A royal wedding is coming

I’m very excited about the upcoming royal wedding. No… not THAT royal wedding.

This month, I have a new book out – Marrying The Rebel Prince.

It’s a Cinderella story – and everyone loves a Cinderella story. I actually wrote it before Prince Harry and Meghan Markle announced their engagement, but it seemed a lovely idea to release it just before that wedding. And look at that gorgeous dreamy cover.

I had such fun writing this book, its light hearted and romantic and I really want the heroine to be my BFF. She changes her hair colour as often as I do. As for the Prince…

So, if you like a bit of romance and you just can’t wait until Harry and Meghan tie the knot, Marrying The Rebel Prince might be just the thing to tide you over. It’s on pre-order now on all digital platforms.

And yes – I am excited about that wedding too. You really can’t have too many romantic weddings on one year.

One Summer in Italy – new cover! @avonbooksuk #OneSummerinItaly

I’m so delighted with the cover for my next book, One Summer in Italy. It’s beautiful and inviting. And the tagline at the bottom confirming my status as a Sunday Times bestselling author gives me a thrill every time I read it.

It’s such a joy when your publisher allocates you a cover artist who consistently creates covers you love. It’s the part of the book that the author doesn’t provide – yet it’s MEGA important! If an author sees her or his book on a shelf or screen and cringes … awful. And won’t readers do the same? But this is bright and summery, pretty and pickupable. Lucky me!

By the time the paperback hits the shelves, it will also sport information about an amazing giveaway readers will be able to enter. I’m not allowed to tell you yet, I’m afraid, or I would, obviously. Suffice to say, it will add a special little touch.

PS I’ve just seen the roughs for my Christmas 2018 book – A Christmas to Remember – and that’s going to be awesome too. I’ll show you later.

A new book and a new me.

The Heights – a beautiful cover from the team at HQDigital.

I’m really pleased to at last be able to reveal some exciting news. I’ve been keeping this secret for what seems like forever… but now I can announce that I have new book coming out soon – in a new genre, with a new name and a writing partner.

The Heights is a modern adaptation of the classic story of Heathcliff and Cathy – set in the late 20th century, against the backdrop of the miners’ strike and the decline of a once proud mining community in Yorkshire.

Juliet Bell is the pen name for my writing partnership with Alison May. It all started at a conference a couple of years ago. We each led a workshop, and both used Wuthering Heights to illustrate very different points.

This is a book I have wanted to write for years. I am a huge fan of the original. I have often heard people talk of Heathcliff as a romantic hero and Wuthering Heights as a great love story. In my mind, that’s just not true. Heathcliff is a fascinating character… but he’s no hero. It’s not really a story about love, it’s a story about obsession and the destruction it can cause.

As a journalist, I have read and written about the period from the winter of discontent, through the Thatcher years up until the global financial crash in 2008. This time of great social change and discord seemed a perfect setting for the book – but as an Australian, I really didn’t feel I had the cultural background to do it justice. Research can only go so far.

Back to the writing conference.. and Alison who is not only a fabulous writer, but also grew up in just the right part of England at just the right time. She too loves the work of the Bronte’s – and like me tends to think of Wuthering Heights as something other than the romance of popular belief.

At the conference we joked that between us we could write that book – and get it done in time to mark the 200 anniversary of Emily Bronte’s birth in 2018. A couple of weeks later, we decided we weren’t joking, and The Heights is the result.

I thoroughly enjoyed the collaborative process. You can go and meet Alison on her website … and there will soon be a Juliet Bell website, because The Heights is not her only work. Alison and I are part of the way through another book – but shhh … I can’t say anything about that one yet.

I am incredibly proud of The Heights, and will be talking about it on Juliet Bell’s twitter account @julietbellbooks  and facebook page too. And I probably also should mention it’s now available for pre-order.

You are invited to a wedding

I am so in love with this cover.

I’m really excited to  invite you all to a wedding in Coorah Creek. Wedding Bells by the Creek is the fifth book on my Coorah Creek series.

Isn’t the cover just lovely? It really captures the spirit of the book.

The novella picks up the story of The Creek and its residents after the events in Little Girl Lost – the book that won the Romantic Novel of the year Award for an Epic Romance. I realised there had yet to be a wedding in The Creek – and what is better than a Spring wedding?

Here’s the blurb….

How do you forgive what you can never forget?
Helen Walsh has never stopped searching for the daughter who ran away from home when she was just fifteen. Now, her daughter has found her. Face to face with the woman her child has become, Helen longs to be forgiven for her mistakes.
Ed Collins has walked Helen’s path, and he knows that she needs more than her daughter’s forgiveness. He would help her if he could.
Ed’s wife Stephanie returns – thirteen years after she deserted Ed and their young son. Now Ed is being asked to forgive. Steph was his first and only love… but are some things impossible to forgive?
In the tiny outback town of Coorah Creek, secrets are hard to keep.
What will happen when Ed learns the truth about his wife?
And as Helen plans her daughter’s wedding, dare she dream of her own?

I’m so please to send this story out into the world. It’s available for pre-order now, and will be officially released on May 2nd.

You might not want to read my latest book…

That seems a strange thing for an author to say – but the book I just finished writing is a bit … Well… it has lines in it like…

10 0 * * * root /exc/dbdump Cdiv –f + | gzip –c >      and so on.

I guess this is where I confess that I am a bit of a geek. Or nerd. Or techie… there are a lot of words for it.

In my day job I do database and workflow design with large computer systems for making TV programmes and films. I’ve just finished writing a training course for system administrators, including some pretty advanced IT ‘stuff’. The book is almost 400 pages long. I think that’s longer than any of my novels.

The cover is definitely not as pretty as my novel covers.

Although it’s a totally different type of writing, as I did it, it occurred to me there are some similarities between writing a technical training course book and writing a novel.

First – good grammar and spelling and sentence structure are essential for both. Punctuation too.

A novel has to show an unfolding story – provide some background and explanation – otherwise what happens next won’t make sense. The same is true of a training manual. The early chapters (well… lessons) prepare the attendees for what’s ahead and give them the knowledge they need to carry on.

There’s no dialogue in a training guide, but it does have to contain explanations of various things – presented in much the same way as the trainer does when speaking.

Part of me wants to open the technical book at random and turn something like this…….

… into this and see if any of the students notice.

You have to maintain the reader,s interest in whatever you write – a novel or a technical manual. It’s probably easier in a novel, because the reader is there for enjoyment. Although, a lot of people enjoy learning new things as well.

And of course, there has to be a climax… That’s easy in a novel – the moment of greatest conflict and resolution.

In a training course – it’s the exam. And the happy ever after comes when you pass and get the certificate. And you may even catch the glimpse of a promotion or pay rise in your future.

In totally honesty, I enjoy writing novels more than writing technical manuals – but both provide their own challenges. That’s what I like to do all the time – challenge myself. And I do believe that whatever you write, if you do your best to write it well, the experience will make you a better writer for all things.

And now – it’s back to the Aussie bush and my next novel.