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Anne Theresa Halsall, of Williams Lake, British Columbia, asks: When you published your books, how did you decide whether to use the American or British spellings and punctuation, i.e., double quotation marks or single, for dialogue? I notice you’ve used both. I’m trying to decide for my book…
Hi, Anne.
In my case, the decision wasn’t mine. Each of my publishers has their own “house style” determining which format they follow for punctuation and spellings and suchlike.
So, for example, I might submit the same manuscript to my American publishers and my UK publishers, and each of them would then make changes in the copy edit stage to make sure things like spellings and quotation marks conformed to their individual house style.
If you’re submitting to a traditional publisher, you don’t need to worry about it. Just write the manuscript with a consistent style, and if they buy your manuscript, they’ll make sure it conforms to their house style when it goes through the copy edit.
If you’re self-publishing, then you ARE the publisher, so you just need to decide what your “house style” is, and again, keep it consistent. If you’re publishing into the North American market, which is huge, then you’ll most likely want to go with American spellings (which we Canadians, raised as we are between empires, can read without difficulty, even if “traveled with his neighbors to the harbor” still looks wrong to me) and double quotes, if for no other reason than British spellings and single quotes look wrong to Americans, and anything that looks wrong to a reader runs the risk of jolting them out of your story.
And you don’t want that.
The “bible” of American style, used by most publishers, is the Chicago Manual of Style. I’m old enough to have an actual hardcover copy that I keep in my writing room, so I can look up items when I need to, but these days the whole thing can be found online: http://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/home.html
Carole from New Zealand was among the many readers who wrote to ask why she was unable to buy A Desperate Fortune for her Kindle: “I have not noticed a delay in books being available to order before but wondered if there is a specific publishing reason for this? I have submitted this query to Amazon direct but having been able to read the first couple of chapters I desperately want to read the whole story!”
Hi Carole.
Sorry about the difficulty you’re having getting a Kindle edition of A Desperate Fortune. That would be because New Zealand falls under the “UK and Commonwealth” territory and THAT falls under the domain of my British publisher, not the American or Canadian ones. And the UK copy of the book isn’t coming out until October.
It will be coming from Studio 28 Books, and it should then be available to buy from Amazon, but if you have any problems at all please don’t hesitate to get in touch and I’ll pass the message on.
Thanks for your patience, and for taking time to get in touch.
With the upcoming spring book tours approaching, a lot of people have been emailing me to ask whether I’ll sign books (or other items) that they bring from home?
This answer’s an easy one: YES! I will happily sign what you bring me.
That said, there are a few rules of basic book-signing etiquette that are so obvious I’m sure most of you already know them, but I’ll share them here anyway:
The bookstores and libraries that are hosting me are counting on the book sales for their livelihood, so please try to give them your business. My mother owned a bookstore when I was little, so I know firsthand how tough it is to make a profit selling books, and every purchase really helps preserve your local bookseller (and in the case of libraries, fund programs for your hometown).
Some bookstores have a written policy that they’ll only allow me to sign, in-store, books that have been bought there. This is usually stated clearly at the event, and if that’s the policy of a store where I’m signing, then I’m bound to honour that. But I CAN still make arrangements to sign your books afterwards, so don’t despair (and often if you simply purchase one book from the store they will relax their rules and let me sign the other books you’ve brought without a problem).
If you have a HEAP of books (as in a big bag of them that you’ve been collecting for years) that’s still fine by me, and I’ll be more than pleased to sign them all for you, but I would ask you to consider taking a spot at the back of the line, so people with only one or two books can move through more quickly and not get held up.
I hope that seems fair?
One of the best parts for me about touring is getting to meet you, and one of the things I love best about signings is seeing the friendships that form in the signing lines, watching as people who start off as strangers arrive at my table in mid-conversation with each other.
I truly have the best readers. And I’ll stay and sign for as long as each bookstore will let me.
My friend and fellow writer Molly O’Keefe hosts a great feature in her newsletter in which she sits down and virtually “talks shop” with writers about everything from inspiration to process. In September it was my turn. You can subscribe to Molly’s free newsletter here on her website, and I’m sure she’d be happy to send you the digital back-issue with our interview as well. Among the questions she asked me was this:
I’m a big fan of the dual timeline but it’s got to be hard especially with a book like A Desperate Fortune to make sure that the contemporary timeline doesn’t get overwhelmed by the historical timeline. (I say this because of Hugh, gorgeous, dangerous Hugh). How do you approach this problem?
Well, it’s never easy. Each book is different and it needs a different balance, and I’ve learned I’m never going to please everyone. For every reader who wants more of the present day story, there’s another who wants to read more of the past. It’s difficult because the past story is generally set in a turbulent time, with more scope for adventure and mystery. There may be conflict in the present as well, but it’s often more personal and more internal, a quieter kind of suspense. I just try to be always aware that my readers might not want to be pulled too abruptly from one tale to the other, so generally towards the end of the book I let the past story take centre stage for a while. (And as you know yourself, with Hugh, it wasn’t like I had a choice—he’s not the kind of character you get to boss around!)
Megan from San Jose State University interviewed me at the end of April for one of her courses, and asked: What is the most challenging aspect of being a writer, and what is the most rewarding aspect of your job?
Working to a publisher’s deadline is always a challenge for me, because it’s an external thing imposed upon me and the work I’m doing, instead of something that rises naturally from the book, and because I don’t work to a proper outline and never really know for certain what my characters are going to do or how many chapters it’s going to take them to do it, a deadline date that sounds perfectly fine when I agree to it can turn out to be a huge problem for me as the book begins to take on its own life, and this is probably the source of my greatest amount of on-the-job stress. The deadline for my current book, for example – the book I’m just finishing now – has already been moved a couple of times, and now I’ve reached the point where the publisher absolutely needs it to be handed in next week or else they won’t be able to keep to their production schedule and the book won’t be published when it needs to be published, so I’m at the stage in the writing where I’m really only coming up for air and coffee when it’s truly necessary, and my kids are eating dry cereal out of the box for their supper. So yes, deadlines are my most challenging thing. The most rewarding thing? The creation. I love the actual storytelling, the act of sitting down alone in a room with a stack of blank paper and turning it into a novel. It’s a wonderful thing to be all on my own with the characters moving around my subconscious, because I see it all happening the same way I watch a film at the movie theatre, and when I’m fully in “the zone” all I have to do is let the characters go and write down what they’re doing and saying. But the craft is so enjoyable and so interesting to me, and coming out of my writing room after a good day’s work is one of the most rewarding moments I can experience.
Connie from Wichita, Kansas, asks: I just recently finished reading The Firebird…Will there be more sequels to the Slains series?
Hi Connie. That’s a really good question, and I wish I knew the answer! To be honest I never really thought about the books as a series—when I wrote The Winter Sea I thought it was just going to be a one-off, and when I later wrote The Firebird I tried my best to make it a companion novel, not a true sequel, so the two books didn’t really have to be read in any specific order and a reader could read one without ever having to read the other. But I do know that a lot of readers view the books as being in a series, and that’s fine. The book I’m writing now, A Desperate Fortune, deals with Jacobites again, but not with Slains, and while a character or two might wander in and play a bit role on the sidelines (as can often happen in my books) the story doesn’t follow on directly from The Firebird so I don’t think you’d consider it a sequel. Will there be a proper sequel, sort-of-sequel, or companion novel that does follow on from both The Firebird and The Winter Sea? I’m not certain. But a few readers have commented I haven’t yet explained just how the Firebird carving made it back to Cruden Bay, in Scotland. And another reader pointed out that Stuart Keith’s still single. And in doing research for the book I’m writing and the one I think I’m writing next, I did find mention of a rather interesting incident that happened up that way…so we shall see. These things can take a while to percolate, and sometimes they don’t ever come to anything. But I would like to think I’m not yet finished with the Morays, for I have a sense they have more tales to tell.
Blogger/Reviewer Kelli Catana asks: In The Firebird you told the present day story of Nicola and Rob along with the past story of Anna Moray… Will we see any of these characters in future books and if so, how do you decide whose story is unfinished?
I’ve learned, with my characters, to never say never, because the truth is that once they’ve come to life on the page for me they tend to stay alive within my mind, and one or two have wandered from one book into another, in the past. But usually, once a character’s main issues have been dealt with, once the problem that first set the plot in motion has been solved, the book is done, the story finished, and the character falls “silent” for me. They’re anything but silent while I’m writing—my writing process is very visual and I actually “see” the story playing out like a film, so the characters are moving and talking all the time, so when I reach the story’s end I know the moment that it happens, because all that stops. The characters stop talking, and they’re happy and I’m satisfied, and I go on to something else. Once in awhile, though, that doesn’t happen—a character keeps moving, murmuring, just at the back of my mind. That’s what happened with Colonel Graeme, one of the historical characters from my book The Winter Sea, and because of him I knew I wasn’t finished with that aspect of the story, that I’d have to write The Firebird, to tell what happened next. And sometimes, too, a character will turn up in another book because they’re a good fit to play a part. I once needed a vicar, for example, in my novel Every Secret Thing, and realized I’d already created a great vicar in my book Mariana, so I just used him, and he did the job perfectly. Rob himself, from The Firebird, began life as a young boy in The Shadowy Horses, and if you’d asked me then whether he’d ever appear in a future book, I’d probably have told you ‘no’. It wasn’t till a reader wrote to ask me whether Rob would ever have his own book that I started “seeing” grown-up Rob, and how he’d make the perfect hero for The Firebird. So although I don’t think, now, that he and Nicola will turn up in a future book, I can’t be sure. I can say that Anna will make a brief cameo in the next book, which I’m currently writing.
You can read the entire interview at www.kellidaisy.com.
Andrea from The Whitby Public Library asks: What is your favourite discovery from writing The Firebird?
One of my favourite discoveries was actually the correspondence kept by Thomas Gordon, the Scotsman who was a captain in the Scots (and later Royal) Navy when we met him in The Winter Sea, and in The Firebird has risen to Vice Admiral in the Russian Navy. One of his daughters married into a fairly wealthy family, so a lot of Gordon’s papers and his correspondence were preserved and are now held by the National Archives of Scotland in Edinburgh, where I was able to spend a whole week sitting reading them. Reading ten years’ worth of a man’s personal correspondence gives you an insight into his character that you rarely get as an historical novelist. What I learned about Gordon—his family, his habits, his household—made me grow incredibly fond of him, and made it easy to bring him to life on the page.
Angela from Royal Reviews asks: Everyone from fellow bloggers to my local librarians is asking if there will be a follow up to The Winter Sea. Can you tell us anything about it?
You can tell them all yes, my sort-of-sequel to The Winter Sea is finished now, and it will be out in the spring of 2013. It’s called The Firebird, and it continues to follow the lives of many of the historical characters from The Winter Sea, centering on Anna Moray, John and Sophia’s daughter, as she grows up and gets a romance of her own. As with The Winter Sea, I was able to use actual historical events and people to drive the plot, which takes Anna from Scotland into Russia, to St. Petersburg, where the Jacobite community was surprisingly active and successful under the leadership of men like Captain (later Admiral) Thomas Gordon. And as with The Winter Sea, the past story is wrapped in a modern-day one, but with new characters this time, including as the hero Rob McMorran, who first made his appearance as little Robbie in The Shadowy Horses, and whose psychic abilities are put to good use in The Firebird.
You can read my entire interview with Angela here.
April from Fredericton, New Brunswick asks: Do you read manuscripts and offer comments or suggestions to new writers?
As far as reading manuscripts or offering critiques of other people’s work, unfortunately no, I’m very sorry but I just don’t do that. It’s not that I don’t want to help. Believe me, I can very well remember what it feels like to be toiling on that long, hard, bumpy road to publication, and I know firsthand the value of a helping hand along the way, but I just can’t read someone’s unpublished manuscript, for varied reasons.
What I can do, though, is try to answer a specific writing question, if you have one. And from time to time I’m able to get out and do blue pencil sessions, like the ones that I’ll be doing at the Surrey International Writer’s Conference in September, in which I can actually sit down and offer feedback to the writers I’ve been matched with.
And if you should ever see me at a signing or a conference, please feel free to come and chat. I love to offer what encouragement I can, and meet new writers. Just please understand that I can’t read your manuscript.
But when you’ve come a little further down that road, and found a publisher, I’m more than happy to be asked to read your book in proof. Last year I had a lovely writer get in touch and ask if I could read and maybe comment on her own unpublished manuscript, and reading through her letter just reminded me so much of my own struggle to get published that I honestly felt terrible I had to tell her “no.”
This year I got another email, this time from her editor, who edits for a major New York publisher, announcing that she’d bought that writer’s book and asking whether I would care to read it now, and give a possible endorsement?
And that made me very happy, because that was something I could do to help her.
April, thank you for your question, and if you’re a writer too, I wish you much success.
The Book Page asked me: If you weren’t a writer, how would you earn a living?
See now, this is a tricky question, because being a writer and earning a living at being a writer are two different things. I’ve always been a writer, from the time I was a child—it’s just the way my brain was formed and how I process things: I shape them into stories.
Before I could earn my living by just writing, I was a museum curator and a waitress, in that order, and I suppose that if my ability to pay the bills with my writing ever disappeared, I’d do both again, in the opposite order: waitressing first, because it got me out in the company of people and gave me flexible hours and was a job I could leave at the workplace when I took that apron off, and museum work second, because I truly loved that hands-on connection to the past and the chance to preserve something special for future generations to enjoy.
But published or not, I would still be a writer.
You can read all 7 Questions that the Book Page asked me here.
Sarah from Spain asks: Do you pick the era and fit the story around it? Or do you find the story and research the era after?
Usually the story comes first, but for me it has never been really a straightforward chicken-and-egg kind of thing.
It would probably be more proper to say that I start with an event, or situation – I tend to stumble on a moment out of history I find interesting. It can be something I notice first-hand on a trip, or hear about, or some small detail buried in a TV documentary or mentioned just in passing in a history book I’m reading, and it strikes me as an interesting thing I’d like to learn about.
Sometimes, from that very first moment – as when I first learned of the Jacobites’ 1708 invasion attempt – I can see what the story will be, and the shape it must take, and I structure my research accordingly.
But even then, the process is continual. The story simply rises from the research that I’m doing, piece by piece, and that in turn leads me to new research, new sources, which creates more possibilities within the story… On and on and on.
For this new book I’m doing, which will be a sort-of-sequel to The Winter Sea/Sophia’s Secret, obviously I already knew the era I would need to research. But again, while I was doing that, I stumbled on an incident that made me stop a moment and think, “Interesting…”, and the story changed again and started up from that.
The story finds itself, it seems, no matter what my starting point might be!
Karen from Coff’s Harbour, Australia, writes: Hi Susanna. Just wanted to let you know how much I am enjoying “The Winter Sea” on my Kindle. I don’t see any of your other books available in Kindle format – can you convince your publishers to do something about this and quickly?!
Hi, Karen. I’m glad you enjoyed the book so much you’re now looking for more of my work for your Kindle.
I know, from the number of emails I’ve been getting on this topic, that you’re not the only person out there feeling this frustration, and if I could get the books out there myself for you I would.
Some authors are indeed bringing out their “backlist” books (the ones they wrote a while ago, that may by now have fallen out of print) as self-published ebooks, so their fans can enjoy them again. In my case, though, my publishers in both the UK and the USA have bought the rights to all my backlist titles, so I can’t bring them out myself. Like you, I have to wait.
Both publishers – Allison & Busby in the UK, and Sourcebooks in the US – are committed to bringing out the books for Kindle and other e-readers, but both publishers are smaller houses with limited resources and lots of other authors whose readers are similarly keen to see their books brought out as ebooks.
So that means there is a queue…but it is moving, and I know my books are in it, if that helps!
Allison & Busby have digitized three of my books so far: Sophia’s Secret (the UK title of The Winter Sea), Mariana, and my latest one, The Rose Garden, and because they hold the rights to the UK & Commonwealth countries, including Canada and Australia, you should be able to buy those for your Kindle. Try using this link, or going to www.amazon.com, selecting “Kindle Store” as the department and doing a search for my name, which should bring up a screen that has a small selection window over at the top lefthand corner under the heading: “Your Country or Region”. If you click on this and select “Australia”, it should show you the three UK books.
Does that work?
For those of you who fall within the American publisher’s territory, right now The Winter Sea is the only ebook available from Sourcebooks, but in October when they bring out The Rose Garden in the States they’ll also be bringing it out at the same time as an ebook, and Mariana will follow in the spring of 2012, with the rest of my backlist currently scheduled to come out at the rate of two titles a year.
I realize you probably wanted them faster than that, and again, I apologize.
I promise I’ll keep passing on your comments and requests to both my publishers, so they’ll know how you feel. And thanks for taking time to write to me.
Tanya asks: I was wondering if what was said about the rock with the hole in it was true. And where did you find out about that? There are so many things about The Winter Sea I could tell you that I loved about your book, but that one part really stuck out to me! Thanks!
Hi, Tanya. The rock with the hole in it is one of those small superstitions I’ve carried a long time, thanks to Canadian writer Gregory Clark and his wonderful story “The Talisman”, first printed on the inside back page of Weekend Magazine and discovered by me in The Ryerson Press’ 1963 collection of Greg Clark’s stories, Hi There!, which was on my parents’ bookshelf and now sits on mine, with all his other books that I’ve collected.
The whole story of “The Talisman”, although it’s very short, is too complex and beautiful to summarize – you really have to read it for yourself – but in the first part of the story he recounts how his own grandmother once told him that if he ever found a little stone with a hole in it, he should tie it around his neck. “It will protect you from the arrow that flieth by day,” she said, “and the pestilence that walketh in darkness.”
How and where he finds the stone is wonderful and moving, and I really loved that story when I read it for the first time. So much so that I got talking to my dad about it, and he promptly went and fetched me something that he’d carried for a long time in his briefcase, and that his father had given him: a small stone, with a hole in it.
I’ve kept it ever since. (That’s my stone, pictured in the photograph below). And when I came to write The Winter Sea, it just seemed natural to use the good advice of Gregory Clark’s Scottish grandmother, and have my characters look for their own little stone, for a talisman that would protect them from arrows that flieth by day, and the pestilence walking in darkness. With all that they were up against, I figured they could use it!
Lee Ann from Melbourne, Florida, asks: I saw on your website that you are writing a sequel to The Winter Sea and that the modern day hero is someone we have met before… is it Robbie from The Shadowy Horses? You know that I have been wanting him to have his own story. On a happier note as you know The Winter Sea was finally release here in the U.S. – I bought a copy and gave it to my sister – she said it will be the next book that she reads :-). I also got a copy of it under the name Sophia’s Secret – love that cover as well as the Canadian hardcover illustration as well. The teaser chapters you have posted from the next book looks awesome but they are just that – teasers. Have a very Happy New Years – can’ t wait for the new book this coming year and looking forward even more to getting to know Anna as an adult.
Hi Lee Ann,
Wonderful to hear from you again! It’s hard to believe it’s been more than three years since you first wrote to me asking whether The Winter Sea would be published in the U.S.A. – as you see, patience pays off! I really hope your sister likes the book, you’ll have to let me know.
In the meantime, you’ll be happy to hear that you’re absolutely right – the hero of the book I’m writing now is Robbie McMorran. When you first asked me, three years ago, whether he’d ever have his own story, my first reaction was, “but he’s only eight!”, and then I got thinking, “hang on, he was eight when I first started writing the book – he’d be older than that, now”, and THEN I thought, “and if I start writing a book now with him as the hero, he’ll be even older by the time it’s finally published…”
So when I began to sift through my ideas for a sequel to The Winter Sea, and went looking for new modern-day characters to wrap the continuing past story in, I already had a clear image of Robbie (or Rob, as he calls himself now) as a young man, and I decided that he would be perfect to cast as the modern-day hero.
I really want to thank you for your original question three years ago, because it started me down a path that’s allowed me to re-discover a character I’ve always loved myself. I’m really enjoying getting re-acquainted with Robbie, and seeing how his gift of the Sight has shaped his life. I have a feeling it will shape my plot in interesting ways, as well…
Marg from Historical Tapestry asks: Due to the timeslip aspect of your novels, and also with the contemporary strands of your story, you have to write more than one leading man. What are the key elements required to make a convincing leading man?
It all starts, for me, with the name. I like plain, solid names for a man, not only when it comes to the historical heroes, where plain, solid names were the norm, but in my modern-day men as well. David and Richard and John – these are names of the men I might meet on the street every day, and that makes them more real to me.
I also like it when a hero isn’t perfect, since real men always have their imperfections and their blind spots, though that doesn’t stop us loving them. And physical perfection isn’t necessary, either. Because I write in the first person, when a hero in one of my books is described as being handsome, we’re seeing him through eyes of the heroine, so while to her he might be the most handsome man she’s ever met, that doesn’t mean he has movie-star looks, only that he fits her own definition of what makes a good-looking man. We all have different views, on that count.
I can only draw from men I’ve known in my own life: my grandfathers, my father, and my husband and my friends, all different men, and yet with certain commonalities. If my heroes tend to be quieter men, it’s because the real men I know don’t go emoting all over the place – as a rule, they don’t talk much at all (though to be fair, I talk so much myself it may just be that they can’t get a word in edgewise). They don’t always say the right things, but they’re there, really there, when you need them the most. They’re dependable, trustworthy, decent, intelligent, honourable men with a good sense of humour. So I give these traits to my own leading men.
To read Marg’s full interview with me, use this link.
Marijana from Australia asks: Dear Susanna, I believe that I have happily resolved the mystery (aided by your clues) and that you are about to embark on a sequel to The Winter Sea! Are you able to confirm this please? I know that, aside from myself, many of my friends will be thrilled if that is the case.
Marijana, you’re a good detective! Yes, that’s what I’ve done.
I know I’ve mentioned before that a few of the past characters from The Winter Sea were still moving round in my mind, refusing to sit still, and I’d discussed the idea for a sort-of-sequel (more a companion book, since the structure would allow it to be read independently of The Winter Sea, so a reader wouldn’t have to have read the first book to enjoy the second) with my editor, Lara Crisp. She really liked the concept and was keen to see it written, but because I was already partway through the sequel to my thriller, Every Secret Thing, we both thought it would make more sense to finish that one, first.
The thing is, what makes sense doesn’t always mesh well with a writer’s subconscious. And my heroine Kate (of the thriller) appeared to know long before I did what book I should really be writing. Not surprising, since I’ve left her hanging twice before – the first time, she was jogging in Ottawa when I set the thriller aside to write The Winter Sea, and the second time, she was stuck in a taxi for nearly two years while I worked on The Rose Garden, so I suspect that by now she can spot the signs. This time, she cleverly settled herself on a terrace in Greece, overlooking the summer resort town of Nydri, with someone for company, dinner, and wine, so she’s good for a while.
This new book will continue little Anna’s story, from The Winter Sea, beginning in the dark final days of the 1715 Rebellion and taking her through France and into Russia, to the household of our old friend Captain Thomas Gordon, now an influential leader of the Russian navy in St Petersburg, and a major player in a Jacobite intrigue that, like the 1708, is often left out of the history books.
And, like The Winter Sea, this book will be wrapping that past story in a present-day one, but with a completely different heroine and hero (though I will give you another clue – you’ve met the hero once before, in one of my own novels…)
The Bruce County Museum Book Club asks: Why do you have a paranormal thread running through your books, does that come from your own experiences?
Before I answer the question, I have to thank the Book Club members for their gracious understanding last month, when at the last minute I had to cancel my plans to meet with them when one of my children fell ill with a fever. Instead we had a fun and lively talk thanks to a speaker-phone. This question came up after we’d rung off, and so they emailed me to ask it.
Have I had any experiences with the paranormal? Well, I don’t know. I’ve had a few things happen in my life that I find fascinating. I may or may not once have tapped into genetic memory. And I may or may not have had something – friendly, but still something – roaming through the hallways of my rented house in Wales. And I’ve certainly met people whose ability to know, predict, or see things that the rest of us can’t see defies an easy explanation.
So I’m curious. I like the fact that there are things in life we can’t explain, and I’m intrigued to see how scientists and academics study these phenomena. I like to read the theories, and the case files, and the arguments, and when I weave the paranormal with a plot I always let my heroine explore the science, too, because for me that’s where the interest lies.
Unlike my heroines, I’ve never been regressed to a past life, or met a ghost, or travelled back in time – but thanks to all my research, I’ll be ready if I do!
Janavie from the United States asks: Please post when your new book , “Rose Garden” is coming out because those of us who live in NJ ,USA, have to track you down.
Hi Janavie. I really appreciate the efforts my American fans have to go through to find and buy my books, and I hope it will become a little easier for you now that I once again have an American publisher, Sourcebooks, who have not only picked up my two latest novels, The Winter Sea and The Rose Garden, but have also acquired my backlist and plan to re-issue those books, too, in due course.
Right now The Rose Garden, which will be published in the UK and Canada in the spring of 2011, is scheduled for a fall 2011 release in the States.
I know it seems like a long wait, but publishers only have so many places in their schedules each season, so they have to plan well ahead. I promise I’ll keep everyone informed as things progress – I’ll post the cover when they send me one, and when I know the day and month of publication I’ll post that, as well.
Meantime, thanks so much for your email and your loyalty!
John from London, England, asks: Do you plan your novels, as I usually think of a start, middle and finish but as soon as I start typing stuff seems to flow straight out and every time I end up throwing all my plans out the window.
It’s nice to know I’m not the only one! Let me preface this by saying every writer does things differently – there is no right or wrong way, it’s a matter of what works the best for you, and not for someone else. But no, I don’t do that much planning.
I start with a first sentence, usually. Sometimes a title. A small central group of main characters, and some idea of what the main problem will be. And the setting, I always know that. Then I turn those main characters loose in that landscape, and see where they take me.
The planning, if any, is done on a microscopic level in the middle of the book, to keep things moving when they start to come more slowly, as they always do. Then I sit down and plan the next scene, or the next conversation, in point form, to give me some direction.
But when things are flowing, as you yourself seem to have already learned, the best thing I can do is get out of my characters’ way!
(I should add the exception to all this is when I am writing a thriller, as I’m doing now. For the thrillers I find that I have to sit down and try planning beforehand – this helps with the pacing. But even in thrillers, my characters tend to have minds of their own).
Virginie writes: I’m sixteen, and I’ve written a book two years ago (that I don’t want published, since it’s my first novel and like my other ideas better) and now I’m writing a second one. I was just wondering if literary agents and publishing companies will mind my age if I send them a copy of the manuscript; will they read it at all? Of course I’ll still try and send it, but is there any possibility of my getting published?
Yes, Virginie, there is a possibility!
Your question is near to my heart because writing was all that I wanted to do from a very young age, so in reading your letter I see a great deal of my own self at sixteen – except for the fact that you’ve managed to finish a novel, where I didn’t finish my first until I’d reached my twenties. Well done!
Will your age work against you? Well, I asked one of my own agents, Shawna McCarthy, who handles all my US sales and rights, for her opinion. Shawna has been in the business over twenty years, as both an award-winning editor and an agent, and her reply to you is,
“It’s actually a plus to be a young writer as it gives you an edge with publishers looking for marketing hooks. Beyond that, though, you still have to be a good writer, as good as an adult, in order to get published. No one will publish a poorly written book just because it’s by a 16-year-old. All writers, no matter what their age, need to have a firm grasp of spelling, punctuation and grammar, and a good feel for plotting, character and pacing. Good luck!”
So there you have it, straight from a woman who knows. For my own part, the best advice that I can give you to increase your odds of getting published is to study everything you can about the business – read magazines like Writer’s Digest, visit the blogs of writers you admire, learn all you can about how publishing works, so you can send your manuscript out in the right way, with confidence.
And please, please, steer clear of those people and web sites that promise a quick and sure path to success. Read this page about “Vanity Publishers”, and be aware of the warning signs. And remember: Publishers pay writers, not the other way around – you should NEVER have to spend any money to “see your book in print”, nor should you have to pay an agent a “reading fee” to have them read your manuscript, but there are a whole lot of people out there lying in wait to take advantage of the unsuspecting (and hopeful) new writer, so beware.
And be persistent. Some writers are lucky enough to be published the first time they try, while for others it might take a few unsold manuscripts and a whole lot of heartache (and postage!) before they connect with that one perfect editor who loves their writing.
The trick is to never give up, and to never stop learning your craft. With a novel already completed at 16, you’re already well down the road to succeeding. Keep at it, and don’t get discouraged.
I wish you the best.
Carol writes: Susanna – I have been writing all my life, and I have several books in the works, at various stages of completion BUT I never seem to cross the finish line and send them off to a publisher. Did you encounter that fear before you sent your first manuscript or query letter off? If you did, how did you get over it? Were the rejections, if you got any, as horrible as some books on writing and authors I have heard speak say they were?
Carol, I was the Queen of First Chapters when I started out! First chapters that I polished and revised until, in my eyes, they were perfect…then I set them to the side and started something else. Sometimes I’d make it as far as six or seven chapters, but that was the absolute limit.
Looking back, I can see that part of my problem was that I had no idea how to navigate my way through the writing of a novel. It wasn’t until I had the prod of my sister’s dare and the roadmap of Phyllis A Whitney’s Guide to Fiction Writing that I managed to get all the way to the end of my first book, Undertow. But part of it, too, was pure subconscious self-defense: If I didn’t actually try to complete something, I’d never have to face up to the fact I might fail. And I was terrified of failing.
How did I get over it? Well, as I said, the dare helped (if I hadn’t finished the book, I’d have had to buy my sister an expensive dinner I couldn’t afford at the time). Phyllis A Whitney’s book definitely helped, from the opening chapters in which she warned: ‘In the beginning [your family will] feel that you have no right to sequester yourself. Who do you think you are – a writer? So you say to yourself and to others, “Yes, I am a writer. I write, and I am a writer…”’ through to the final pages in which she gave advice about surviving the submission process: ‘The most important rule through all this painful time is not to let the rejections discourage you. (You should be working on something else by this time, anyway.) Remember – a manuscript sitting on a shelf isn’t going to sell.’
I took her advice, faced my fear with pure blind confidence, and sent that first manuscript off to New York. It came back almost by return mail. But I sent it out again. And again. And again. My rejections, from both agents and publishers, weren’t really all that horrible. Painful to receive, yes. Discouraging, certainly. But for the most part, they were kindly worded. Several came with small handwritten jottings of encouragement. And after two years of rejections, Undertow finally landed on the desk of an editor at a small publisher who published just that sort of book, and wanted to buy mine.
It helps to persevere. Because one thing no one ever told me when I first became a ‘published author’ was that being published didn’t mean I’d finished with rejection. Editors and agents come and go, the focus of a publisher can change, a bigger publisher can buy out one that’s smaller and sack both its staff and authors – it’s an ever-changing business, and it helps to have thick skin and a lot of patience.
I have neither, as it happens. What I do have is a stubborn love of doing what I do, and I take comfort in the knowledge that it all comes down to finding that one person, that right person, in the right place at the right hour of the day, at the right publisher. And sometimes, that takes time.
Hang in there!
Leanne from Toronto writes: I enjoyed reading Mariana! I’m British and although you are listed as a Canadian author I can tell by your writing that you have spent much time in England! I wanted to ask you about the location of Mariana. A few years ago I found myself in Avebury in Wiltshire. Your description of Exbury reminded me of that town – especially the reference to the Red Lion and the church. I was curious to see if parts of Exbury could be linked to Avebury.
Leanne, your instincts were dead on – Avebury was, in fact, the setting for Mariana, but since I didn’t want to use the stone circle in my story and it would have been hard to write about Avebury without mentioning the stone circle (the characters would have been bumping into the stones left and right!) I decided to change the name of the village.
But the buildings are all there, in their proper locations – the manor house, the pub, and the church. Even Greywethers was a real house – in Avebury it sits at the crossroads, just opposite the Red Lion, but I moved it a bit further out of the village for my novel. You can see the back of it here, in this photo.
The manor house is a National Trust property, and open to the public. It was closed when I visited so I didn’t get a chance to stand at the window in the Cavalier Bedroom myself, but from all accounts the ‘ghost’ seen from there is a matter of record. You can find the National Trust’s page on the manor house here, including their link to a very cool Google Street View of Avebury that lets you sneak up behind the house I used for Greywethers, and look across the road into the back garden of the Red Lion!
To see the interior of the Red Lion, you can rent the movie Still Crazy, with Bill Nighy and Billy Connolly – the band members meet up in the Red Lion early on in the film.
And of course, there are always my own few photos of the locations…
Liz from London asks: I picked up ‘Sophia’s Secret’ by chance in Waterstones, London, loved it and now have all of your novels that I can get hold of. On your website you say that you’re near the end of your next book and I wondered how long it takes from the publishers receiving your text to my being able to buy it in London?
I’m still working to finish the new novel – two chapters left, then a few weeks’ revising to tidy it up, then I’ll send it all through to my publishers.
There’s no hard-and-fast rule of how long it takes for a publisher to bring a book out, but the usual time from receipt of the typescript to book-on-the-shelf is about nine months (just like a baby).
The typescript will need to be edited first, in a back-and-forth between my editor and me, and then the copyeditor has a go at it, and then the book is set in proof and THAT has to be read through rather carefully for errors, then it’s ready to be sent on to the printers.
In the meantime, the cover needs to be designed, and the book – having been added to my publishers’ catalogue of upcoming titles – must be shopped round the major book-buyers for bookshops and libraries, since it’s their pre-orders that will decide how many books need to be printed.
There is also the publicity to handle – months before the book comes out it must be sent off to reviewers and to magazines and influential booksellers, and all of that, in hopes that someone might say something nice about it 🙂 That’s a lot of work my publisher must do, and those nine months fly by like nothing.
So assuming that I send them my new typescript in September, they will likely have the book out on the shelves next April, but if we just say “next spring” that should be safe enough!
Louise asks: Will Allison & Busby be re-issuing all your previous books?
I can’t promise they’ll get round to all the books, but I do know for certain they plan to re-issue two others besides Mariana…
The Shadowy Horses will be out in a new paperback edition in the UK this September, and Season of Storms (which has never yet been published in the UK) is the next in line to be re-issued sometime after that. As soon as I know the publication date I’ll post it here. I’m really pleased to see the books getting another chance. Can’t wait to see the new covers!
Patricia asks: I have a question about the Scottish royal family listed in The Winter Sea. When I studied History in university, the family name was spelled “Stuart”. On a British website about the History of the Monarchy, the Scottish line of royals is spelled “Stuart” as well. As a writer, myself, and as one who is greatly interested in history, I would appreciate it if you could explain the varied spelling and your use of “Stewart” rather than “Stuart”. It seems even more ironic that a character should be named “Stuart”.
The spelling of the royal Stewart name in Scotland is an unsettled matter among historians. The original spelling was “Stewart” (from “Steward”), and remained so until Mary, Queen of Scots altered it to the French spelling of “Stuart”. This revised form of the name became the one best known and favoured by the English, and so it was the one most used by English historians writing about British history (including, most likely, the texts you remember from your university days!).
But Britain is not always synonymous with Scotland, and many Scots appear to prefer the original spelling when it comes to their royals. (You’ll find a lot of Scottish web sites, academic and otherwise, use “Stewart”, like this one: http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/scottishhistory/stewartscotland/index.asp)
Certainly many of the documents I used in my research that came from the time of my story (1708) used the “Stewart” spelling, and since my characters were Scottish and I wanted to respect that, I decided to use “Stewart” in my book.
Also, as you’ve pointed out, I had a modern character whose Christian name was “Stuart”, so the different spellings made for less confusion, in my mind.
I hope this helps?
Laura Hilly of Gloucester asks: How difficult was it to carry out the research for this book [The Winter Sea/Sophia’s Secret]?
I would use the word “challenging” rather than difficult. Certainly it took a great deal of time and study, because in the past story I was using a number of real people as characters and their lives had to be re-created as faithfully as I could manage. In the case of John Moray, this meant doing a bit of amateur geneaology to fill in the gaps of his immediate family records, identifying his brothers and sisters and using found bits of his personal correspondence to help track his movements and get a good feel for his character.
I had to do this with many of the characters, in fact, trying to make each person as real as I could while attempting to piece together the puzzle of what happened that summer and autumn, and why. But as frustrating as it could sometimes be, I absolutely loved that part of the research. Sitting in the British Library and reading letters Moray wrote – actually touching the paper he touched over three hundred years ago – that’s just a moment I’ll treasure, and never forget.
Excerpted from Allison & Busby’s Book Club Q&A.
Muriel from Ontario asks: I’ve just finished reading Every Secret Thing and totally enjoyed it. We are reading this for our Book Club and I will be making the presentation of the book. Could you please help me come up with some intelligent questions that I could ask the members as it seems a bit difficult to find information on the Internet. This is our first mystery so it would be nice to make it super interesting. Again it was a great book and enjoyable beginning to end and as my husband and I have spent a lot of holidays in Portugal it brought back the familiar towns. Thank you.
Muriel, I’m very honoured that your book club has chosen to read and discuss Every Secret Thing, and I’m so glad to know that you enjoyed it. Hmm…questions you could ask the other members of your club. I’ve given this a bit of thought and managed to come up with a few (though I don’t know whether they can truly be classed as “intelligent” :-):
1. The story is told in two interwoven threads – one set in the present-day, another in the past. Did this approach work for you?
2. Could the past story have stood alone without the modern-day frame?
3. Did you find one story more compelling than the other?
4. Did you have a favourite character?
5. The contribution of the BSC ladies to the war effort fascinated me, as did the women themselves. Do you think modern young women would be capable of working under such secretive conditions today? Could you do it?
6. When I was writing Every Secret Thing I had planned on giving Kate and Matt a happy ending, and my first draft of the novel actually ended with them together. It just didn’t ring true, somehow. Kate didn’t seem quite ready for it yet, so I rewrote the ending leaving their relationship in limbo, unresolved, to be continued in the next book in the series. In your opinion, did I make the right decision?
I hope these few questions will give you a start, at least. And please do feel free to write back with any other questions that come out of your discussion – I’ll be happy to answer them, if I can.
The review site Singletitles.com asks: Your novels are a wonderful blend of romance, mystery, history, suspense and emotion. What drew you to writing these kinds of books?
The short answer, of course, is that those are the books I love reading. As children, my sister and I were given free access to our parents’ bookshelves, and when we were bored we could choose any book from the shelves that we wanted and squirrel it up to our rooms for a read. So from a fairly early age I was introduced to the books and the writers my mother loved best: Kathleen Winsor’s Forever Amber; Daphne DuMaurier’s Jamaica Inn; Nevil Shute’s A Town Like Alice; My Lord Monleigh and Bride of the MacHugh by Jan Cox Speas, The Masters of Bow Street by John Creasey, and all of Mary Stewart’s thrillers. All those books helped shape my own sense of story and taught me the value of strong and intelligent heroines.
My parents also passed their love of history on to me, a passion I still carry, and the mystery’s there because I have the kind of mind that likes a puzzle, wants a challenge, thrives on a whodunit. As for the emotion, well, that likely works its way into my stories because I’m so sentimental. Around the time of the 50th anniversary of D-Day there was an ad on television that I still can’t even describe to anyone without going all weepy. (The one with the old man who goes into a vintage clothing store to buy a pair of silk stockings so he can keep a promise that he made in wartime). (You see? Here I go…)
Read the full interview at Singletitles.com
Rosemary from Vancouver writes: I am sure you get many people writing to you about Mariana, which is my favorite book of all time. I have actually gone through three copies now – I read it over and over again! My question is this – while I love the subtle references to the characters from Mariana in other books – Named of the Dragon and in Every Secret Thing – I want more of them! Any plans for a sequel to that? Any plans to “resurrect” your old characters from Mariana and return to that area of England? Of course, in present day, not necessarily in the past?!
Thanks so much for your email, I’m glad that you enjoy the books. I really am so flattered that so many people seem to fall in love with Mariana. All those characters are very dear to my heart, too – that’s probably why they tend to sneak into other stories sometimes! But just at the moment I’ve no plans to write a sequel. It’s a difficult thing to describe, but when I’ve got a book’s ending right I can tell because all of the characters simply stop talking – there’s nothing more for me to put on the page.
I suppose it’s rather like Julia’s journey in Mariana. Once she’s travelled the path she was meant to, the circle is closed and she can’t re-live life in the past any more. Having said that, I have learned to never say “never”, and if I’m ever called back by those characters I’d certainly be happy to revisit them. And that’s an area of England that I truly love, it’s magical, so Exbury and Crofton Hall may one day have another tale to tell.
Kerstin from Germany asks: How were you inspired to create the Roman legionary ghost in your book Rosehill (The Shadowy Horses)?
Thanks for your question, Kerstin. When I was a little girl I read a book for children called The Eagle of the Ninth, by Rosemary Sutcliff (I see that this same book is available in German as Der Adler der Neunten Legion). It tells the story of the lost legion, and I was fascinated by it. When I came to write Rosehill I knew I wanted the characters to be working on an archaelogical dig, and I wanted Peter Quinnell to be something like Schliemann, devoted to finding the proof of a legend. I remembered the lost Roman legion then, and thought that it would make a perfect and romantic thing for Quinnell to be searching for, the sort of thing a man might dedicate his life to finding.
The dig, I knew, was in the Scottish borders, which have seen so many battles through the centuries that they feel full of ghosts. And to many people there the gift of second sight is seen as something normal. So the character of Robbie started forming in my mind, this boy who claimed he’d seen a Roman ghost out walking on the hill. And then of course I started seeing in my mind the ghost as well, and I began to wonder where he’d come from, what had happened to him, and why he still walked there all alone.
Few people know that, while I was searching for a British publisher for Rosehill, one editor asked me to rework the book to include the Sentinel’s own story in flashbacks at the beginning of each chapter, and I did this (which took me some weeks), but in the end that editor did not want the book after all, and the publisher who finally did buy it liked the book better the way I had written it first, so the Sentinel’s story was never included.
Perhaps one day I will try to re-write it into a separate short story, when I have the time.
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