys scaring her cats by trying out dialogue on them. She spends her days dreaming of retiring to a crumbling Venetian palazzo, walking on the windswept beaches of West Auckland, and writing funny, flawed but awesome female characters. Find her on Twitter: @fkleitch

Thank you Fiona for taking time to answer my questions. As you can see, I'm pretty nosey too. So, readers, what genres do you read? Have you ventured out into the unknown and tried something new?  Are you a reformed book snob picky reader? Tell me about it.

Have a lovely day! 

Andie xx

Staying Focussed Or Writing When We Don't Want To

I’m writing this post two days after an angry mob stormed the US Capitol in protest of the certification of Joe Biden as the 46th president of the United States. During this time I was in the middle of a massive structural rewrites. All of the authors reading this post have an understanding of how intense this phase of the editing process is, this taking apart your novel and putting it back together to jibe with editorial suggestions. Of course, total focus is required. For this writer, total focus during a time of confusion, chaos, and fear was extremely difficult. On the day I sat down to get busy with my rewrites, I soon discovered that given the state of the world, I had the attention span of a single-celled amoeba. I needed to find a way to stay grounded and tuned into my work in progress, and I needed it quick! 

I logged off social media, despite being in the midst of promo around the release of the paperback version of The Betrayal. My free time that day should have been spent posting about my book, responding to comments, and thanking the people who posted book news on my behalf. But I was quickly mortified and captivated with imagery of the horrors at the US Capitol. The only thing to do was to to shut down FB, Twitter, and Insta. After I was safely away from SM, I set the timer on my cell phone for fifty minutes. During this time, I only worked on my book. I didn’t look at my phone or emails. When my fifty minutes were up, I’d take a fifteen to twenty minute break, enjoy a cup of tea and maybe do a bit of yoga. Then it was back to it. It would have been so very easy to blow off writing and spend the day glued to the shocking series of events being portrayed on the news. But a deadline is a deadline. And being a pro means sitting down and doing the work even when you don’t want to. The political drama is still unfolding in the US, and I'm still sticking to the 50 minute rule. My takeaway here is that my time is my most valuable asset. Curating how I spend it has been a timely lesson well learned. 

How do you make yourself write when surrounded by distraction? Drop your comment below. 

Happy writing, all. Hope you and your loved ones are keeping well. 

Terry