Fabby news! English Lord, Ordinary Lady just got a five-star review at Cataromance! Here's a snippet:

"Sublimely entertaining, wonderfully moving and unashamedly romantic, Fiona Harper is an absolute genius when it comes to creating terrific characters and writing superb romances. Warm, witty and feel-good, contemporary romance does not get any better than this!"

If you want to read the whole thing, you can find it here. And if you want to know where the original idea came from, read a snippet and have a chance to win a signed copy, then head over to Liz Fielding's blog where I have a guest slot today. She's celebrating her 50th book by inviting authors along all year to post and give books away, so put it on your favourites list!

And, if you are interested in finding out more about the story behind the story, in the next week or so I'll be blogging about the characters, the setting and the ideas that all came together to create English Lord, Ordinary Lady.

To be read

I know everyone says they have a teetering TBR (to be read) pile, but mine really is. I mean, look at it! I tried to make one big pile but it stopped teetering and started falling instead. Bad idea.

This pile is as tall as I am. Literally. Almost exactly 5’3. Do you reckon I can get it to the floor in 2008? Me, I’m not sure. But once again I’m doing the eHarlequin book challenge and attempting to read 100 books this year. Why, oh why, don't I have more thin ones? That's what I want to know!

If you want to see what I’m reading, come on over to the eHarlequin community and join the fun!

Review

English Lord, Ordinary Lady has just received a really nice review from All About Romance! If you want to read the whole thing, click here, but if not, here's a snippet:

"There are some series romance titles that clearly lure some readers...and send me running in the opposite direction. Take, for example, anything that includes the words "sheikh" or "cowboy." On the other hand we have a title like English Lord, Ordinary Lady. I took one look and thought, "Count me in." Happily, the book was every bit as good as the title suggested...

…as a light and cute love story, it succeeds admirably. Even though I've never had the desire for pink hair, I found Josie nearly irresistible. She is perhaps a little stubborn at times, but it fits with her character, and she really grows during the course of the book. She's also just plain fun. By far my favorite scene was when Will decided that the tearoom staff ought to wear uniforms, and Josie "alters" hers to suit her personality. This paragraph made me laugh out loud:

"Customisation. What a beautiful word, thought Josie as the blades of her scissors sliced through the grey fabric. She said it twice more in her head then once out loud, just for good measure. It just rolled off the tongue."

I shared it with my daughter, who asked if she could read the book next. Naturally, nothing suits a rebellious heroine like a stuffy hero who needs to get a little less stuffy. Will is the perfect foil for Josie, and his actions at the end of the book – when he proves his love in a most unexpected way – seal the deal. "

Seeing as All About Romance can be a little picky about category romance, I was really pleased with this review!

Writers' Forum Article

I have some other good news was totally usurped by last week’s mega good news. But now the dust has settled a little, I can let you know that I’ve been interviewed, along with M&B editor Jenny Hutton, for the current issue (Feb) of Writers’ Forum magazine in the UK. Unfortunately, they don’t have a web link for the article so it’s buy the magazine or nothing!

The article goes into the history of M&B and asks what it takes to ‘break in’ today (hence, my input). I even have my very own pink sidebar with a heart and the title “Fiona’s top tips”. This gives me visions of imparting sage, housewifely advice on how to remove stains or bake the perfect sponge, but ignore me – I’m daft that way.

Romance Prize Nominations!

Two of my books have been nominated for the same award! Her Parenthood Assignment and English Lord, Ordinary Lady are in the running for the Romantic Novelists’ Association’s Romance Prize.

The winner will be announced at the awards luncheon at the Royal Garden Hotel in Kensington on the 4th of February. Until then, I will mostly be gnawing at my fingernails…

I was in the middle of a rather large roast beef dinner with some friends last Sunday evening when the phone rang. ‘Let the answerphone get it,’ I yelled, tucking into a Yorkshire pudding. Above the noise of four adults and four children that I could hear one of my friends’ voices. I’ll ring her back after dinner, I thought, but then I heard the words ‘awards luncheon’ and ‘fourth of February’ and suddenly I was across the room with the phone in my hand. Not quite sure I remember how I got there. And I gave the award organiser on the other end of the line quite a surprise too!

Happy New Year

2008 is a special year for Mills & Boon as it marks their centenary. One hundred years of publishing popular books loved the world over! So I'm really pleased to have three books out this year as it makes me feel very much a part of the celebrations.

My first book for 2008, English Lord, Ordinary Lady is out right now at both Millsand boon.co.uk and eHarlequin.com, and will be on the shelves in February. And, if you like eBooks, it's also available in that format too from eHarlequin's eBook boutique - along with other titles from my backlist.

Four Star Review

I’m celebrating my first ever four star review from the Romantic Times:

Restoring his family's ancestral home is a huge undertaking for developer Will Roberts, but it comes with the title he's just inherited. As does Josie Harrington-Jones, who manages the tearoom on the premises. A single mother and reformed party girl, Josie has a real knack for the business end of things -- but she also has a few issues, and a secret. Her professional partnership with Will turns personal eventually, but Josie's not sure he's in love with the real her -- and it's a deal-breaker.

Fiona Harper's English Lord, Ordinary Lady (4) has a credible plot and conflict, as well as great characters. More than that, it's warm and funny.


What a lovely late Christmas present!

Hallelujah!

I’ve finished! And what a marathon it was.

The word limit for Romance is 50,000–55,000 words. This one weighs in just short of 59,000. That means I’ve written about 33,000 words in 14 days! That’s 6000 words today alone and more than 10,000 in the last two days. You may picture me slumped on my desk, whimpering.
And now, within an hour of finishing, the cold that has been tickling my nose for a few days has decided to arrive properly. I may just give up and go to bed. But not for long – I expect revisions will be back on Friday and I have the next two weeks to tidy it up!

The upside is that the title for this book looks as if it's going to be "Christmas Wishes, Mistletoe Kisses". How adorable is that?

A perfect place?

I just had to post this. This is a location from my current book - a boathouse on the heroine's estate. It's the perfect little hideaway. Who wouldn't want to be snuggled up inside in front of a roaring fire with my yummy hero, Ben?



Much cosier than Louise's big old mansion on top of the hill, I think.



But where would you rather spend Christmas? In luxury in the mansion, or cosy and basic in the cabin-like boathouse?

Oh, heck

Right. I need to get a first draft done before Christmas! I thought I had a couple more weeks, but schedules change and suddenly I'm up against the deadline. I may go a bit quiet for a while...

Story Structure: Turning Point 2 - Change of Plans

The second turning point in Michael Hauge’s story structure is the end of the first act. By now, the characters have been introduced, the situation has been set up and the adventure is about to start in earnest. Vogler calls this point in the story the Threshold. I like this image. It speaks of the protagonist crossing into unfamiliar territory, going on a journey.

This is the point when the hero commits to the adventure completely. Things are going to get uncomfortable for your characters now they have been shoved out of their comfort zones. Why are your characters going to do this? Why haven’t they just refused the call to adventure and stayed home with their feet up? Because to achieve their goals they are going to have to act. They want what they want more than they want a comfortable life. Motivation at this point is key. Make it strong. Make it believable. Make the stakes high.

At the ‘Change of Plans’ your protagonist(s) is going to make a decision that pushes the story in another direction.

Pretty Woman:
Instead of sending Vivian back to Hollywood Boulevard, Edward offers her $3000 to spend the week with him. Why? He has business to do and he needs a companion, but he doesn’t want to get emotionally entangled with anyone, and this causes him to make an unusual decision. Vivian accepts because she needs the money – her goal is to get out of her business and do something more with her life.

You’ve Got Mail:
Fox Books opens. Up until now, Kathleen has been coasting along in her life and living in the past. (Have you noticed that this is what her boyfriend represents – someone who is so fixated on living in the past he sees modern technology as some kind of evil?) Now Kathleen is going to have to look forward and act if she wants to save her shop. She’s not exactly a willing adventurer, but she has no choice; the battle has begun.

Notting Hill:
I think the turning point here is when Anna finally stops shilly-shallying and asks William if he would like to have dinner with her. Up until this point she’s been sending very mixed signals and, finally, she makes her mind up one way or the other. Her desire to find that special someone has overridden her desire for self-protection and she's willing to take a chance on trying something new - dating an 'ordinary' guy.

Five minutes of fame

I visited my local QS store (they are running a promotion with M&B and one of my books is involved – see here for details) on Thursday just to see my lovely gift-wrapped cover for Blind-Date Marriage in the flesh, so to speak. And while I was there, I bought some clothes for the kids and - hey presto – got asked which free book I would like. I replied that I would like the pink one because I wrote it and the sales assistant got all over-excited, called the manageress and, before I knew it, I was speaking to the area manager on the phone and having my photo taken!

Unfortunately, I was having a bad hair day and had scraped all my curls into a ponytail and I looked like a squirrel in the picture. Eek! Still, it wasn’t as bad as the one on the RNA website of me accepting the NWS trophy! How many chins? And, no, I’m not providing a link to that!

Story Structure: Phase 2 - New Situation

So, after the first Turning Point, Michael Haugue describes the next phase of the story as the New Situation. It’s basically the end section of act one, as the next turning point will send your characters headlong into the second act.

I see this as a kind of in between stage. Vogler’s hero’s journey concept deals with the idea nicely. If you think of old-fashioned fairy tales or myths, there is often an adventure the hero (and by this I mean protagonist, not just the main male character) must go on. Vogler calls the second act the Special World of the adventure – often the hero must journey to a new land to fulfil his quest. In modern-day tales, our protagonists may not be fighting dragons or slaying giants, but they may get pushed out of their comfort zone and find themselves in a new emotional landscape. For many romance stories, the relationship itself is the adventure, and this will be the stage of the story where they’ve met, but they haven’t quite got it together yet.

So, by now our hero has had their “call to adventure” – the trigger/inciting incident to get the story going – but they haven’t yet committed to it fully. Our protagonist may refuse the call briefly, even if it is only a few moment’s hesitation, or higher stakes may push the hero into acting when maybe he’d rather not. Sometimes preparations need to be made – the hero may need to acquire new skills to embark upon his quest.

Pretty Woman:
Edward and Vivian have met. She helps him get to his hotel and he almost goes inside and leaves her waiting for the bus – but he doesn’t. Something about her zest for life intrigues him, and he invites her inside for the night. Time after time in the next few hours she defies his expectations, and this pushes him into doing something unusual when the time comes to pack her off back to where she came from…

In a sense, the second act of this story is the length of the contract between Edward and Vivian ($3000 for one week) – this is the ‘Special World’ of this story. You couldn’t just jump from Edward picking her up in the car to immediately asking her to stay the week. Something more has to happen to push him into that unusual decision; it has to be set up.

And this is what this phase of the story is about, moving things into position so the hero and heroine can cross the threshold into the second act and get the adventure (in this case, the romance) going!

Notting Hill:
Anna gets cleaned up at William’s house and, just as she leaves, she kisses him, and he is dumbfounded. Then they play a game of cat and mouse for a while. She leaves a message; he doesn’t get it – and when he does he gets sucked into the publicity machine for her new movie.

It’s Anna who controls where the story goes at the moment. William wants to pursue the connection (of course!), but Anna is wary. At first it seems she is just going to make sure he is ‘okay’ about the kiss and then dismiss him but, after he is adorably flustered doing a fake interview, she changes her mind. Up until the end of the first act, they are dancing around each other and the audience is not sure whether a romance is going to get going or not.

You’ve Got Mail:
This is an interesting one. Kathleen has just discovered that Fox Books are opening a store in her neighbourhood and right after that, she and Joe meet in real life, without knowing that they are online sweethearts – and there’s a connection.

Norah Ephron does a marvellous job of setting up everything in this script! I see the adventure, the ‘special world’ of this story as being the fight between Kathleen’s true-hearted little store and the Fox books Goliath. And, before the battle gets going, the writers set everything up for maximum conflict.

Not only are Kathleen and Joe getting on well in cyberspace, but there’s a spark in real life too – what a pity that they’re going to become mortal enemies in a matter of days! Having them meet before the conflict gets going raises the stakes and makes the audience sigh for what they know can never be! Now, that’s good writing.

So, in this section of the story, you have to decide how your characters are going to respond to the story trigger, their call to adventure. Will they embrace it or reject it? And what needs to happen so that, when they embark on their adventure, all the necessary pieces are in place?

Story Structure: Turning Point 1 - The Opportunity

This is the part of the story where things start to get juicy! Your main character is wandering around in their ordinary world, doing their thing, and – BAM! – something happens that is going to change the course of their life!
Depending on which book on writing you read, this crucial story moment might be called any of the following:

• Call to adventure (Christopher Vogler)
• Inciting Incident (Robert McKee)
• Catalyst
• Trigger
• Opportunity

I say ‘crucial’, because without this element, your characters would just keep wandering around doing ordinary things. Even if your character has a so-called exciting life, if nothing actually happens, your reader is going be nodding off very shortly.

They may not know it yet, but how they respond to whatever happens may determine their future happiness. Your character may receive some news, or meet someone. They may lose something and need to find it again or an event may happen in their community. It even can be a stirring deep within your character that makes them make a change in their own life. What exactly happens will depend on each individual story.

In a romantic story, the event that often sets the story in motion is the first meeting between the hero and heroine, although not always…

• In Notting Hill, it’s the moment when Anna walks into William’s bookshop. Her celebrity life has just intersected with his ‘ordinary’ one. Funnily enough, this event almost isn’t enough to get the story started. Their paths cross, they go their separate ways and, but for William spilling OJ down Anna’s front a few minutes later, they probably never would have met again. But, I doubt that Anna would have agreed to go to William’s flat to change if she hadn’t met him in the bookshop earlier, so I think that first meeting was the story trigger. Thinking of it as a "call to adventure", it's as if they both chicken out a bit the first time and fate needs to give them a helping hand - a second chance.
• In Pretty Woman, the story trigger is the moment Edward gets lost on Sunset Strip and stops to ask Vivian directions.
• Interestingly enough, in You’ve Got Mail, Kathleen and Joe have already met – online, so this can’t be the story trigger. I actually think it’s the moment when Fox Books reveal they are going to open a store in Kathleen’s neighbourhood. This event is ultimately going to cause the main characters’ internet lives to clash with their ‘real’ lives. It also raises an interesting question. The audience knows the identity of Kathleen and Joe, even if they don’t, and at this point, they wonder: “Will she ever be able to love him if he puts her out of business?”

Asking a big question is the main job of this turning point. It asks the central story question to which the climax (turning point 5) will be the answer. “Can a ruthless businessman find warmth and love with a cheap prostitute?” “Can a movie star and an ordinary guy have a long-lasting relationship?”

According to Michael Hauge, it’s hard to start a movie with this kind of turning point, but not so in a novel. Some novels work best when the inciting incident occurs right there on page one! Sometimes it needs a bit more setting up than that, but the idea is to not dawdle about at this point. Get the story started and hook that reader in!

Blind-Date Marriage Special Offer

Just to let you know that, if you live in the UK, you have a second chance to get hold of a copy of my award-winning first book Blind-Date Marriage! This book won the RNA's Joan Hessayan New Writers' Award in 2006 and was nominated for two RITAs in 2007!

Mills & Boon are running a promotion with QS clothing shops. Customers who spend £15 will get a free book - either Blind-Date Marriage or Breakfast at Giovanni's by Kate Hardy. Not only that but there will be a coupon for £2 off any other M&B series book redeemable at W H Smiths.

So, get on down to QS and treat yourself! They have over 200 shops nationwide and you can find your nearest one here.

Even better than the last!

I was pleased with the UK hardback cover for English Lord, Ordinary Lady, but I've just spotted the North American version up on Amazon, and it's even better. Sigh.

Now I'm itching to get my hands on my author copies! I so love this book and I really hope it does well. Let's face it, it's going to have to live up to its cover now!

Story Structure: phase 1 - the set-up

We all know that stories need to have a beginning, a middle and an end. Act One of a story is the beginning. We meet the characters, find out what their lives are like and discover what problems they are facing.

Set up
In Joseph Vogler's Hero's Journey, this stage is called the Ordinary World. We see the protagonist as they are before the journey they are about to embark upon changes them. This is the place where we have to introduce our hero and heroine and create sympathy for them and curiosity about them. Now, according to Mr MIchael Hauge, in a movie, this should take about the first 10% of the screen time. In a novel, however, there is more room to play. Sometimes there is not set-up at all and we meet the hero at the first turning point. It all depends on the requirements of the story. In fact, just about any of these structural elements depend what may fit your story; there are no hard and fast rules - only what works.

The main thing to avoid is stretching this section out by dumping in backstory, or including events that do nothing to move the story forward. If anything, as novelists, we can be guilty of setting up a little too much. Another trap to avoid is to have lots of scenes showing who your main character is before anything really happens. Show only what the reader needs to know and get the story started as soon as possible. The best way for the reader to find out what your characters are like is to give them something to do! Make them face problems, test their limits.

Lovely scenes that sketch out your character are nice, but if you do too much of that in the set-up phase, your reader is going to turn the light off and go to sleep. Not good. The Set-up is where you want to hook your reader. Right from the first page. Right from the first paragraph. From the first sentence, if at all possible. Just because this is the world that is "ordinary" to your characters, does not mean it should be dull! Top-selling M&B Romance author Liz Fielding has a great article on her website about opening scenes. Go and check it out.

I'm struggling with the opening sentence of my wip at the moment. It started of as, "Louise wasn't looking at the man sat opposite her—the one voted "Hollywood’s Hottest Hunk" in some stupid magazine poll only last week. " Presently it is: "Most women would have given at least one kidney to be in Louise’s shoes—both literally and figuratively."

Who knows what it will end up as. But the point is this: ask a question with your very first sentence if you can. Maybe my first effort raises a more interesting question: if you were sat opposite a drop-dead gorgeous movie star, would you be staring at your cutlery? Of course not! So why is Louise not gazing into his eyes and drooling? Your first sentence question may not be the main story question (although extra points if it's related somehow) but even a little question that gets the reader to keep going until you can hit them with an even bigger, juicier question is good.

I've decided to look at a few well-known movies for examples (because more of us have seen the same movies than read the same books) to see how this story structure stuff hangs together:

• Notting Hill - as the credits roll, we see Anna's 'ordinary' life as a movie star. (It may not be ordinary to you and me, but it's her ordinary life.) And shortly afterwards, we meet William, an average guy living in Notting Hill and running a failing bookshop.
• Pretty Woman - Edward is a cold, ruthless business man who cares only about the bottom line. Vivian is a cheap hooker with dreams of bettering herself and is struggling to pay the rent.
• You've Got Mail - Kathleen is the owner of a small bookstore and has a pretentious boyfriend. However, online she is ‘shopgirl’ and she is having an internet romance with ‘NY152’. Since they don’t talk about personal details, she can’t know that he is Joe Fox and that his family owns a chain of book megastores.

So, after all that, a little challenge! Julie Cohen did a first page challenge a while ago where she asked people to post the first few paragraphs of a book/work-in-progress; I'm doing a first sentence challenge. Either post your sentence on your blog and provide a link, or use the comments section here. Go on, hit me with your best shot!

Repetitive what?

I'm wearing my hat as guest colomnist for the Pink Heart Society today and blogging about why it is important to look after your body when you are a writer.

Is there room for a little magic?

Mel asked:

"I guess my question is what surprises you when you actually start to write the story? What you planned isn't always what happens. So surprises?"

I still totally surprise myself when I'm writing. For me, my plot board is a bit like a journey plan, a route map. I know my starting point. I know my destination (Happy Ever After!). And I know some of the major landmarks (events) and changes of direction along the way (turning points).

You can plan a route in great detail, but it's not until you actually drive that road that you really know what it feels like to be there - what the scenery is like, what little details you will find that you can never discover until you are there in person.


A couple of years ago, my family and I drove from Inverness in Scotland, to the Isle of Skye. We knew we had to go down the side of Loch Ness, take a right at such-and-such a town and keep going along the yellow line on the map until we got to the bridge that took us onto Skye. Part of the route looked something like this (click here to see map). Not very exciting, is it? I'd stick the picture in, but the map is copyrighted, so only the link.

What I discovered along the way were sights like these:

And I also experienced wind that was so cold it felt like knives on my skin, that made the inside of my ears burn when I got back into the warm. We saw deer running over the hillside and watched the winter sun turn dull patches of hillside the most wonderful golds and browns and mossy greens.

Thankfully, writing is about the journey, not about getting to the destination in the shortest amount of time. If it were, every romance book would be only three sentences long, starting with: "Boy meets girl..."

So, when I get into my character's skins and take a journey with them, unexpected things happen. Where I thought I would have a long, straight uncomplicated run, I suddenly find a road block and have to take a detour. Sometimes I discover that the road I thought was the right way is actually taking me in the wrong direction and I have to scrap the map and start again. Other times, the road is just dull, but I glimpse a much a much prettier/dramatic/dangerous route nearby. Some landmarks are worth lingering over, and some are just a blur as I pass them by to visit somewhere that I thought looked dull, but have just realised has become vitally important.

Quite often, the surprises are in the details. The little things that add richness and texture to the book. In "Her Parenthood Assignment", I had no idea Gaby was going to give herself a makeover after she found a video of Luke's dead wife. I knew she was going to feel threatened by the dead wife's memory and I had a little card on my plot board that said: "Gaby finds a home movie of Luke's wife?". That was one of those little detours that suddenly became essential.

Another example of a surprise is in "Break Up to Make Up". I knew Adele and Nick were going to take a journey together in a car that Adele had bought since their split. And I knew that Nick was going to have a fit that she'd sold his beloved jeep, but I didn't know that Adele was going to enjoy being the naughty one, just for once. I giggled with Adele as she waited for Nick to realise...

In my next book "English Lord, Ordinary Lady", I didn't know Josie's wig was going to fall in the soup... And that's all I'm going to say about that! You'll just have to buy it in February to find out more.

Really, my board is just a way of getting all the myriad ideas about the book out of my head (where they are whizzing at great speed and liable to get lost) and tuen them into something visual. I'm a very visual person, so I need to be able to picture things to remember them most of the time. Tell me your name, I'll forget it. But if I see it on a name badge, I'll keep that little memory snapshot with me for much longer.

It's that time again

Well, since I'm at the start of a new book - and procrastinating wildly - I've hauled my plot board out from behind my desk again. As always, I've had different Idea of how I'm going to lay it out this time. But I'm not sure the actual look of the thing makes a blind bit of difference as I've decided that it's not how the finished article that is important, but the process I go through, ordering my thoughts about the story and getting the key plot points and themes in my head.

Since I've been reading "Story" by Robert McKee and listening to sessions from this year's RWA conference by script-consultant Michael Hauge, I've decided to do something a little more sophisticated (and flexible) than my normal method of pinning on 20 cards with the major plot points of the story. This book, my plot board is all about story structure.

I've clocked up a fair number of "How to.." books on writing in the last few years and, while they all have different terms for the necessary building blocks for a story, there are certain key elements that pop up again and again and I thought I would blog about these as I finish honing the shape of Louise and Ben's story.

I've decided to use Michael Hauge's method of six phases of the story, with 5 turning points (TPs) as transistions from one to the next. Not as many things to remember as Vogler's Hero's Journey and a little more detail than the classic three-act structure.

The whole thing divides up as follows:

• Set-up (ending with TP1 - Opportunity)
• New Situation (ending with TP2 - Change of Plans)
• Progress (ending with TP3 - Point of No Return)
• Complications and Higher Stakes (ending with TP4 - Major Set-back)
• Final push (ending with TP5 - Climax)
• Aftermath