I've been tagged by the gorgeous Heidi Rice has tagged me to join in with THE NEXT BIG THING, a series of questions on my next book. So here's the skinny:
What is the title of
your book?
Kiss Me Under The
Mistletoe
How did
you come by the idea?
I was fascinated by
the idea of a WAG (short for Wives And Girlfriends, normally applied to
partners of famous men). In this age of unprecedented opportunity for women, why
would she decide to define herself by her husband. And what would she do if she
wasn’t married to him any more and lost that key piece to her identity?
What genre does your book
fall under?
Romance/Women’s Fiction
Which actors would you
choose to play your characters if it were a movie?
Ooh, interesting! Maybe Jennifer Connelly as Louise
and Hugh Jackman as Ben.
What is the one-sentence synopsis of your book?
A WAG leaves her celebrity life – and her cheating
husband – behind and seeks to build a new life for herself in a crumbling
deserted mansion in the country.
Will your book be
self-published or traditional?
Traditionally published.
How long did it take you to
write the first draft of your manuscript?
Hmm. Not sure. This was an ‘elongation’ of an
earlier book (think, the 12” compared to the 7”). I think the earlier version (60k
words) probably took about 4 months, but I added another 30k words in four
weeks!
What other books would you
compare this story to within your genre?
Liz Fenwick’s The Cornish House took a similar
theme – woman on her own moving to a new place, and a very special old house,
rebuilding her life and finding love again – but our styles are quite
different.
Who
or What inspired you to write this book?
The idea of my WAG character, Louise, but also the
location. When I was a
teenager my father owned a boat that he moored near Dittisham, up the River
Dart, in Devon. If we ever took the boat out to sea, or went down river, just
for a few seconds we’d catch a glimpse of a marvellous old white mansion on the
hill, half hidden by trees. I used to wonder who lived there and what it was
like inside.
Years later I was very excited to discover the name of the house was Greenway
and had once been owned by the famous crime writer Agatha Christie. And there,
the idea for the story of a haunting old house on the riverside, once lived in
by a famous woman, was born – although in my version, the former owner was a
movie star and not a writer.
What else about your book
might pique the reader’s interest?
My heroine carries the scars of being a child carer
for her ailing father, and the guilt she feels after his death has brought her
to where she is now. Even with the seemingly ‘perfect’ husband and the life
everyone dreams of, she hasn’t been able to be happy.
And I tag the following people to take up the baton and talk about The Next Big Thing:
