To Russia with Love! by Sheila Claydon

Golden Girl, the first book I wrote, featured in my previous blog when I demonstrated how book covers have changed over the years. This time I am talking about my second book, Empty Hearts, a story set in Russia. This book's covers have metamorphosed even more.

As you can see from the slightly tatty image, this is a photo of the original book because in those days (1985) there were no eBooks and no digital images. I didn't even have a computer. This was written by hand and by old fashioned typewriter. Although it is a full length novel it was published in tandem with another author and sold in a romance program where readers bought a specified number of books each month. 

I was still writing under the pseudonym Anne Beverley at the time so you can imagine my chagrin when the book was published with an incorrect spelling. For those of you who know the story of Anne of Green Gables, I am very much in agreement with her insistence that it should always be 'Anne with an E."

From there Empty Hearts followed the same path as my previous book and was published as a Retro romance under the name of Sheila Claydon writing as Anne Beverley (fortunately with the correct spelling!) And it was given an altogether more attractive cover.

Then things became even more interesting because now, in its final form, published as a Vintage Romance by BWL Publishing, Empty Hearts has two covers, and I'm not sure how this happened. Not that it matters at all because the story is the same in each one, but my favourite image is the first one because it is closer to one of the best things that happens in the book. The little boy, Peter, is an important part of the story, and if you would like to read about him and the image the cover portrays, then click on Book Snippets under the blog heading on my Website. As you can see, ice and skating feature a lot in cold and wintry Moscow!

I am ashamed to say I wrote this book without having ever visited Russia! Instead I used information and a map from an article in National Geographic Magazine! Foolhardy, arrogant or just plain naive? I'm not sure. It's certainly not something I would do now. Every book I've written since then is set in a place I've visited so I can be sure to get most of my facts right. Having said that, I have spent time in Russia since I wrote Empty Hearts, and while I was there I decided I didn't need to be too embarrassed about my writing behaviour after all as my research (or rather the information in the National Geographic article) was pretty solid!

Empty Hearts...the story

By trying to make a new start, Holly just may find a family of her own.

Holly is struggling to pick up the pieces of her shattered life when she is offered the chance to travel to Moscow to research a new book. That she will also have to look after diplomat Dirk Van Allen’s five-year-old son, Peter, seems a small price to pay...until she meets them both.

Determined to find a way into Peter’s stony little heart, Holly thinks that softening his father’s attitude towards her might help. When Dirk sees through her ploy and starts to play her at her own game, she realizes she is way out of her depth with this mysterious, intriguing man.

Serendipity or Fate? ... by Sheila Claydon

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The characters in my books always have problems and, as is the nature of romantic fiction, they always overcome them...eventually! Their problems are varied and, because I've written quite a few books now, there are many of them. Often the book description will point the reader towards what to expect and the beginning of the blurb in Saving Katy Gray is a good example of this.

Katy was used to losing things. First she'd lost her childhood home, then her career and reputation, and finally, and most dreadfully, her identity, so she knew she should be used to it....

Katy has more problems to overcome than most of my characters but, eventually, she finds a way, as do the characters in books 1 and 2 of the trilogy. What had never occurred to me until recently, however, is that when characters find a solution to their problems this can often help the reader. It was my daughter who prompted this thought with two books she has recently read.

In the past 2 years she and her family have lost a loved one following a long illness, coped with the resultant mental health issues, helped a friend who was in an abusive relationship and then, finally,  had to completely reorganise their lives due to the demands of Coronavirus. This has included children being upset about having to miss important exams, training programmes being cancelled, reduced income and, to top it all, my daughter having to leave home and family every day and put herself at risk as a frontline worker. Yet, despite all of these drawn out problems she has remained unbelievably resilient while all the issues she has been dealing with have slowly resolved themselves, and we are so proud of her.

That is not the issue, however. We know that many, many people face similar and even worse problems, but what we don't know is how often they read about themselves in a work of fiction.  Entirely serendipitously my daughter, looking for some escapism from her stressful life, recently picked up two novels entirely at random. Unknown to her one was about an abusive relationship and how the heroine began to recognise and then deal with her problems, while the second was about the loss of a loved one and how the resultant grief was played out across 3 generations.  When she started reading she had no idea that the stories were about the issues that had affected her own family but the more she read, the more everything resonated. By the end she had not only totally identified with all the characters, she also felt much better about herself, how she had handled things, and perhaps even more importantly, why other family members and friends had acted as they did.

It made me wonder if fictional characters sometimes help readers to resolve their own problems more effectively than non-fiction help books. There is, of course, an important place for these, but when someone is dealing with trauma they often don't have the emotional energy to read the factual stuff and instead turn to the escapism of fiction. This thought has made me look again at the dilemmas my various characters have faced and solved in order to check that I dealt with them realistically. I do, of course, like all writers, always do my research, but the moment of serendipity (or fate) experienced by my daughter, has made me realise anew how very important this is. We writers have a responsibility towards our readers. It goes without saying that they want us to entertain, to make them want to keep the pages turning, even perhaps to teach them something new, but now I've added 'help them to resolve their problems' to the list of things I must think about before I start a new story. The responsibility is really quite daunting!

When my hero contacted me on Facebook....by Sheila Claydon

Dedication

To the real Dirk Van Allen with many apologies for unwittingly stealing his name

Writers are used to strange things happening to them. Those moments of serendipity when the story they are struggling with suddenly becomes clear thanks to a chance remark overheard, or the glimpse of a stranger's face on an everyday journey. From such things whole books are born. From them, too, characters spring to life, and for most writers those characters are almost  real. Almost, but not quite. So imagine how startled I was when the hero of my book Empty Hearts contacted me on Facebook.

Of course it wasn't quite like that. I'm a writer, so I exaggerate! But it was pretty spooky all the same. You see nowadays most of my heroes have ordinary names like Matthew or Sean or Daniel, but for some reason I gave the hero in Empty Hearts a much more exotic name. I called him Dirk Van Allen.  Because I wrote it a long time ago I don't remember where the name came from although I do remember the person I modelled him on (never to be revealed) and I remember too that he had a double-barrelled name, so I guess that was the trigger for Van Allen.  My choice of Dirk, however, remains a complete mystery to me. So when the name Dirk Van Allen popped up on my Facebook page I was more than startled.

So was the real Dirk Van Allen. How he found my book I have no idea, but he wanted to know why I had used his name, and he had a point because it is unusual. Van Allen is unusual and so is Dirk, so marrying the two together for a fictional hero and then discovering the name belonged to someone after all was an almost unbelievable coincidence, so that is why I have dedicated the 3rd edition of Empty Hearts to the real Dirk Van Allen.

Written in the 1980s it is now a vintage romance that has stood the test of time sufficiently for a 3rd edition to be republished by Books We Love, in print and as an ebook, so the least I can do is acknowledge the success of a very unusual name. Thank you Dirk, and because you and I are now Facebook friends, I know your own romance was one of the great ones, so this is in memory of your wonderful Lanny too.

Go to Sheila's Books We Love author page to see the rest of her books, which are available on:

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Help from the little people...by Sheila Claydon

Books We Love Author Page

So here I am in Australia again, visiting family. We've spent so much time in Sydney over the past few years, and have so many Australian friends, that it's beginning to feel a bit like home. Visiting, socialising and taking care of our little granddaughter does interfere with the writing of course, but not as much as you might think. 

Take 'Remembering Rose,' Book 1 of Mapleby Memories. I started that while I was helping to care for my then 6 month old granddaughter, and finished it when I returned home. It's a time travel romance but guess who one of the main characters is? Yes, a small baby! It wasn't intentional, nor is the fact that  Book 2 (so far only half written) features that same baby starting school, something very integral to the plot. And what did I do today that might influence how I write about that? Well I took my now 3 year old granddaughter to breakfast at her daycare nursery to celebrate Mother's Day (Grannies and other women special to the children always included) and sat with what seemed like a hundred tinies on mini chairs at a mini table - so watch out for something similar down the line in one of my books, maybe Book 2!

Why do we write what we write. Well for me the idea for a book is usually prompted by a chance remark or a newspaper article, or even by noticing someone or something when I'm out and about. How I weave that into a story is an entirely different matter however, and my eldest granddaughter (now old enough to read all my books and be my number one fan) tells me that she can recognise herself and her sister in some of the earlier ones.  Well not them exactly, but their behaviours and comforters. She's absolutely right and yet none of it was intentional. 

It is true that whatever and wherever the setting for a story, we still include what we know and experience, although to allay any suspicions my husband might have if he reads this (unlikely) I hasten to add that the romance is all imaginary:) No experience there at all!!!!

Several of my other books feature children, including 'Empty Hearts' which will be published later this year. The only difference is that this one is a vintage, written and first published in the eighties, so the little boy in it must have been based on my own children!!! Sorry about that guys, but a writer does what she has to do:)

While I am editing that and finishing Book 2 of Mapleby Memories, there is always 'Double Fault' if you like family stories. That also has children at its centre, and how!!!

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Check out my books on the Books We Love website or visit me at https://www.facebook.com/SheilaClaydon.author/

Emotion or Character Trait? Calling all writers... by Sheila Claydon

Is ambition an emotion? What about pride, confidence, rivalry, envy, jealousy? Then there is optimism, exhilaration and enthusiasm as well as pessimism and cynicism. Are they emotions too or are some of them merely character traits?

Very recently I became involved in a somewhat challenging debate about this. One point of view was that these are all emotions. This was based on the theory that all emotion is the product of changes in the brain. Neurotransmitters and hormones were mentioned. It was stated that the body's neurochemical systems determine behaviour and that we are the products of our brain chemicals and electrical impulses. I am not sufficiently knowledgeable to argue with these apparently proven scientific facts but, as a writer, I had to take issue with the definition of an emotion.

To me love is an emotion, so is sadness. Liking, joy, anger and fear are also emotions. So, I think is surprise.  Everything else comes from these, so envy for example is the result of feelings of fear and anger and so is hate but they are not primary emotions.

A lot of people reading this might think 'so what' and mentally list a whole lot of feelings that they consider to be emotions such as guilt, dismay, pity, and I couldn't argue with them. It does make for an interesting discussion though and, as words are so important to a writer, I thought I'd throw the challenge out there. What do you consider to be our pure primary emotions as opposed to the character traits we develop via our upbringing and life experiences? And how important are these emotions to your writing?

I know when I write my own stories I call on a great many emotions. I also build personalities, however,  and to do this I have to develop character traits. In Mending Jodie's Heart, Book 1 of my Pathways Trilogy,  ambition, anger, fear, sadness, enthusiasm, pessimism, obstinacy and a few others all come before the love that finally blooms, and this continues through Books 2 Finding Bella Blue and Book 3 Saving Katy Gray.  Without them, I couldn't write any books at all.

Sheila's books can be found at Books We Love and Amazon

She also has a website and can be found on facebook  and twitter

Sepia photographs and other stories revisited by Sheila Claydon

Eighteen months ago I wrote about a sepia print I found in a box of old photographs and how the beautiful young woman and dashing young man who were its main characters transfixed me. I was so intrigued by their apparent happiness that I tracked down their story and discovered that while it didn't have a sad ending, it didn't have a happy one either. By the end of their lives they were careworn and frail from years of hard work and semi-poverty. Their lives were typical of many people who lived in rural England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  (To read their full story search for Sheila Claydon 14 September 2014 on this website)

Of course research prompts possibilities for a writer and before long I had the beginning of a book. It wasn't the real story of Rose and Arthur, although it borrowed a lot of facts from their lives, it was the one in my imagination.

There were two problems, however. The first was that I was still in the middle of writing Miss Locatelli, my book set mostly in Florence in Italy. The second was that however much I tried to avoid it, Remembering Rose insisted on being  written in the first person, something I had never tried before. It wasn't Rose's voice that was telling the story though, it was Rachel, her great-great-granddaughter.

It took me a while to discover that Rachel wanted to be Rose's mouthpiece across the centuries but when I did I had another dilemma. Time travel! I'd never tried that before either.

There was another problem too. I mainly write contemporary romance, so how was that going to work in a book that was about someone from the nineteenth century?

The end result, after wrestling for weeks with various ideas, is a number of intertwined romances, some contemporary, some historical, as well as a sort of family saga, and of course that elusive time travel. By the time I finished I felt as if I had run a very difficult marathon but it was worth it. I love Rose and Rachel even though they are very far from perfect, and I love their heroes even more.

Writing Remembering Rose has been like piecing together a jigsaw puzzle and although the real Rose and Arthur will never know they were the inspiration for this story, and would probably be horrified at how I've interpreted them, I like to think they would forgive me for playing with their lives if they did.

Sheila Claydon's books can be found at Books We Love and Amazon . She also has a website and can be found on facebook