Linda Gillard

Thanks for spreading the word & supporting this excellent cause, Michelle.

Thanks, Chrissy - as ever - for the recommendations of my books. Star - the mushiest (!) of my books (if you have a Kindle) is probably UNTYING THE KNOT. http://www.amazon.co.uk/UNTYING-THE-KNOT-ebook/dp/B005JTAMQO/ref=pd_sim_kinc_2 I consider that the most romantic book I've written. STAR GAZING was shortlisted for Romantic Novel of the Year 2009 but A LIFETIME BURNING isn't romantic. Passionate, yes! Romantic, no. Do you know Sue Moorcroft? She writes modern believable romance. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_1_7?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=sue+moorcroft+books&sprefix=sue+moo%2Cstripbooks%2C188 Or Anne Rivers Siddons? http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/search/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=I%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AAnne+Rivers+Siddons&keywords=Anne+Rivers+Siddons&ie=UTF8&qid=1328700827&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B000AQ3E5C

Having read the Mills & Boon correspondence (!) can I suggest, Vodkafan that you consider romantic suspense as a genre? The best and most celebrated author in this genre is Mary Stewart whose books in the '60s & '70s influenced a whole generation of writers (including me.) She's just been reissued in pastel "park your brain at the door" covers that bely the intelligence of her writing. http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=sr_tc_2_0?rh=I%3Astripbooks%2Ck%3AMary+Stewart&keywords=Mary+Stewart&ie=UTF8&qid=1326289283&sr=1-2-ent&field-contributor_id=B000AP6YNC Mary Stewart (still alive and in her 90s) wrote superbly and hated to be throught of as a romance writer. She thought she had more in common with John Buchan - outdoor adventures with a heroine-in-jeopardy. Her books score for dialogue, exciting plots and exotic locations. (Well, they were considered exotic in the 60s - Crete, Corfu, Skye, Austria, Lebanon.) She writes wonderfully about these foreign locations and you can really soak up the atmosphere as you read. She also writes very well about children and animals. Both often feature in her stories. (If you're an animal lover read THIS ROUGH MAGIC.) There's always a love story, always a happy ending, but her heroes are real men, with failings. Sometimes they aren't even tall, dark or handsome. My favourite Mary Stewarts are THE MOONSPINNERS, THE GABRIEL HOUNDS and NINE COACHES WAITING (which is a sort of '60s JANE EYRE.) I read them all as a teenager and I've re-read lots of them in middle-age. They still hold up well if you accept they are period pieces. But Stewart is classic mainstream romance (even though she'd not thank me for saying so!) The Mills & Boon type of romance is known in the trade as "category romance" and has its own genre rules.

Ooh, yes please. Do cross-post your reviews on Amazon. You can never have too many good ones! What do you still have to read? There are 5 books altogther. One of them isn't on Kindle yet. (A LIFETIME BURNING.) I've got pb copies of that available for swap or postage on READ IT, SWAP IT. I was looking for some new board games for Xmas, so thanks for the recommendations.

Thanks, VF, this is a brilliant review. Several reviewers & readers have commented on the old-fashioned feel of the book. Some liked it, some didn't. One reviewer was clearly annoyed that Christmas passed the family by without anyone watching very much TV and she thought - wrongly - that no one plays board games any more. (My 26 year-old son is coming to Scotland for Xmas and has demanded board games which are a tradition in our family, as are fiendish jigsaws.) I think the family are so locked in the past, it's bound to seem as if they're living in a time-warp zone. And I was consciously copying (in an affectionate way) COLD COMFORT FARM where bang-up-to-date Flora arrives at the farm and introduces the 20thC and all its benefits (eg contraception) to the medieval Starkadders. The plot of HOUSE OF SILENCE was inspired by a family story my mother told me about her grandmother. My mother was the eldest of 4 daughters who were neglected by their selfish and flighty mother. The family were afflicted with a tragedy (I'm having to avoid spoilers here!) which my grandmother appeared to get over, but when she was old and suffering from dementia, it came back to haunt her. This story made a big impression on me (you'll see the similarities if you've read HoS) and I eventually decided to write a fictional version of what might have been. I adored writing this book and was completely gutted when my publisher turned it down. I was convinced my readers would love it, so I e-published it myself on Kindle where it became a bestseller. I've sold 13,000 copies since April and it continues to sell. (And my publisher said the novel was unmarketable. Hahahahaha...)

If you want any more about writing process, where therapeutic writing ends and creative writing begins, you might be interested in this guest blog I wrote a while ago for a writing blog called AUTHOR! AUTHOR! My post is called WHERE OUR FICTION REALLY LIVES and it's largely about how and why I came to write EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY. See http://www.annemini.com/?p=4973

No, EMO GEO is by no means my favourite (although I think Calum might be my favourite hero.) Rose never really worked for me as a heroine. I don't regard her as one of my more successful creations. I also think the book reads like a first novel. There are things that make me cringe now when I read them! (But there are also some things of which I'm quite proud.) That book was very personal to me (there was a climber in my life and some of what Gavin says about climbing was lifted verbatim from what my guy said), so I think perhaps the book didn't exactly have a separate life of its own in the way that my favourites do - and those are A LIFETIME BURNING and HOUSE OF SILENCE. I think both those novels had very little to do with me/my life and they are both technically ambitious books (and I think technically successful too) so I'm much fonder of those two. They seem separate from me - people and worlds quite of their own. I really loved the characters and missed them terribly when the books were finished. The only character in EG that I cared about as much as that was Calum. But in ALB & HoS I felt so close to so many of the characters, they felt so real to me, it was like having an alternative family. To judge from reader reactions over the years, EMO GEO and STAR GAZING have been my most popular books but they are my least favourite. ALB, HoS and the new one, UNTYING THE KNOT are the books of my heart. If you held a gun to my head and said "Which is your best book?" or "Which book do you want to be remembered for?" I'd say A LIFETIME BURNING which is probably my least popular book (though some kind & enthusiastic fans have claimed it was one of the best books they've ever read.)

Not at all, Poppy! I feel as if I've hijacked VF's thread anyway. Thanks for the book title. I shall definitely check that out. TOUCHED WITH FIRE by Kay Redfield Jamieson also deals with this subject, but it's a bit of an academic read. A good one to dip into if you're interested in why so many poets, composers, authors were bipolar and suffered with suicidal depression. Her memoir, AN UNQUIET MIND (about her own bipolar and the problems of "coming out" as bipolar when she herself was a practising psychiatrist) is not at all academic, but really readable and makes a good companion read with EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY. That book played a large part in helping me come to terms with my own condition. In an attempt to be upbeat about the issue, I have a Mental Health section on my website which includes, Famous Manic Depressives - A Celebration, a long list of famous people (mostly creatives) who have made a positive contribution to the world despite the fact that they are/were (or were thought to be) bipolar. Go to http://www.lindagillard.co.uk/mental-health.php and scroll down.

EMO GEO is autobiographical only up to a point. Rose's condition was very serious, mine isn't. I was never hospitalised, but a friend was and she was much iller than me so I was able to combine my own experience, hers and a lot of research to write Rose. A lot of me went into Calum, actually. He was my valediction to teaching and his creative writing class is my class. I wanted him to represent all that was good about teachers & teaching. Getting all that down in a book is one of the ways I was able to let go of what I regarded as my vocation. I don't have set hours for work but I work most days, including weekends. I put in a lot of time promoting my books, especially the e-books as I've indie-published those on KIndle without the back-up of a publisher. (Not that either of my publishers ever did much to promote me and the 2nd one eventually dropped me.) No one will know about the e-books unless I spread the word, so some of my writing will be guest blogs (I do a lot of those) or joining in on book forums. (UNTYING THE KNOT is being discussed on a Diana Gabaldon discussion forum at the moment. They've done most of my books now as a Book of the Month.) I respond to all reviews of my books that I come across on blogs and forums. I respond - often at length - to all fan mail. (People contact me via my website.) And that's before I start writing fiction. It takes a lot of time but my readers are a loyal and enthusiastic bunch and many have become friends, so I like to respond. Feedback from readers, being able to chat about the stories & characters is undoubtedly the best thing about being published. Some reviews of my books have just reduced me to tears, they're so wonderful. I can tell that the reader has really "got" the book. Stephen KIng says writing is telepathy and when you get reviews like that, it certainly feels like some sort of telepathy. As for my writing process... When a book is going well I will write every day and probably produce a polished chapter in a week. I can draft for only a couple of hours a day but I can edit for many more. I'm a workaholic, I love what I do, I've published 5 novels since 2005 and am just about to complete another. I work very hard, write pretty fast and don't have much of a life! It's not unknown for me to put in a 12-hour stint at the PC with breaks for meals and checking Facebook. I draft almost always by hand on lined A4 in pencil or biro. (I only use one particular kind of pencil and biro. I'm not fussy about the A4. ) I'm a slow 2-finger typist, so the copy-typing is laborious, but that's the beginning of the editing process. I can write straight on to a keyboard but I found I write better (and more bravely) if I write by hand. I also like the physical process. I like the scratching sound of the words as they cover the paper - and covering the paper is what I aim to do. I try not to think about the quality of what I write while I write. I just "spread the ink" and think about quality when I start the editorial process. Drafting is just about getting my ideas down and telling the story (or listening to my characters' dictation!) I don't write fiction every day, but if someone was starting out and wanted my advice, I'd say try to write every day. You need to develop a writing habit. You can't wait for inspiration to strike before you start writing and you have to get used to writing rubbish - or what you fear might be rubbish. I advise people to just "spread the ink". The prolific author Nora Roberts said, "I can fix a bad page. I can't fix a blank page." I long ago reconciled myself to the fact that a lot of trees have to be sacrificed and a lot of waste paper bins filled in order to produce a novel.

(Ooh, I'm enjoying this dialogue about the writing process. You really shouldn't indulge me. I shall go on for too long and in too much detail...) EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was totally fantasy to begin with. I was a cracked-up broken down teacher, recuperating after a mental breakdown and a surprise diagnosis of mild bi-polar affective disorder (aka manic depression.) I was looking for an upside to mental illness and I thought it might have some positive connection with artistic temperament/creativity. The more I found out about my own condition, the more this seemed to be true. I'd had to give up teaching, I had no other way of earning a living, I was 47 and on the scrap-heap (or so I thought), so to occupy myself I started writing a novel about an "alternative" life in a place I loved, rather than the boring Norfolk suburb I was actually living in. The novel was pure self-indulgence, so naturally the hero was gorgeous! (Calum is my fantasy man and to judge from the fan mail he gets, he's many women's fantasy man.) I wrote about all my issues - creativity, teaching, being 47, being a mother, madness & depression... The novel was just a depository for all my thoughts on these subjects, hung on a frame of interior monologues and dialogues. It was therapeutic writing to a large extent and I had no thought of trying to get it published. It wasn't until I joined a writers' e-group and they started to nag me about approaching an agent that I thought I might have produced something that spoke to someone other than me. As for constructing the novel, I didn't plan anything at all. When I started, I didn't even know whether Megan existed. I thought she might be an imaginary child, the baby Rose had never had or who'd died. I knew nothing much about Calum's past, certainly nothing about what had driven him to drink. I didn't know what had driven Megan and Rose apart, just that they didn't get on. Writing the book was an excavation, digging down through layers of time and the characters' memories. That's why I eventually thought EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY was a good title. (My working title had been SCRAPBOOK because that's how I wrote the book - in short snapshot scenes, randomly, covering a wide expanse of time.) So, no, I didn't play things through in my head before writing. My characters sort of talk in my head as I write. It's as if they tell me what to write (and they say some pretty surprising things sometimes - not at all what I had in mind.) Then when I have a draft, I edit and edit until I'm completely happy with it. (I recently e-published EMO GEO and I was changing a few tiny things for that, so I now think of the e-book as the "director's cut". ) I hardly ever discard stuff and an awful lot of what you see on the page in my books is first draft - things that I just scribbled down in a trance-like state and never changed much. Sometimes I feel as if the stories already exist, as if they are "out there" and I just channel them on to the page. Writing my books is for me as much a process of revelation as reading them is for the reader! Hope that was of interest.

Thanks, Vodkafan, for this thoughtful review. I've responded to some of the interesting points you raise here (where you also posted your review.) http://www.bookclubforum.co.uk/community/index.php?/topic/7810-vodkafans-2011-reading-list/page__view__findpost__p__274238

Thanks, Vodkafan, for the interesting and thoughtful review of EMOTIONAL GEOLOGY. It's a real treat and a novelty to have a review written by a man. I'll respond to a couple of the points you raise.... Calum and Rose experience an immediate and powerful sexual attraction - that's one reason why things take off for them and that soon becomes love. The other reason is, they're both artists of different kinds and so they find they have an immediate rapport when they get talking about their work. I think as a teacher of some rough kids in Glasgow, Calum wouldn't have been particularly fazed by Rose's mental illness. He's also an experienced climber and there are some strange people in the climbing fraternity! Calum has also experienced mental fragility himself (he is a functional alcoholic) and so Rose doesn't scare him off. On the contrary, I think he wants to look after her. Your point about dialogue is very interesting. Calum's a teacher and teachers are gabby! (I used to be a teacher, so I can say that.) There are plenty of Scots who talk like Calum and since I've lived in Scotland (since 2000) I've noticed there's a certain type of Highland guy who's chatty and witty in quite a self-consciously entertaining way. (This is quite hard to describe but I think it comes from the fact that Scots seem to love language and have more fun with it than the English do.) So I think Calum convinces as a Highlander (well, that's what I've been told by Highlanders & islanders!) but I don't expect him to be a type that southerners would recognise. I've always wondered if my heroes convince as men... I've always feared they don't, that they're just female fantasies. But in fact my books have had a few reviews over the years written by men and the guys said they did find the heroes convincing and appealing because they're vulnerable and flawed, not fantasy alpha males. But if a reviewer were to say my heroes were just female minds inside attractive male bodies, I'd be prepared to say "guilty as charged", because I think for many female readers, the ideal fictional hero isn't just a guy you think you could fall in love with, he's someone you want to talk to and who will understand and accept you, and those are qualities that women often look for in their female friends. I think my books are about friendships between men and women, just as much as they are about love and sexual attraction.

I just dropped into this thread again and saw this. Thank you, vodkafan! :-) I do hope you enjoy the downloads. I haven't looked to see if you have a similar thread here on BCF but there's a thread on READ IT, SWAP IT forum that posts details of Kindle bargains - mainstream books that have been reduced for a limited period. It's a good way to keep up to date with the good deals.

I think Amazon has got the message about the quantities of rubbish being self-published. Amazon.com have now set up a Kindle Indie Books store to help buyers navigate their way through the vast numbers of e-books being published. It's still not going to be a guarantee of quality because they say "The likelihood of appearing within the Kindle Indie Bookstore is higher for highly rated, popular and top selling books." (Note the absence of any reference to quality of writing or editing.) But it's a step in the right direction. It's also a huge validation for indie authors like me that Amazon thinks indie books are actually worth promoting. I hope AmazonUK will follow Amazon.com's example and give UK Kindle authors this shop window.