Guest Author Leigh Russell : Living the Dream from a Walk in the Park!

These days writing is such a necessary part of my life, it's hard to believe that five years ago I had no expectations of becoming an author. I've been quoted as saying that I "fell into writing like Alice down the rabbit hole” because there was never any grand plan to write. 

If anyone had told me five years ago that my books would all hit the bestseller charts on amazon, kindle, iTunes, WH Smith's and Waterstones, I would have laughed because I hadn't written anything. So when people ask me about my future plans, I can only say that the future is mysterious and full of exciting possibilities. There's no telling what might be around the corner.

The story of my writing begins with a walk in my local park. It was summer in England - so of course the sky was overcast and as I reached the middle of the park it began to rain. Just then, a man appeared round a bend in the path walking towards me. In that instant an idea for a story struck me, and when I returned home I started writing. The story took shape so quickly in my mind that after six weeks the first draft was finished. Having sent it off in a large brown envelope - as you did back in those days - I almost forgot about it. Imagine my excitement when a publisher telephoned me two weeks later to express interest in my writing!

You can read the story inspired by my walk in the park in Cut Short, published in 2009 as the first in a series of crime novels. The book introduces my detective, Geraldine Steel, a single woman dedicated to her job. Thanks mainly to word of mouth recommendations, Cut Short sold incredibly fast. Fortunately it was also very well reviewed, and went on to be shortlisted for a CWA Dagger Award for Best First Crime Novel.

Since the publication of Cut Short, I am frequently approached to give author talks. The first reading group I visited were interested to hear about Road Closed, the second book in the series I found myself writing. My audience were all disappointed to hear that I had given Geraldine Steel a different sergeant in Road Closed. "But we like Ian Peterson," they chorused. Always keen to please, I duly reinstated Ian Peterson as Geraldine Steel's detective sergeant; little dreaming that he would one day feature in his own series.  

I was initially offered a three book deal. In Cut Short, Road Closed and Dead End, Geraldine Steel works for the Kent constabulary. Following the success of all three titles, my publisher offered me a second three book deal. In Death Bed and Stop Dead, Geraldine has moved to London, leaving her sergeant behind. So when my publisher wanted to explore the possibility of my writing two books a year, a spin off series for Ian Peterson was the obvious answer. The new series launches this year with Cold Sacrifice.

Sometimes I stop and think: "This is me. I'm writing books, and people are reading them all around the world, in translation as well as in the original English". It seems unreal. I'm not sure it's really happening. But if it's a dream, I don't want to wake up yet. I'm only half way through writing the second Ian Peterson novel which has to be finished before I turn my attention to the edits for the sixth Geraldine Steel novel, and then there's my idea for the seventh Geraldine Steel investigation.... and the eighth.... and Ian Peterson's third story... No, I can't stop yet! Because however exciting it is to know my books are bestsellers, the real thrill is writing.

Links to all Leigh Russell's books can be found on her website: http://leighrussell.co.uk

Jacqueline Christodoulou tells us how Crime Writing found Her...

When people ask me about my writing I usually tell them that I submitted my first novel five years ago. But that’s not entirely true. My journey began a long time before that.

Like most people, I started writing at school.  I didn't give up later on. Likewise, reading began at around five years old and I continued. So when I decided to write novels I thought I had a fairly good grounding. How difficult could it be?

Not so easy, it turned out.

I began to write short stories for publication around 1995 and had some success with women's magazines. So the natural next step was to write something longer. I'd been thinking about a story and I began to write that, with some autobiographical details thrown in. Bound to be a winner, wasn't it? I sent it to the Romantic Novelists Association as an entry to one of their competitions. The main thrust of the feedback was that I had spelt 'whether' as 'wether' wrongly the whole way through the manuscript conjuring up the image of a castrated male sheep for the reviewer. Not exactly what I was hoping for.  I sent it to a couple of agents (with corrected spelling), and it was rejected.

Around that time I had been working with a group of young people at a youth project and learnt that there was more to storytelling than meets the eye - rather than just being a source of entertainment, it's how people construct and understand their life experiences.

So I went to study it academically for many years and came out on a very different trajectory than I entered at - I became a narrative psychologist with a successful non-fiction book about identity construction!

I’d learnt about the nuts and bolts of storytelling, and how it affects people psychologically. I learned about Aristotle’s three acts and how everyday language is storytelling with a beginning, middle and an end. In many ways, studying the way people build their identities through stories brought me closer to understanding how readers understand novels, as a kind of conversation filtered through both the ideas of the author and the experience of the reader.

But I still wanted to write fiction. In fact, I couldn't stop writing fiction. I read a lot of women's fiction and decided I would write fiction for women. Seemed entirely reasonable. I didn't plan to write formula or commercial fiction, rather stories about lives, wherever that took me. The first two novels exorcised my own life out of the stories, leaving my set to write a third story free from my emotional shackles. My third novel was the first one I had been completely pleased with and excited about. However, when I sent it out, I soon realised that it was considered mixed genre.

In between writing the third novel and revising it, I wrote a speculative fiction story and briefly wondered if I was meant to veer off in this direction. Then I started another women's fiction book that, again, had dark undertones.

By this time I had detected a pattern - these women's fictions books were all set against a landscape of the peaks and troughs of lives and how people dealt with loss and various emotions. I'd learnt about Freytag's pyramid by this time, and about comedy, quest and tragedy stories. I'd learnt about seed words and thematic questions. Some time early last year I realised that I my thematic questions were about crime and mystery and I was trying to squash them into a women's fiction-shaped container.

I love my characters, so much that I dream about them. I was, and still am, committed to strong characters who, like real people, have their own nuances, flaws and ticks. So as well as the confusion over genre, I was trying to write a character-led novel with an equally strong plot. This led to a slow pace - I was trying to do everything at once.

It wasn't until my work attracted the attention of agents and I received their feedback that I realised I was a crime writer. I'd had some requests for full manuscripts from agents who represented crime and thriller authors, and I came to realise that this was what the darkness in my writing had been - underlying tones of dreadful things in women's lives. I had also been writing strong women characters and some of the critique from beta readers mentioned that they were perhaps a little too quirky for women's fiction. I told myself that they were quirky because of their horrendous life experiences, but never wrote about the horror. It was almost as if I had been resisting writing what I wanted to in an effort to get myself to a point where I wasn't writing about surface issues.

Writing about crime and mystery has allowed me develop my writing in a way that I had never been able to before. My interest in characterisation extends to the characters surrounding the crime and affected by it, as well as the antagonist and protagonist, and this has given me an opportunity to use my psychological knowledge to understand the dynamics.

Having described my journey so far it sounds like I have a master plan, all plotted out somewhere. Yet when I start writing all of the above is in there somewhere, driving the core of the story as the characters provide a canvas for it. It's still difficult, and a challenge. But the joy from the creative process makes it worthwhile. That, and imagining my novel published and on the shelves of a bookshop.

So crime writing is for me. It always was, right from the first novel when I took imaginary revenge on the man who left my great grandmother alone with a child. I just had to recognise it. Now it's difficult for me to imagine writing anything else. Although who knows where this writing journey will take me next?

Jacqueline has written for best! Magazine, Bea Magazine and The F-Word. She has contributed to the 100RPM anthology and has written a non-fiction book ‘Health, Identity and Women’. Jacqueline is currently working on her second crime novel.  Her first crime novel is currently "under discussion  with interested parties" - watch this space!
Her blog, Keeping it Real, looks at links between psychology, ideation and the writing process.

Debut Author Paula Daly tells us how Stephen King gave her the drive to write a book that created a bidding war!

Paula Daly's debut novel, the gripping crime thriller "Just What Kind of Mother Are You"  is the reason there has been no sleep, little cooking and NO ironing in our house recently.  And you have only to read all the Five Star reviews on Amazon to know that I'm not the only one.

The story strikes a chord and fear into mothers the world over; your daughter's friend is missing and you were the one who was supposed to be looking after her. "Un-put-downable" doesn't do it justice.

So... I can't tell you how stupidly excited I am to be introducing our Guest Author today.... and here Paula reveals what every aspiring author is desperate to know... how did it happen?  How did you arrive at the Station called Success?

"You know the saying – you should only write if you cannot live without writing? Well, that wasn’t me. I belonged to the group of perhaps millions of people who longed to be writers so they could give up the day job.

What could be better than sitting by the fire on a cold, wet February afternoon being paid to make up stories?

Trouble was, I had no idea how to write. Or even how to start. I didn’t have anything to say, and wouldn’t have known how to say it even if I did. I had not studied English since I was sixteen, I was a physiotherapist, and I wasn’t even certain how to punctuate dialogue correctly. 

Then my friend called and said she was reading StephenKing’s book ‘On Writing’. She told me to read it, which I did, and the next day I started writing. His book gave me the confidence to just give it a go and write anything that came into my head. Suddenly I found I had more than enough to say. In fact, I couldn’t stop. I had paper all over the house and wrote whenever my youngest child would allow.

After around six weeks of short stories I felt ready to tackle a novel. No idea what I was doing - I thought I’d start writing and see what came out.

What came out was a rather silly, frivolous psychological thriller. Not good enough to be published, but good enough to attract the attention of an agent who said, “We don’t want this. Write your next novel and we’ll see how you do.” I tried telling her I didn’t really know what I was doing, that I didn’t know HOW to put a novel together, but she assured me I could do it.

That next novel was turned down by all major publishers. A near miss, they said, but deep down I knew it wasn’t good enough. Writing is a skill that takes time to learn. I was fully prepared for it to take the same amount of time as a degree course - my reasoning being that I was retraining for a job, and any skilled profession takes at least 3 to 4 years of full time study.

Eventually, I struck lucky. JUST WHAT KIND OF MOTHER ARE YOU? came together once I found a great premise and figured out my characters’ motivation. Once submitted it prompted a bidding war between six major publishers and to date has sold in eleven territories.

I’m still not sure I know what I’m doing, but at least now I realise neither does anybody else."

Thanks for stopping by Strictly Writing, Paula.  We all wish you every continued and deserved success with 'Just What Kind of Mother Are You' and I for one cannot wait for the next book!

Scare tactics

I'm a good girl.

No, really, I am.

I eat my five a day, I read bedtime stories to my children and I call my Mother every day.

I like to think my reward will be an afterlife like George Best, but in the meantime I make sure I floss my teeth.

So what then, is a nice girl doing writing crime fiction?

It's a question I'm asked all the time. In fact, when I was doing the publicity stint for my second book, I was asked a variant of it in every one of the fifteen radio interviews I did.

And I suppose it does seem odd that I should choose to spend so much time dreaming up violent criminals and their brutal activities.

Why don't I shy away from imagining what goes on in the mind of a sociopath?

Why do I enjoy exploring the twisted logic of the damaged and the dangerous?

It seems strange, sick even...but it's not.

Hang on and give me a chance.

I believe that humans are instinctive thrill seekers. How else can you explain why my local gliding club has a waiting list? They're planes, with, like, no engines. Duh.

How else can you explain motorbikes, rollercoasters and ice skating? No need for any of it.

Yet we love it...or at least some of us do.

Me, I'm a bit of a wuss. I like being on my two feet. I don't like flying, skiing or riding horses. I don't like anything that goes faster than 30mph. To be honest I've never even driven on a motorway. Okay stop laughing now.

But I still need my fix of adrenaline, so what better way to get my kicks than to conjure a world of thrills and spills. A world of danger.

In the safe confines of the left field of my brain I can feel the dead weight of a gun, or the smell of fear on my victim. Hell, I can kill off the cast if I'm in a shitty mood.

And I'm not alone. Crime fiction has been and remains one of the most loved genres. From Agatha C to Mo Hayder, the book buying public have voted with their wallets and library cards.

Even in these cash strapped times, with the economy in free fall and the publishing industry suffering, crime fiction continues to sell.

When times are bad it seems, we still like to imagine a world where it could all be worse.

So that's my excuse and I'm sticking to it.

Now, can anyone think of a name for my new serial killer?