My First Writing Retreat by Sophie Claire

Do you ever wonder how much you could achieve if you weren’t constantly interrupted by the demands of daily life and could concentrate solely on your writing? Well last weekend I did just that when I went on a writing retreat for the first time. It wasn’t anything official – just a group of us who booked into a Bed & Breakfast in the grounds of a monastery in Yorkshire.

Beforehand, I was excited at the prospect of immersing myself in writing for 3 days and being in the company of writer friends, although I must admit I was a bit nervous too about not having my usual desktop (I borrowed a laptop) or a printer, and also, would it be too intense? Would I be the naughty one who was always stopping for cups of tea and distracting the others? (*coughs* that did happen, but I think they were happy to stop – and eat flapjacks!).

The orchard (the monks produce their own apple juice)

The vegetable patch

I needn’t have worried. The technology worked, and I was at my desk at 8am each morning.

Away from my usual routine, I was really productive and more focused; although we had internet, I wasn’t as tempted as usual and enjoyed the uninterrupted stretches of time to write – what a luxury.

My word count steadily increased, but regular breaks were essential, so I explored the monastery grounds, which were surprisingly big for a town site.

The whole place had a very peaceful atmosphere, with benches dotted around everywhere, inviting you to sit and contemplate...

...Encouraging you to slow down, and live in the moment.

By the third day I felt immersed in my story and with this came a feeling of deep calm. It reminded me of when I took part in NaNoWriMo last year – I experienced the same freeing up of the imagination and shutting off of the inner critic, allowing my imagination space to simply create.
I could hear the outside world, the cars and buses trundling past on the main road nearby, yet I felt cocooned here and apart. Cloistered, is the word, I suppose.

The church bells rang four times a day and they soon became a familiar background noise, also calming. Out of curiosity we went to evensong, which was beautiful and the monks were very welcoming. (I kept setting my alarm to go to 6.45am matins too, but I confess I never made it!)

The church

Anne Stenhouse, Sophie Claire, Kate Blackadder
& Helena Fairfax

After evensong we headed out to eat in the local pub, where we soon became regulars.

Unlike the monks’ meals, these were not silent!


The four of us had lots to catch up on, writing projects to discuss, ideas to share. All good fun and inspiring.


The whole experience was very liberating and productive. We all agreed that we’d like to do it again and I look forward to that.

Have you ever been on a writing retreat? How was your experience? 

Sophie.x

Links:
Anne Stenhouse
Kate Blackadder
Helena Fairfax
Sophie Claire

The Inspiration Behind 'Another Man's Child' by Anne Bennett

In this post, Anne Bennett talks about how her family history inspired her latest novel.

Many times  I have been asked where I get my inspiration from to write. Some wonder if it is helpful to me that I live in such a beautiful place. While walking the beaches and hills near my home has helped me iron any knotty problem I have encountered in the manuscript, the inspiration to begin in the first place comes from other sources. Sometimes I don’t even know what these triggers are, but the book coming out on 19th November, called Another Man’s Child, was inspired by my mother’s tale and the house she was born and raised in.

Wales

This house is not just any old house. It is the family home of the Logues.  My mother was born in 1910, the eleventh child in a family of twelve.  But I never saw the house in its heyday, for it was in ruins when I eventually caught sight of it.  I had no idea anyone had a photograph of it, because photography was expensive and usually only used to mark significant events.  However, two cousins, Martin in Redditch and Michael in Dublin, began researching the family history and pooling resources on the Facebook Page 'Logues of Tawnagh'.

Tawnagh, Ireland

Martin unearthed the picture of this house and suddenly the story my mother told me about one of her sisters made sense.  My mother was born in rural Ireland and in that time most houses were small cottages, single-storied, and consisting of two or three rooms. The walls were mainly white washed sod, and the roofs were made from thatch. This house,  by comparison, was a large, two-storied, double-fronted, brick-built house with a slate roof.  The house showed the Logue status in the community, which would have been high, and the daughters of such a thriving farmer would be expected to marry well and so be kept in the manner they were used to.  That meant marrying a farmer, the eldest son of a farmer, or a man with a trade.  So when one of my mother’s sisters was attracted to a hired hand, looking at the house it is easier to understand her father’s rage and actions, which would be considered extreme by today’s standards.

In real life the sister was packed off to America, where the Logue family really did have a widowed Aunt Maria living in New York, but my fictional Celia Mulligan did something equally daring to escape from her father’s dominance and marry the man she loved.  However, the path of true love is never a smooth one and much was to befall the young couple and in the end Celia comes near to losing all she holds dear.

Another Man's Child
by Anne Bennett

A moving family drama of one young woman’s fight to survive, to find her long-lost relatives and to find a place to call home.

Celia Mulligan is in love with farmhand Andy McCadden, but when Andy asks her to marry him and she accepts, her father is furious – no daughter of his will marry a mere hireling. Celia elopes with Andy and they make their way by ship to England. While on board, Celia meets a demure young woman called Annabel who tells her in confidence that a friend of her father forced himself upon her and she has since fallen pregnant.

Annabel plans to throw herself on her brother’s mercy and asks Celia if she will accompany her to Birmingham as her ladies maid. Without a job and with nothing to offer her, Andy encourages Celia to accept – he can find employment for himself and save for their future. But neither of them can foresee the events that will follow, and soon Celia will be forced to choose between the man she loves, and the love of a vulnerable child…

Published by Harper Collins: 19th November 2015

What Do Libraries Mean To You? by Sophie Claire

They've been in the news recently, mostly relating to closures or reduced funding, and this got me thinking – how important are libraries? Are they still relevant in the internet age when so many schools and homes are equipped with computers, and when Wikipedia has all but replaced the encyclopedia? And when money is tight, should they still be a priority for public funding?

Libraries have been a feature of my life at every stage, and I’m lucky enough to have studied in some of the most beautiful and historic libraries in the world. At Oxford University I was spoilt for choice between the famous university buildings such as The Bodleian, the faculty library (my favourite) or our college library which was open all night (and we made good use of this, sometimes working through the night to finish an essay on time). 

The Radcliffe Camera, Oxford

But it was as a child that the library had the most impact on me. My parents, like most people, were careful with money, and there wasn't much spare for books unless I was lucky enough to receive a gift voucher for my birthday or Christmas. So, for a voracious reader like me, the library was essential. It gave me the chance to experiment and explore different authors and genres: fairy tales and adventure stories, pink hardback romance novels, horrors (that phase didn’t last long), thrillers (that one lasted all through my teens), to name but a few.

Without my local library, I wouldn’t have had the varied grounding that later funnelled me towards the realisation that the books I enjoyed the most were all romantic in essence. I wouldn’t have developed a love of words, the feeling that there was a whole other world between the pages of a novel in which ideas could be explored, other cultures brought to life, and in which I could lose myself. 

"If you do not value libraries then you do not value information or culture or wisdom." Neil Gaiman

I learned so much from libraries, and not just in the non-fiction section. Fiction too teaches us – about bygone events, about different people’s perspectives and predicaments, about humanity. What better way to learn empathy than to put yourself in the shoes of a character for 400 pages?

"Books help us understand who we are and how we are to behave." Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird)

My local library has changed dramatically in recent times. It runs sessions for babies and toddlers, it has a soft play area with sofas where parents read to their children, a book group, a craft group, a writing group. It has computers and machines which clock my books in and out, meaning I don’t have as much reason to chat to the librarians any more – which is a shame. On the other hand, it’s easier to renew my books online.

John Rylands Library, Manchester

But some things haven’t changed. Remember the smell as you walked in, of dusty books and polished wood? The sacred hush of dozens of people working or reading in silence? The weight of a book in your hands as you read the blurb and decided if it was worth a try or not. As a child I used to find it hard to whittle the choice down to ten books, the maximum allowed on a ticket. I would carry those books home like treasure, impatient to start devouring them. And then three weeks later I'd go back for more.
Now, as I walk into a library and run my gaze over the shelves, I still get the same breathless feeling of excitement. So many books to read, so little time!

How about you? Do you use a library? What does it mean to you?

Sophie.x

sophieclaire.co.uk

Ten (and a half!) Things We've Learned About Blogging

It’s become increasingly important for authors to have a ‘platform’ to promote themselves and their books, but keeping a blog regularly updated can eat into precious writing time. A way around this is to have a joint blog with a group of friends. We started this blog way back in September 2012. It took a while for us to find our feet. We had no schedule - posting randomly whenever we felt like it, or not at all! Gradually our confidence grew, along with our visitors, and we now average over 100 hits a day. We’ve made mistakes along the way - and no doubt we’ll keep on making them! – but we have learned from them.

And here's what we've learned:

To ensure we stayed friends, we agreed in advance about the essentials, such as what we were going to blog about, and how often, and whether to have guest posts or to make our blog all about ourselves.

We learned to keep the design of our blog simple. Going mad with graphics, multi-coloured fonts and too many large photos meant our site was a bit slow to load and kept doing weird things. Occasionally it still does weird things but we decided to stick with the orange swirls because they've become our trademark. We've recently created a news page for our book launches and new releases, and another page lists all our latest books. This keeps our home page free for our blog posts.

We now tell visitors who we are (we used to be mistaken for a book blogging site!) and have lots of photographs to make ourselves seem more 'real'.

Most of our blog posts are around 600 words long, which we hope are just the right length to read during a coffee break. But we also like to alternate these with longer posts, which we break up with sub-headings, such as Valerie-Anne Baglietto did when she wrote this post about her favourite childhood books. (It makes them easier to read.)

We love photographs, but prefer to use our own rather than breaching someone else’s copyright. We recommend getting into the habit of carrying a camera around and building up a library of suitable photos, even doing your own photo shoot, as Johanna Grassick did for this post about books.

A group of authors blogging together can create a cross-pollination effect amongst their readers, but we try to be subtle about promotion. We write about the themes in our books rather than the books themselves. Trisha Ashley wrote a post about her pets when promoting her novel about a dog rescue centre and Juliet Greenwood wrote about creating a WW1 garden when her book set during the Great War came out.

We make sure our posts have a point to them and we’re not just blogging 'because it’s a Monday and we always blog on a Monday'. We try to make our posts informative, interesting, or at the very least entertaining - and occasionally tongue-in-cheek, like this one by Louise Marley.

If we get stuck for ideas we brainstorm subjects and themes. We’ve written posts about where we write (June Francis), how we juggle writing with family life (Anne Bennett) and even our favourite Christmas traditions (Cheryl Lang).

We keep an eye on our blog statistics and have found our posts about writing, research and inspiration are the most popular, especially this one by Annie Burrows, which has had almost 2,000 hits.

Finally, because there are ten of us, our posts receive ten times the exposure when we all link to them from our personal social networking sites. We tag our posts with all the (relevant!) labels we can think of. We try to keep old posts going by linking to them in a new post (in the same way we’ve done here - sneaky, eh?) or add the links in a list at the end, sub-titled something like ‘Related Posts’.

Setting up a blog and finding things to post about can be intimidating but with a group blog we can bounce ideas off each other and share the work between ourselves. And very often it doesn’t seem like work at all!