The Ideas Jar

On the first Friday of each month, Novelista Annie Burrows will be drawing a question out of the jar where we've been putting all the questions about the writing process posed by readers -

This month, the question that came out of the jar was:

How do you decide on how many secondary characters should appear in a book?

1) Planned out list?

2) As and when required?

That's a very good question Cheryl! (waves)

As you know, I write for Harlequin Mills & Boon, so the focus is very much on the two main characters, and their love story.

However, they do need a world in which to act out their story, and I do have to populate it with secondary characters.

When I first start thinking about any story, the first thing I do is imagine the backstory of my hero and heroine.  I have to know what kind of childhood they had, which means placing them in a family.  And at this stage I often do write out a list of "the sisters and the cousins and the aunts" (to paraphrase W. S. Gilbert.)  I may also give them a pet such as a dog, and since my books are set in Regency England, a horse (with its own personality.)

There may also be a villain, with henchmen, who will also go on the list.

But then I start writing.  And my characters, at this point, become much more rounded.  And the world in which I have them moving becomes far more detailed as well.  As the story develops, I do find I need "extras", as well as the initial cast I drew up.  A butler, to answer the door, a footman to carry a note, a maidservant to help my heroine dress and undress, and various lords and ladies to populate the ballrooms.

But then, sometimes, characters also just walk into the story without my say so because they decide they have a part to play.

For instance, when I was working on the Silk and Scandal series, I sent my heroine to the house of her estranged half brother, and when she knocked on the door, it was opened by an Indian manservant I never knew existed before.

Since another author was responsible for the part of the series that dealt with this half brother, I immediately e-mailed her, to tell her what had happened.  I think the email went something like - "Midge has just knocked on Stephano's door, and it has been opened by an Indian manservant.  Have you any idea where he came from?"

As this email went to another author, she was not at all phased by this, and immediately emailed back with a whole story of how Stephano had rescued this man whilst seeking out jewels in India, and how he was now a devoted servant who would protect his master with his life.

It was as if neither of us invented him.  He was just there, hovering in the wings, waiting to walk on and play his part.

So, in short, the answer to the two-part question is Yes!  Both!  I start off planning the characters I think I'm going to need, add others when I need them, and also get surprised by characters I didn't know were lurking in the background, who simply want to get in on the act.

So - do you have any questions about the writing process you would like to ask?

If so, please leave your question in the comments box.  All questions will go into the jar, and I will draw one out each month. 

Annie's latest release is "In Bed with the Duke" which you can buy from Harlequin in the US or Mills & Boon in the UK

Z is for Zombie Kittens - by Annie Burrows

On the first Friday of every month, Novelista Annie Burrows has been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer.  And is dealing with themes in alphabetical order.  This month, she's reached Z...and assures us it stands for zombie kittens!

If you've been following my a - z then you'll recall that last month I had to resort to looking in the dictionary to find a word beginning with "y" that I could use to talk about the writer's life.  At that point, I thought I'd have as much difficulty finding a "z" word.

But then I had the nightmare about zombie kittens.

The zombie kittens got my son, my daughter, and my husband.  I was left alone in a clearing, swirling a medieval mace round my head to stave them off, and began to yell - because although normal kittens are cute and fluffy, zombie kittens have glowing red eyes, and lots of sharp pointy teeth, not to mention the fact they can climb trees and then dive off branches onto your head.  I yelled so loud as a particularly terrifying tortoiseshell launched itself at my face, its lethal claws flexed, that I woke myself up.  I also woke up my long-suffering husband.

Next morning, when he asked what my nightmare had been about, and I told him, he couldn't stop laughing.  He can never remember what he's dreamed about, let alone have a dream so vivid and terrifying it wakes him up shouting.

And that brings me round to the point.  Even my nightmares aren't your average run-of-the mill ones that everyone has about finding you've gone to the shops with no clothes on, or all your teeth are falling out.  (You do all have nightmares like that, right?)  Because I have a rather overactive imagination.  Which never switches off, not even when I'm asleep.

And that's what makes me a writer of fiction.  When people ask me where I get all my ideas for stories from, I have never known what to tell them.  Because ideas just come.  And they come from the same place that those zombie kittens came from.  The fervid depths of my imagination.

It isn't something I have studied to acquire.  It's just the way I'm made.  It started in childhood.  On the way home from school, I'd chatter away to my imaginary friends.  In the playground, I'd gallop round in an imaginary episode of The Virginian, (in which I starred) or hide from Daleks (saving the world in the process).  People who have imaginations like mine look at the person sitting opposite them on a train, and instead of asking them what they do for a living, imagine a conversation in which they offer to murder someone you hate in exchange for murdering someone they hate.   Or describe entire worlds that can be reached through a wardrobe in a spare room, or create a language spoken by a race of immortal beings who live in an enchanted forest.

We can't help it.  We don't have to strive for plots, or characters, or scenes.  They are continuously dancing about in our heads.  And if we don't write them down, or act them out, then they keep on dancing, and shouting, and nagging, until we tell their story to somebody, in some way.

Even the zombie kittens.

kitten pics courtesy of pixabay

Annie's latest release is "In Bed With the Duke" which has been an Amazon UK bestseller, and reached the top 100 in the Regency charts of Amazon.com.  You can still buy it, and discover what sort of stories she dreams up, when she isn't dreaming about zombie kittens.

 

Y is for...? by Annie Burrows

On the first Friday of every month, Novelista Annie Burrows has been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer. And is dealing with themes in alphabetical order. This month, she's reached Y which is for...

OK, I have to confess that I resorted to going through the dictionary to find a word that began with Y, round which to write this month's blog. I could have cheated, and gone with "Why" which would have given me a lot of leeway. But I didn't want to do that.

Anyway, there aren't that many words in the dictionary beginning with Y, so I knew it wouldn't take me long to read through them.

Thankfully, it took only a few seconds to discover this little gem: Yesteryear which is a poetical or archaic form for "a time in the past". Which seemed appropriate, as that is where I set my stories.

I've always had a fascination for yesteryear. It started when I was a little girl, with family trips to various stately homes. When we got home, my sister and I would dress up as ladies of the manor, and romp round the garden on imaginary horses - or, if it was wet, we'd draw plans of our ideal stately home, complete with dungeons, secret passages, and of course, massive libraries.

I started reading historical romances at school, although I didn't know it then. I thought I was studying Jane Austen, and Thomas Hardy. I still thought I was studying English literature at University, without realizing that reading all those stories, written in the past, had given me a love of reading about people from the past. After I left university, I didn't want to keep on studying great literature, but I did still find myself gravitating towards stories set in the past.

At first, I devoured books by writers such as Norah Lofts. I absolutely loved the way she took us into the lives of relatively ordinary people and brought an era to life. And then carried that story to the next generation.

Then I discovered Georgette Heyer, and learned that historical stories didn't need to be dark and melodramatic, they could be amusing romps.

And then, much later, when I was doing a writing course and I began to research the market, I discovered the "Masquerade" line produced by Mills & Boon. And I fell in love with historical romance - as a reader and as a writer. These were the kind of stories that were already forming in my imagination - where simple country misses won the heart of an apparently cold, aloof, brooding aristocrat. Or survived kidnap by pirates, or ran away from evil guardians disguised as boys, and generally discovered they were far stronger and braver than they'd been given credit for.

So I began to write stories set primarily in the Regency era. Why Regency? Because there was an established market for that type of story, and because I thought I knew most about that era, having read so many others set in that time. Stories, I feel, should provide an escape from real life. And the Regency is a great place for many of us to escape to, since it is far enough away from Nowadays to feel suitably exotic, but familiar enough so that we don't feel all adrift when we get there.

The only trouble is, once I began to write Regency romance, in earnest, I began to discover just how little I knew. When I sent my first heroine on a journey to find her long-lost brother in Spain, for example, I had no idea what route she might take, or how she'd get back to England once he died, either. I didn't know a thing about troop movements in the Peninsula, or how wounded soldiers were looked after, or what happened to their effects once they'd died. What was worse, it was extremely difficult to find out. I would go to the library for a book on a specific topic, and read lots and lots of them without finding out the one thing I wanted to learn. (Although I picked up a lot of other interesting facts instead). The only way round it, at that time, was to plough on, and hope for the best. Anything I didn't know, I skirted round, but even so, I'm sure I made a lot of mistakes.

Fortunately, Nowadays, I have access to the internet. If I want to know how long it would take to travel by stagecoach from Yorkshire to London, I can probably find out within a matter of minutes. And what coaching inns my characters would be likely to have changed their horses, too.

Annie's latest book is a sort of road trip, through a section of fictional Regency countryside, since she is still wary of sending any of her heroes to a coaching inn in a real town which didn't exist in Real Life. However, the heroine does discover she can survive no matter what the villains try to do, and impresses the hero with not only her bravery and ingenuity, but also her singing voice.

You can find it at Amazon, and Mills & Boon

X is for...X rated (or not?) by Annie Burrows

On the first Friday of every month, Novelista Annie Burrows has been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer. And is dealing with themes in alphabetical order. This month, she's reached X...

Last month, I asked what I should write about when I got to x, and several people suggested x rated.

I don't think I actually write x rated stuff, to be honest. In my mind, an x rating means erotica. And although I do write some steamy scenes, my main focus is on what goes on inside the heroine's head and heart, not the hero's bedroom.

It's not that I shy away from writing love scenes. I write about people falling in love, and a big part of that process involves sexual attraction. If I didn't include that part of my heroine's journey to her happy ever after, I would feel as if I was leaving out a huge part of her story. But that is what it is - just a part of her story. Sometimes the fact that the hero and heroine make love is an essential part of the storyline, but sometimes it just isn't.

Because, during the regency period, when my stories are set, single people didn't have the sexual freedom we enjoy today. There was a stricter moral code in place, and harsher punishments for women who didn't stick to those rules. Men sometimes had to make amends by marrying the woman they'd slept with, but by and large, it was the women left with the babies, the women who bore the brunt of society's disapproval, and the children who were left with the tag of bastardy.

Of course, if you were wealthy, there were ways round the rules that bound everyone else. Royal bastards were often given titles and lands. Girls from wealthy families who fell pregnant before marriage might be sent away to remote estates for a while, the child given to a humble family who'd receive wages for bringing it up, and the girl subsequently married off to someone who would be prepared to accept compensation for his bride's lack of purity. She wouldn't perhaps pay such a high price for having sex outside marriage, but she would still have a "stain" on her reputation - if anyone were to find out.

However, this means that my heroes and heroines are going to have to think very carefully about sleeping with each other before marriage. Which in turn means I have to think very carefully about how far to let them go if they aren't married. I do aim for historical accuracy, you see, and often I just can't imagine a scenario in which an unmarried couple would leap into bed with each other.

Which means that many of my books end up being what I would describe as "courtship" books. The couple might feel very attracted to each other, they may do a lot of flirting, but they won't fully consummate their relationship until after they are married. Or at least on the verge of marriage. That isn't to say there are no scenes where the hero tries to go as far as he dares. Which makes the ultimate scene, where he can finally make the heroine completely his, all the more satisfying (I hope!)

However, occasionally, I do write what I call "honeymoon" books. And the way I manage to do this is by having my protagonists marry at the outset, thinking they are going into a convenient marriage, and then finding they can't keep their hands off each other. And, because they're married, they don't have to. In fact, they tend to solve a lot of their issues in the bedroom (just like in real life?)

This means that my books don't all have the same level of heat. My 2015 Christmas book, for example, (The Captain's Christmas Bride) started with a girl accidentally seducing a stranger and having to marry him. And him believing that the only thing they have going for them is sexual compatibility. (You can imagine how that goes!)

In contrast, in the novella which is going to be out for Christmas in 2016 my hero and heroine don't get up to anything more than heated glances and one scorching kiss. It just wouldn't have been plausible for people in their situation, you see.

OK - now, here's a teaser for you. Do you think you can guess the level of heat of the books I've written from the covers I've posted in this blog?

Since the first two covers are both of the same book, I would say it's not likely!

So - what do you think my next book, "In Bed with The Duke" will be, from looking at its cover? Courtship book, or honeymoon book?

For more clues - you can read the blurb here

And you can read the opening chapter here 

T is for Time Management by Annie Burrows

On the first Friday of every month, Novelista Annie Burrows has been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer.  And is dealing with themes in alphabetical order.  This month, she's reached T...so she'll be talking about how she manages her time.

I'm supposed to write two books a year, at 75,000 words each.  Every time I get a new deadline, one of the first things I do is to sit down and work out a timetable which will ensure I get my story in on time.

My last one went something like this:

Due August 31st.

75,000 at 10k per week (or 2 chapters per week) for 1st draft.  = 2k per day.  Will take 7 and a half weeks.

If start 4th March, should be done by April 30th.

2nd draft - revise 3 chapters per week = 8 weeks (assuming 15 chapters)

should take until June 17th

That should have given me a full two and a half months to do a third draft, which is when I usually have only a few little tweaks to iron out.  I was hoping I would be able to get the commissioned story finished, and then spend some time on a book I'd like to self-publish.

But what happened?  Well, to start with, my first draft was over 30,000 words short.  I'd written all the story I could think of, and the only way I could have put in anything else would have been shameless padding.

Fortunately, the Novelistas helped me with some brainstorming, during which we came up with a new ending.  So that my second draft, with a completely new ending, which I managed to finish on June 29th, came in at 64,000 words.  Still a bit short, but not too far off for that stage of my drafts, so I was reasonably happy.  I still had a full two months before the deadline, although I was by then two weeks behind where I wanted to be.

However, I was going to the Romance Writers of America conference at the end of July, which would mean two weeks off, plus any time necessary to recover from jet lag which always turns my brain to mush.  So I thought it would be a good idea to get my 3rd draft done before I flew out.

But then I had an unexpected visitor, who stayed a week.  And a teacher husband at home for school holidays underfoot.  So by the time I flew out I had achieved practically nothing.

My next entry in my "progress with wip" file reads:

returned to work on August 10th.

Have until 31st to deadline = 3 weeks.

Need to revise 13 chapters = min 1 chapter per day.

I finally submitted the book on September 4th, having spent the previous week hunched over my laptop feverishly typing.  And ended up with back spasm, followed by a migraine.

So what had gone wrong with my brilliant plan?  Ok - I knew there would be a couple of weeks out at the end of July for the trip to New York, but I shouldn't have had to end up frantically trying to finish by the deadline.  I'd worked out that I'd have plenty of free time - I'd even hoped I could work on that self-published book that has been on the back burner for what feels like forever.  And this isn't the first time it's happened either.  The last few books I have produced have all gone the same way.  I've started off with a brilliant timetable, which appears to give me plenty of time, and end up begging my editor for an extension.  And given myself a migraine getting it finished.  I'm on my 21st book at the moment, so you'd think by now I would have learned how to write a bit faster than I did to start off with.

So this time, on the recommendation of a blog I read that suggested I should be able to write 10,000 words a day if I followed their advice (cue hollow laughter) I kept a writing diary.  To see if I could pick out patterns.  Which would show me where I was going wrong.  Wasn't I spending enough time at my laptop?  I certainly felt as if I was working as hard as I could.  So perhaps I was taking too many days off to gallivant - although time spent with the Novelistas wouldn't count, I promised myself.  I frequently need their input.  (And the home-made cake).

Anyway, what I discovered when I read through my writing diary was this deadly phrase:

Revisions landed.

And everything made sense.  Because, when I counted how much time I'd spent on revisions to my previous book, when I should have been ploughing forward with my next one, it came to a shocking total of 6 weeks.

The revisions came in two rounds, the first of which took me four weeks, and the second, two.

Even when I did get back to my wip, I found phrases in my writing diary like:

Spent an hour in afternoon just trying to get my head round chapter 10 again

So, it's revisions that are the culprit.  If I hadn't had those revisions, my book would have been submitted in plenty of time, and I could have worked on my own personal project.

So, clearly, when I'm making my timetable for my next book, I'm going to have to factor in those 6 weeks for revisions. And next time, hopefully my writing diary won't have comments like:

Change of plan -

All went to hell in a handcart coz of revisions.  Now need to re date all these targets

So now I am officially only 1 week behind revised schedule.
 

Wow.  It's going to be tight.

 Annie's 20th book, "The Captain's Christmas Bride" is on sale now. 

She has just finished the second round of revisions for her 21st book, and is off for a lie-down in a darkened room. 

When she recovers, you can find her on facebook or twitter @NovelistaAnnie, and her website is here.

P is for...Point of View by Annie Burrows

On the first Friday of every month, Novelista Annie Burrows has been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer.  And is dealing with themes in alphabetical order.  This month, she's reached P...

While I was trying to get my first book published, I read a very helpful "how to" book called "The 1st 5 pages", by Noah Lukeman, which contained a piece of writing advice that stunned me.  It suggested that before I even started my story, I ought to decide from whose viewpoint I was going to tell it, and whether to do so in 1st, 2nd, or 3rd person.

Er...what?

What is a viewpoint character, I wondered, and what is the difference between first, second or third person narration?

In a nutshell, in case you didn't know either, the viewpoint character is the person through whose eyes a reader will experience the story.  The person whose story it is.  If it is written in 1st person, it will be "I" did this that or the other.  I'm currently reading a fabulous thriller by Dick Francis, who always seems to tell his story in the first person, and comes up with some amazing opening lines because of it.  Because he uses the first person, you always feel as if you are experiencing the story alongside someone who has only just gone through it themselves, and is telling you all about it.

2nd person is "you" did it.  Apparently this is the hardest of all to write and is rarely used.  I can't think of a single example to give you - sorry!  3rd person is "she/he" did this that or the other, and is the most commonly used.

I knew that writing a story is a kind of world-building exercise.  I'd always thought of it as painting a picture with words.  But this chapter likened it to playing a piece of music, in which any inconsistency with the viewpoint would sound like a clashing, crashing discord, shattering the harmony.

So I read the single chapter dealing with viewpoint very carefully, and then looked at my own current manuscript, as recommended.  Firstly, I discovered that I had been writing from my heroine's viewpoint (mostly) in 3rd person all along.  Which, coincidentally, turned out to be what Mills & Boon recommended in their guidelinesat the time.  And since Mills & Boon was the publisher I was targeting, it was a jolly good job too.

I also learnt about the various ways I could make mistakes with handling viewpoint.  I could change from the viewpoint of one character to another with bewildering rapidity, I could tell sections of the story from the viewpoint of characters who really didn't matter, and shouldn't have come to the fore, or I could fumble it altogether by having a character say or think something she couldn't possibly have known.

I'd thought my writing was pretty good, before then, but after reading the chapter on viewpoint, that story suddenly seemed full of discordant notes.  I had indeed switched viewpoint so quickly any reader would have had trouble keeping up with who was the main player in a scene.  I had also written substantial chunks from the point of view of characters who shouldn't have been speaking directly to my reader.

Those errors wouldn't have been errors at all if I was writing the kind of story where it is fine to have several people giving their account of the story.  In crime novels, for example, one incident can be related by several witnesses.  I've also read family sagas

where the thread gets taken up by someone from the next generation.  So long as the change from one character's viewpoint to another is made clear and doesn't confuse the reader, that method can suit certain types of story.

However, since I'm writing romance, and I want to create an intense emotional experience for my reader, it is far better to get right inside my heroine's head, and stay there (unless I need to let people know what the hero is thinking).  When the reader knows what my heroine knows, understand what motivates her to act the way she does, it creates empathy.  Even if the heroine acts badly, the readers should know why she did what she did, and will therefore still keep rooting for her.  Same goes for the hero.

But if I introduce scenes from anyone else's point of view, and take the focus off the main characters, it dilutes the intense emotion I want my reader to feel.  There was no need for the woman my heroine (Amity) met in the dressmaker to suddenly start talking to the reader.  It was Amity's story, not Mrs Kirkham's.  Similarly, I shouldn't have written anything from Amity's brother's point of view, particularly since he was going to die in chapter 4.

Nor should I have had Amity knowing exactly what her brother was thinking, no matter how close they'd been as children, except by reading his body language and taking her best guess.

In fact the only viewpoint mistake I hadn't made was switching from first (which I'd never used) to second or third.

So, once I'd learned about the various types of viewpoint, I then began to think a bit harder about whose viewpoint to use in any scene.  To create the most impact for the reader, it's best to think about which character will have the most invested at the time.  Who has the most to lose or gain?  Since I write romance, I really only have the choice between the hero or the heroine, but it is a point that still needs careful consideration.  Do I focus on the heroine's determination to resist the hero, whose rakish reputation has already made her turn down his proposal of marriage more than once, in spite of the almost overwhelming attraction she feels for him?  Or do I get inside the hero's head, and let the reader know that this time, he has really fallen in love, and his devil-may-care smile hides his fear of rejection?

 

Once I'd got the hang of considering point of view, it made a huge difference to my writing.  Once I stopped digressing into the mind of the heroine's brother, his commanding officer, a woman Amity met in the dressmaker, or anyone else, the story focussed more closely on my heroine, and her journey of discovery, and therefore became more interesting.

Amity still hasn't found a publisher - but I'm working on it!

 

 

 Annie's latest book is "A Mistress for Major Bartlett", 2nd in the "Brides of Waterloo" series from Harlequin.  Currently available from Amazon

M is for...Mills and Boon by Annie Burrows

On the first Friday of every month, Novelista Annie Burrows has been sharing a very personal view of what it is like to be a writer.  And is dealing with themes in alphabetical order.  This month, she's reached M...for Mills & Boon.

Like many people who become writers, I started off being the kind of child who always had her nose in a book of some description.

Unlike many, I didn't have a burning ambition to become a writer.  It just never occurred to me.  Not until Margaret Thatcher abolished student loans, just a couple of years before my daughter was due to go to university, that is.  We hadn't a penny saved up to fund her education, and were suddenly faced with the huge cost of her getting a degree.

How to get the money to put her through college?

I know, I thought.  I'll write a book.  I've read so many, I'm sure I could do just as well.  Because when I wasn't reading a story, I was daydreaming.  Those sort of Walter Mitty-ish daydreams where I was the heroine, getting into all sorts of unlikely adventures.

And I had been to university and got a degree in English, so I knew all about what makes great literature.  I was sure, if only I put my mind to it, I could quickly come up with a bestseller.

And I did come up with what I thought was a brilliant idea.  A re-working of the Babel story from the bible, which would show how it affected one family, as the world they knew collapsed into chaos around them.  It was a kind of allegorical, apocalyptic examination of both family dynamics, and social conditioning, which ended up proving that we are all only as civilized as the society in which we live.

At that point I made a discovery.  It is a lot harder to write a novel than I thought.  You can't just sit down and write your ideas down in the order you get them.  You've got to tease out the message, and have enough action going on to get that message across without boring the reader to sleep.  How did I discover this?  Well, because I read sections aloud to my family as I finished them.  If they really did fall asleep, I knew I needed to re-write that bit.

Anyway, that was how I learned to write - by sitting down and doing it, then trying out the effect of my prose on my poor unsuspecting family.

At last it was finished.  My masterpiece.  I got hold of a copy of the Writers and Artists Yearbook and started sending it out, eagerly awaiting the thrilled reaction of publishers who would all be clamouring for the privilege of printing it.

You won't be surprised to hear that none of them wanted it.  Most didn't even bother replying.  Which puzzled and hurt me.

By this time, my daughter had started at college, and I clearly wasn't going to make my fortune with my book, at least not right away.  So I had to go out and get a Real Job, which meant I had less time to devote

to writing that bestseller.  Which I wasn't going to abandon.  I'd got hooked on writing.

I felt I just needed to work out where I was going wrong.  Perhaps I needed a bit of tuition, or something?

But since I was working I couldn't go on a full time writing course.

However, I did see an advert for a correspondence course which involved doing assignments and sending them off and getting them marked.  The first assignments involved researching various magazines with a view to writing articles.

Now, this probably seems logical to you, but this was the first time anyone had suggested researching the market, and writing something in accordance with a set of guidelines.  I thought I could just write whatever I wanted, and some publisher should be grateful to print it out and sell it for me!

I knew magazine article writing wasn't for me, but at least the marks I got from my tutor were encouraging.

There was a fiction-writing segment coming up in the correspondence course, and, getting bored with the factual stuff which didn't make use of my imagination, I skipped ahead and read the section on genre fiction.

Now, because I'd studied Literature at university, I'd been taught to sneer at pulp fiction.  But the one thing that caught my eye, as I read the course outline, was a little sentence that said, "If you send work in to Mills & Boon, someone will read your manuscript, and reply."

A reply from a publisher!  By this time I would have given my right arm to get a reply from a publisher.

It then went on to suggest that if I wanted to write something likely to get Mills & Boon to take an interest, I should buy several recent books published by them, so that I could see if I could write something along those lines.

So off I went to my local library, and got an armful.

I'd never knowingly read anything from Mills & Boon before.  But the moment I did, I was hooked. Why hadn't I read anything like these wonderful romances before?  They matched exactly the kind of stories I'd been making up in my head for years - oh, I don't mean the worthy, literary story I thought was a Real Piece of Writing - I mean the ones where I was a heroine in peril, getting rescued by some strapping great hunk with a tortured soul who needed my gentle brand of wisdom to make his life whole - or the ones where I was an impoverished, though intelligent girl from a genteel family who catches the eye of a dashing rake, or pirate, and persuades him, through a series of adventures where I demonstrated a special brand of pluckiness, that I was just what he'd always been looking for without even knowing it.

From that moment on, I had stories flowing out of my fingertips, drumming at my brain to get onto paper.  Plucky heroines and rugged heroes clamouring at me to tell their stories.

Though it took another few years before the editors at Mills & Boon finally gave in, and agreed to publish one of them.

I wasn't sure exactly which line I wanted to aim at - it was a choice between Moderns (which are like reworking of fairy tales such as Cinderella, or Beauty and the Beast, really) or historical, where I could indulge my imagination in tales of adventure, involving rakes encountering plucky heroines.

So what I did was to alternate.  First of all, I'd write a story for the Modern line, and send it in to the relevant editor.  And then, while I was awaiting a response, I'd write a historical one.  So when my rejection eventually came back, I immediately had another one all ready to send out.

At the same time I was buying books about how to write, to see what I could learn.  I can't say that any one book had all the answers, but every single one of them would contain at least one little nugget of advice I found useful.

And my husband got me a computer which would connect to the internet, which opened up a whole new world of research for me.

It was just after I'd signed up for an evening class at a local college in fiction writing that I first heard of the Romantic Novelists Association, and its New Writer's Scheme.  My tutor was giving me good marks for my assignments, but I was still getting standard rejection letters from Mills & Boon, and I wanted to know what I was doing wrong.  Why wasn't I getting anything published?

For a fee, I discovered, the New Writer's Scheme would read a manuscript, and actually send back a report about the quality of my writing.

So, I decided that when my next rejection letter came through, I would send the manuscript off to the New Writer's Scheme so someone would tell me where I was going wrong.

However, that submission didn't get rejected.  Instead, I got a very nice letter asking to read the full manuscript, and then, many months later, a request for very minor revisions.  Before I knew it, I'd got the call with the offer of a publishing contract.

It had only taken me ten years.

My first book, His Cinderella Bride, came out the following autumn.  By this time not only my daughter, but also my son, had both graduated from university.

But I'd got a new career.

 

Annie's first book "His Cinderella Bride" has just been made available as an ebook.