Our Fab-Yule-ous Decorations...

In which the Novelistas tell us about their favourite Christmas decorations!

And if you'd like the chance to win a fabulous Novelistas' book bundle, scroll down to the end of this post and we'll tell you how!

Trisha Ashley

My Santa tree topper is made of painted papier-mâché and is over a hundred years old. I know this, because it was bought with her pocket money by my mother's older sister when she was a little girl, and my mother is now 93... His red suit has faded into a soupy brown over the years, but in a misguided moment Mum tarted him up with glitter glue and a cotton wool beard.

Valerie-Anne Baglietto

My sweet and sorry-looking little snowman has graced the mantelpiece during the festive season for several years now, since my daughter ‘adopted’ it at her primary school Christmas fayre. Another child had made it anonymously, but out of all the other sock snowmen for sale it was the one my little girl chose to bring home, and somewhere along the line it lost an eye, yet that only makes it more precious. I wish that anonymous child somewhere could know that their creation found a good home with us, but I suppose that child is a stroppy teenager by now who might not care (although secretly in their heart, I hope they do!)

Annie Burrows 

I don't have a favourite ornament. But every year I do tend to pick up a few new ones. This year's addition to my Christmas collection is this cute Santa doormat!

Sophie Claire

Many years ago, before I was married, my future mother-in-law taught me how to make these hand-sewn decorations. Back then my day job wasn’t creative, so I was thrilled when after a couple of hours I had made something – and that’s when I caught the sewing bug.

Over the years I’ve moved on to bigger projects like patchwork quilts, but each Christmas I return to making these little decorations. I love to personalise them, picking fabrics with particular friends and family in mind, and when the children were small they used to help too, cutting out circles of fabric.

Making these decorations has become an important part of my Christmas preparations and I really look forward to cosy evenings spent stitching in front of the fire.

Beth Francis

In the late 1940s, a group of young German children were brought from their bombed-out cities to my home town to stay with local families for a few months. My grandmother looked after two of them.

They never forgot her, and every Christmas they would send a card with a small gift for her grandchildren. One year there was an advent calendar, rare here at that time; no one else in our street had one. Another year we were sent a tiny doll. Dressed with scraps from my mother’s sewing box, she has topped our Christmas tree ever since. She’s old and faded, but conjures up so many memories of Christmas over the past seventy years that she’s irreplaceable.

June Francis

Last year I visited Liverpool's Anglican cathedral shop just before Christmas and my eyes alighted on these bright sparkling miniature glass Christmas trees. I just had to have one. After buying one, I thought my tree lacked an angel, so I went around the shop and discovered a host of angels. I chose Angel Florence, thinking of my father's sister Florence who was found drowned in the Leeds Liverpool canal during the Second World War.

My middle name is Florence and I like to think of my aunt looking out for me, my sort of guardian angel.

Juliet Greenwood

The Christmas decoration with special memories is the fairy that stood on the top of each Christmas Tree for as long as I can remember. Since I was a little girl, it was always tied on first, before the tree went up. Then came the lights, followed by the tinsel and the rest of the decorations. Those old family Christmases have long gone, but I have inherited the fairy, along with some of the other decorations, which are now interspersed with ones I’ve collected over the years. So the day the fairy goes up on top of the tree is still the day Christmas begins.

Cheryl Lang

My favourite Christmas ornaments are two snowmen and a later addition of a little girl. This is me being sentimental. When my first son arrived, he was only a couple of months old for his first Christmas, so we had to have a tree. I began collecting baubles and I found a jolly snowman and decided this was his special one. Some years later when son number 2 arrived, I remembered the snowman and amazingly found another one. Go forward a number of years, my daughter arrived and before her first Christmas I found this little girl with blonde plaits. This, I imagined might be how she’d look in a few years’ time.

Louise Marley

When I was little my father would take me everywhere - probably to give my poor mother a break - and I can remember going into a petrol station when I was about four, seeing this Nativity scene and falling in love with it. I don't know why. Perhaps I thought it was some kind of dolls' house. But my father bought it for me and I spent many happy hours playing with it - until I was told it had to be packed away because it was a 'Christmas decoration'! But it came out again the following year, and the year after that, and perhaps this is why it has lasted so many years. The Star of Bethlehem fell off very quickly, to be replaced by a milk bottle top, and at some point I lost one of the sheep. And a few years back my husband accidentally crunched it underfoot! But a bit of Superglue later and it was soon as good as new!

Related Posts:

All I Want for Christmas (Group Post)

Rum Cake and Tinsel (Trisha Ashley)

A Christmas Gift from The Novelistas! (Group Post)

How Grandma Invented Christmas (Louise Marley)

Christmas Traditions (Cheryl Lang)

Tips for Being a Domestic Writer-Goddess at Christmas (Group Post)

My Favourite Christmas Tradition (Sophie Claire)

A Satsuma and a Sugar Mouse (Trisha Ashley)

Competition!

Win a Novelistas' Book Bundle!

If you'd like to be in with a chance to win a Novelistas' Book Bundle you can enter via Rafflecopter below. It's simple to use and the more clicks (follow us on Twitter, follow us on Facebook, etc) the more chances you have to win. The competition will run from 9th December to 16th December 2018. Due to the pressure on the postal system at this time of year, we're afraid your prize will probably arrive after Christmas!

Terms and Conditions: We're sorry but this competition is only open to those living in the UK. No alternative prize will be offered. Your personal details won't be stored for longer than the competition runs and your details won't be passed onto anyone else. We will only contact you if you are a winner. If the winner does not respond within 48 hours of being notified, another name will be drawn.

Tips: It sometimes helps if you are already logged onto Facebook or Twitter before you try to enter. If you have trouble entering via a mobile phone, try a laptop/desktop computer instead. If you don't wish to use the Rafflecopter app, you can also enter via our Facebook page.

Good Luck!

a Rafflecopter giveaway

Gladfest 2018: Joanna Cannon Talk

Gladfest 2018

Two weeks ago I attended the annual literary festival known as ‘Gladfest’ at Gladstone’s Library in Hawarden, North Wales. A mix of informal chats, talks, readings, and workshops, the speakers this year included Joanna Cannon (The Trouble with Goats and Sheep), Sarah Perry (The Essex Serpent), Miranda Kaufmann (The Black Tudors) and Lucy Mangan (Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading). The festival started on Friday evening and lasted until late on Sunday afternoon.

Gladstone's Library, Hawarden

Although the festival is mainly aimed at readers, some of the authors offered tips for would-be writers. In particular, Joanna Cannon spoke at length about her working day and how she became published, and I thought readers of this blog would be interested in what she had to share. As I didn’t take written notes, I have paraphrased.

Joanna Cannon

Joanna tries to avoid giving writing advice. In fact, she jokingly said that her writing advice would be to never give writing advice! She never dreamt her books would be so successful and she finds it mind-blowing that her books have been translated and are available in countries all over the world.

She likes to write about characters that would ordinarily be overlooked in society. Her writing day starts at 3.00 am (it's deliberate! She finds she works better that way), when she walks her dog across the fields near her home and thinks about the story she’s writing. She doesn’t plan her books. She has a vague idea of what is going to happen and how the story will end. She writes about 1,000 words a day, reading back over what she has written the day before and editing it before writing something new. Rather than writing a rough first draft, she writes and polishes as she goes along. She doesn’t have a study but prefers to move from sofa to sofa around her house.

When Joanna wrote her first novel she wrote it for herself, never believing it would go on to be so successful, or that people would start analysing it – or that American publishers would want to change her words and characters to suit an American audience! When she wrote her second novel she made the mistake of wondering how others would judge her work and if readers from other countries would understand what she was trying to say, and she found this really stifled her creativity. The way she moved past that was to realise you have to write your story the way you want to write it. It has to be your story, that only you can tell. If readers like it, that's great, but she now accepts you can never please everyone all the time.

Joanna’s first book, The Trouble with Goats and Sheep, was published after she attended a writing conference. She had no idea if her writing was any good, so she entered a competition where writers had to read the first 500 words of their book aloud to a room of publishing professionals. She won, and by Monday had offers of representation from seven literary agents. A few weeks later she had a publishing contract.

Joanna admits to reading her reviews, good and bad, and says that as a writer you do have to laugh sometimes at the one star ones. For example, in her first book, set firmly in 1970s England, one of her readers had been disappointed that there was no mention of Battenberg cake. So she made sure it was in the second book, joking that she knew at least one reader would be happy!

She has the voices of the characters in her head before she starts writing and tries to find something to pull the reader into the story, to make them keep reading. As a reader, she’s a sucker for books that have a secret. Although her books have been labelled ‘uplit’ by the media, personally she enjoys reading dark, twisty thrillers. And as she tends to skip any kissing scenes, there is no kissing in any of her books!

If you'd like to listen to Joanna's talk yourself, it is available via SoundCloud here for another two weeks.

The talks by some of the other authors can also be heard on SoundCloud here.

Links:

Joanna Cannon

Gladstone’s Library

Gladfest

Photograph copyright (except book covers): Louise Marley

RNA Conference 2018 Round-Up from Annie Burrows

Novelista Annie Burrows went to the Romantic Novelists' Conference this year in Leeds, and gives her own, very personal, take on the event.

(Warning – this is looooong!)

This year’s conference of the Romantic Novelists' Association was held at Leeds Trinity University.

The first thing I did on arrival was send pictures of my room to my daughter, as I’d promised to keep in touch with her during the weekend.  A quick recce of the kitchen (plenty of gin and tonic in the fridge so I knew I was going to get on well with whoever was on my landing) and then it was off to the first talk.

“Building a Bestseller” by Sue Moorcroft.  Sue, and her agent, described in great detail how she went from moderate success writing with Choc Lit, to having an Amazon number one bestseller.  It was about halfway through the talk that I realised this wasn’t what I had expected.  Although it was very interesting, I had hoped to learn how to write a bestseller!

Next came a coffee break and the official welcome from Jan Jones, conference organiser, during which she advised us not to attempt using the safes in our student rooms. (Too late!  Both The Golfer and I had wrestled with ours, and accidentally locked them shut with no way of opening them again - fortunately without any valuables inside.)

My second session was “Falling in Love – with Mills & Boon.”  And as it actually said on the programme, “followed by workshop”, I was prepared to do a bit of work.  After a short description of what editors are looking for in the various lines, and a quiz to determine which type of hero we would prefer to write, we split up into groups, to prepare an outline of the conflicts that might arise between a hero and heroine of whichever line the quiz put us, and think about how to show them falling in love with each other in spite of them.  Fortunately, I got mostly B’s, which put me in the historical group.

The first thing we had to decide was an era.  The lady next to me shouted Saxon!, and nobody saw any reason to argue, because straight away we could find a source of external conflict by having the hero a conquering Norman, and the heroine a defeated Saxon.  However, we then decided it would be a bit more interesting, if the hero could be a defeated Saxon, and the heroine a conquering Norman.  But how could we throw them together in a way that might cause them to see that they were uniquely suited to each other, in spite of the external conflicts arising from them being on opposing sides?  We’d just about decided to make Alaric (the Saxon hero) a groom employed by Elinor’s father, and send them on a journey to a convent where Elinor is going to take the veil rather than marry the man her father has chosen for her, when our time ran out.

I really, really hope somebody from our group writes that story, as I want to know how Elinor and Alaric can possibly find their happy ever after!

That was the end of the formal part of Friday.  It was back to the student hall of residence, where those of us in flat 6 got to know each other over gin and Pringles before going down to dinner.

On the way in I was grabbed by one of the Mills & Boon editors and plied with free wine.  Which was lovely, but after earlier intake of alcohol I found myself wilting over the pudding, and had to retire to bed before hearing who won the “tweet a story” competition. You can find all the entries by searching: #RNAConf18Love.

The next day I discovered the winner was Kate Johnson: “First, he broke hearts. Then he was hated. Then they laughed at him. But you can’t keep a good man down. They saw him console his enemy, they saw him win. And a nation fell in love. Some heroes wear capes; this one just needed the right waistcoat..."

Saturday dawned bright and hot… Fortunately I had packed an electric fan, which had been wafting the air in my student bedroom round, keeping me relatively cool all night.  It had also drowned out the noise of the aircraft coming into land at Leeds Bradford Airport, which was about a mile away.  (Or possibly more.  Perhaps it only sounded as though it was a mile away.)

I was a bit late into the first session, “Breathing life into historical characters”, because The Golfer had a tee-time emergency which required a lot of emailing and phoning round to get him onto an alternative course.  And so I’m still not sure which speaker was Carol McGrath and which was Charlotte Betts.  However, after listening to how the speaker became interested in what happened to people after the fire of London, and hearing her vivid description of the spice warehouses burning, shooting out flames of various colours, I really need to read The Spice Merchant’s Wife by Charlotte Betts.

Saturday’s second session (for me) was given by Alison May, and was about self-editing.  Alison is a really entertaining speaker.  Not only that, but I wrote pages of notes which I will apply next time I’m editing my manuscript.  But, glancing back through them, I can see that what I’ve printed in capitals, and underlined twice, is the title of her next book, which I really want to read, having listened to her speak. All That Was Lost is (available from Amazon from 6^th Sept).

Last morning session was given by Fiona Harper, and called “Romance Structure – how three-act structure applies to love stories”.  And that description was spot on.  Again, I have pages of notes about applying a three act structure to a story, with appropriate turning points.  And again, in capital letters, and underlined, are the titles of two more books I want to buy!  Story Trumps Structure by Steve James and The Memory Collector by Fiona Harper.

At lunch time came my favourite moment of the entire conference.  An as-yet-unpublished-writer I

sat next to made my day by saying that I didn’t look old enough to be a grandmother.  And then trumped that by giving a very flattering opinion about people who write for Mills & Boon. (I gave her a signed copy of my latest release, naturally.)

However, she then proved that I am not as fantastic as I’d like to think, by telling me all about the session she’d attended that morning, about pitching a story.  It was, apparently, the first part of the session I was about to attend, “Writing a Synopsis.”  Had I read my conference notes properly (or at all) I would have seen that I was supposed to have attended both parts, as they were really one 2 hour lecture chopped into two bits.  Also, the speaker, Debbie Taylor, meant this synopsis to be the kind of thing to send to a publisher after having completed a story, as part of a pitch to publishers and editors, NOT as an outline of what you intend to write, which was what I wanted to learn how to do.  Because, even though I have now had 27 books published, I still find writing a synopsis extremely hard.  I brought two things out of that session.  The first was the heartening news that agents often take little notice of a synopsis, because so many authors are so bad at writing them, (yay!  I’m not alone!). The second, from the workshop part of the session, was a one-line character description of my hero which I am definitely going to include in the synopsis I will send into my editor:

“Thomas Norrington, handsome, fair-haired Marquess of Devizes, can persuade just about any woman into his bed with one lazy smile.”

The last talk I attended on Saturday was “Truth can be stranger than fiction…Barbara Erskine in conversation with Nicola Cornick.”  Once again, in my notes, I have the title of Barbara’s next book underlined and in block capitals.  However, after hearing Barbara describe how she lived in a house where she saw a ghost child sitting on the stairs crying, and how various members of her family had psychic links with each other I changed my mind about buying it. The Ghost Tree sounds like the kind of thing that would give me nightmares!

I then had to spend some time getting glammed up for the gala dinner, especially as the historical writers for Mills & Boon who were attending had already agreed to do a Facebook video for the Harlequin Historical books page.  You can view that here. And note that I am virtuously drinking orange juice, rather than bubbly, since I had already partaken of…no, not gin this time, but Lemsip.

The meal was lovely, the company even better, and at the end of the meal, the winner of the Elizabeth Goudge Trophy was announced. Elisabeth Hobbes, fellow historical writer for Mills & Boon, captivated the judges with an opening for a story titled, The Child from the Sea.

Sunday morning I emerged rather bleary-eyed after a sleepless night due to throbbing sinuses, in spite of the Lemsip, although it had given me a chance to start reading one of the books I found in my goody bag, Single for the Summer by Mandy Baggot.

The first session after breakfast and packing all my stuff and running it to the car, was aptly named “Emotional Resilience for Writers”.  Andrew Cornick, who has worked as a psychotherapist for the NHS (by this time I had read the background notes about who was giving the talks and what they were actually talking about), gave some very useful hints about maintaining mental wellbeing.  I will remember, in particular, his description of NATs (negative automatic thoughts) because I had been bitten the night before, (I sat as near to the doors as I could, to get a cool breeze.  Unfortunately along with the breeze, came various flying insects) and spent a lot of his talk scratching the gnat bites.

After coffee break, it was in to “The Bestseller Experiment” a talk given by Mark Stay about how he and a friend decided to write a book together and get it to the top of the kindle charts within a year.  Nothing he said will be of any use to me, I shouldn’t think, but it was a very amusing session, and, once again, I want to read the book he wrote, Back to Reality by Mark Stay and Mark Oliver.

And finally, my last session of the conference, which was called “Word Wenches – two nations, one language of romance?”  The Word Wenches blog is one of the longest-running author collaboration blogs on the web. And it was fascinating to hear the take on the state of publishing both in the US and the UK from such talented and experienced writers.  Who didn’t agree on everything, and were comfortable enough with each other to say so!  My takeaway from that session – “There is an audience for everything.  You just need to find it.”

Other lessons learned?

Lesson One: Read the accompanying leaflet describing the talks in detail.  Don’t just choose the talks on the title alone.

Lesson Two: Do not attempt to lock anything away in a safe before reading the instructions.

Lesson Three: Do not mix gin and Lemsip

Lesson Four: If sitting next to an open door at night, first spray self liberally with insect repellent.

Lesson Five: Do not enter a raffle for an enormous gift basket if you are going home on the train.