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!

Debut novel up for US book critics award

Strictly Writing catches up with Northern Ireland journalist and author Anthony Quinn

A DETECTIVE thriller written by Northern Ireland journalist Anthony Quinn has been selected as one of the five best debut novels of 2012 by book critics from the LA Times, The Washington Post, The Guardian, The San Francisco Chronicle and other daily newspapers.

Disappeared, which is set along the Lough Neagh shore in the aftermath of the Troubles, has been nominated for the Strand Critics Debut Novel Award, the only crime fiction award to be judged solely by book critics. Previous nominees for a Strand award include Stieg Larsson, Lee Child, PD James and Michael Connelly.

The awards, which recognise excellence in the field of mystery fiction, will be presented at an invitation-only cocktail party, hosted by The Strand in New York on July 9.

It is not just Disappeared’s tightly plotted story which has resonated with US audiences but also its moody scene-setting and ‘powerful’ prose.

Reviewers have praised the novel for its ‘powerful mood-enhancing prose’; ‘its convincing tightly-plotted story’; its ‘lavish portrayal of Irish history’ and ‘the ratcheting up of tension as the yarn progresses’.

Anthony has written a number of short stories which have been shortlisted for Hennessy Irish Fiction Awards, but this is his first novel. The idea for the thriller came from a single image of an elderly man burdened by his past wandering across windswept bogland.

“I wanted to write a novel about the past coming back to haunt a group of men caught up in the Troubles”, he said.
“The image of a confused old man struggling to remember a bad deed buried in the past with a desperate sense of urgency stayed with me. I wanted to know what drove him on and what lay waiting for him in this remote landscape.”
The book begins when Inspector Celsius Daly is called to a rural home in the lough-shore area, from which David Hughes, an elderly gent afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease, has lately vanished.

Hughes’ sister and caretaker fears he has wandered off and into trouble. But as the inspector investigates, he discovers that Hughes isn’t the quiet country putterer he seems. Instead, he’s part of a larger and much more complicated story connected to the long-ago slaying (by the Irish Republican Army) of an alleged political informer, Oliver Jordan, and the more recent torture murder of an ex-intelligence agent.

The fact that said agent placed his own obituary in a local newspaper, prior to his death, makes this whole affair particularly bizarre. Daly - a detective still wrestling with a recent separation from his wife and more capable at his job than at handling his personal life - adds further to the stakes in this mystery by inviting Jordan’s answers-seeking son into the case. It soon becomes apparent that the missing Hughes harbours secrets in his deteriorating mind that others don’t wish to see released.


You can purchase Anthony's novel on Amazon and other selected outlets.