Books We Love's Tantalizing Talent ~ Author Sheila Claydon

 

I was 7 years old when I cleared out the bottom half of my toy closet and, using the shelf as a desk, set myself up as a writer. I’ve been writing ever since: poetry, non-fiction, stories for children, but my absolute favourite is contemporary romantic fiction.

I truly believe that ‘love makes the world go round,’ so weaving stories around characters who are falling in love is what keeps me writing. Sometimes I become so engrossed in what is happening in their lives, that what was intended to be one book becomes a series. My When Paths Meet trilogy is an example of this. When I finished writing Mending Jodie’s Heart, I wanted to know what happened to her younger sisters. Finding Bella Blue (Book 2) and Saving Katy Gray (Book 3) were the result.

Falling in love should be about far more than the romance and my stories always are. Far from being perfect, my characters frequently have to face up to some uncomfortable truths before they can learn to truly love. I hope you will check them out, and enjoy them.

I write contemporary fiction. My books are listed below:

When Paths Meet Trilogy:

Mending Jodie’s Heart            (Book 1)

Finding Bella Blue                   (Book 2)

Saving Katy Gray                     (Book 3)

Miss Locatelli

Kissing Maggie Silver

Double Fault

 Reluctant Date

Cabin Fever

The Books We Love Special Edition

Miss Locatelli

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Arabella knows her audacious plan to save her family’s century old jewelry business doesn’t stand a chance without Luca Ezio. She just wishes he wasn’t helping her because her grandfather asked him to, but because he wants to. 

For his part, Luca can’t remember when he was last so turned on by a woman and he doesn’t like it one little bit. Apart from being way too young, Arabella is the granddaughter of a client whose relationship with his family is complicated. The right thing to do would be to walk away but his heart has other ideas. Then Arabella’s life begins to unravel in a way that affects both of them and suddenly Luca finds himself fighting for his future as well as for her heart. 

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Mending Jodie’s Heart

When musician Marcus Lewis buys the derelict farmhouse next to Jodie’ Eriksson's riding school he doesn’t know whether to be amused or irritated by her angry reaction to his plans. Then her sister Izzie visits him and makes things a whole lot worse…or is it better…because now he has an excuse to see Jodie again. Although, when he sees her, it’s not exactly a meeting of minds, they do discover they have one thing in common; they both believe they know what’s best for Izzie, and for Marcus' son Luke. 

It turns out they’re wrong. The children they thought they were protecting need to be set free. It’s Jodie and Marcus who have the problem; but can two broken hearts make one whole one? The battle lines that were set when they first met have long since been breached but the war won’t be over until Jodie learns how to trust again, and until Marcus allows himself to believe in his son.

Kissing Maggie Silver

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Maggie Silver intends to put as much space as possible between herself and her family just as soon as her parent’s ruby wedding celebrations are over. She is fed up with their constant advice and her never-ending babysitting duties. There’s a great big world out there and she wants to see it before she settles for suburbia. Then Ruairi O’Connor turns up at the same time her sister-in-law goes into labor, and suddenly everything becomes a lot more complicated. 

As for Ruairi, in a few weeks time he will be on the other side of the world, so now is not the time to fall in love, especially with Maggie. Until now he’s thought of her as little more than a child so why has he suddenly discovered she is very grown up indeed and the only thing he wants to do is kiss her.

Find Sheila's books at http://bookswelove.net/authors/claydon-sheila/

 

The Golden Year of 1966

By the time you read this blog I'll be on the high seas. Why? Well because my husband and I are lucky enough to be celebrating our Golden Wedding anniversary on 26 March, and we've decided to do it in style by cruising in the Western Mediterranean. We are even going to have a gondola ride in Venice...an absolute must for a writer of contemporary romance as I'm sure you'll agree.

Those 50 years seem to have flown by and yet I can remember the beginning as if it were yesterday. Our only travel then was in a small car on mostly secondary roads as there were few highways in the UK in those far distant days. We were married for years before we flew in an aeroplane and a lot more time went by before we boarded our first cruise ship, but how times have changed since then. Now, thanks to work as well as holidays and trips to see friends, we have visited more than 40 countries and are still travelling, and I can hardly believe it. Growing up I never expected to travel anywhere outside the UK and my parents never did.

Readers know that many of the places I visit feature in my books and that is particularly the case with Cabin Fever. The story follows another cruise we took, this time from Auckland in New Zealand to Sydney in Australia. It's written from the perspective of the crew instead of the passengers. Did I just make it up? Not quite. I talked to some of the crew members to ensure I got my facts straight before I returned home and wrote about it, and in doing so I was able to relive the cruise all over again, always a bonus.

I have no idea which, if any, of the places we visit in March will feature in future books. It could be Dubrovnik, or Venice, or Malta, or a host of other places, or perhaps none at all. It depends entirely on whether something triggers an idea for a story. One thing is for sure though, celebrating or not, I will be looking for that trigger. It's my default mode.

Something else is going to happen in March as well. A weekend in an hotel with two of my cousins and their spouses, all of whom were also married 50 years ago in 1966. It must have been a very expensive year for the family!  We all know how lucky we are to still be together and to have our health, and we are going to drink to it, and to the future, because hopefully we still have a few golden years left. Maybe that should be my next book. The story of 3 marriages. On the other hand...maybe not!

My next book, Remembering Rose, which will be published in June, a few months after my anniversary cruise, is about a marriage though. Well two marriages actually, which, although there is more than a century between them, are inextricably linked together. In this story the only travel involved is time travel, something which, looking back over the past fifty years, I seem to have done just by living.

Sheila's books can be found at:

Books We Love

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Smashwords

Kobo

She also has a website and can be found on facebook

Chilblains and icicles by Sheila Claydon

Fortunately it hasn't actually come to chilblains and icicles but only because the weather in the UK has been warmer than usual for this time of year. What has happened though is that our central heating and hot water have packed up and the three weeks we have been without them has taken me right back to my childhood.

How spoilt I am now. The house is always warm. Hot water is available at the turn of the tap. I can have a shower whenever I want. I can even walk around the house without a sweater in the middle of winter if I want to (I don't!). My kitchen is full of gadgets from a toaster to a steam iron, an ice-cream maker to a microwave. My kitchen hob is ceramic so it's clean at the swipe of a dishcloth, and my cooker and fridge are self-cleaning, and of course there's the washing machine and tumbler dryer. How could I manage without those?

Now let me take you back to when I was tiny and my mother, father and I lived with my grandparents. It was at the end of WW2 and we lived in Southampton, a maritime city that had been severely blitzed, so there were no houses to buy or rent. In those days laundry was either done by hand, using a big block of green soap and a washboard, or it was piled into a copper boiler and the dirt was stirred into submission. Then it was rolled through a mangle and how important I felt when I was allowed to turn the handle. Then, after hours flapping on the line in the garden, it was ironed with a flat iron that had to be heated on the stove. Even so, everything was ironed. Nothing was easy care in those days.

Then there was the cooking. The milk, which was delivered daily by a man driving a horse and cart, was kept in a bucket of cold water on hot days, or, on cold days, outside.  The food, too, had its place. A big old meat safe with a fly cover was kept in a shady part of the garden and everything in it was used within a day or two. No supermarket shopping, no packaging either. Everything was weighed out and wrapped, even the biscuits. My favorite job was to go to the shop next door and fill a bag with broken biscuits because that way we got a selection instead of just the one kind.

As for central heating and hot water, forget it. An open fire and the warmth from an old-fashioned black-leaded range were the only forms of heat we had in that cold, dark 3-bedroom house, so going to bed was a sprint up the stairs to an icy cold bed made marginally more comfortable by a big stone hot water bottle wrapped and pinned into a cotton cloth. I remember the cotton coming off mine one night. I still have the small burn scar on my leg to this day.

Washing for me was from a bowl beside the range or, once a week,  a tin bath that had to be filled with pans and kettles of water that had been heated on the stove. For my grandparents and parents it was ewers and bowls in their cold bedrooms and a weekly visit to the public baths.

I can still remember how happy my parents were the day we eventually moved into a property that had a bathroom, a fridge, and a water heater, whereas nowadays nobody expects anything else.

Of course all this was a very long time ago, and because we lived with my grandparents who were still using gaslight instead of electricity, we were probably at bit behind the times anyway. Other people lived in more comfort I'm sure but I didn't have a problem because, like all small children, I thought what I was used to was normal. I didn't like the chilblains (caused by sitting too close to the fire in an attempt to warm my frozen feet), or the chapped knees and lips. I didn't especially like having to wear layers and layers of clothes either. Scratchy woollen vests, a liberty bodice with tiny, fiddly buttons, a pleated skirt that hung from a warm over bodice, then a thick woollen jumper. My knees were always bare though, above very unattractive woollen socks held up with an elastic garter, and this meant chapped knees and thighs. Little boys suffered a similar fate because in those days children were deemed too young to wear long trousers and I didn't know anyone who wore woollen tights...maybe they hadn't started making them.

So although I'm not enjoying being without heating and hot water, it's not all bad. Without the sudden upheaval it's caused in my life I wouldn't have remembered how lucky I am, and how much harder domestic chores were for my mother and grandmother.  I haven't got any chilblains either and I am very grateful for that.

None of my heroines have ever had to suffer such deprivations although Kerry, in Double Fault does have a bit of a hard time when she's a single mother. Before the path of true love can run smooth they all have other problems to contend with though.

Sheila can be found at:

Books We Love

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Smashwords

Kobo

She also has a website and can be found on facebook

WHO am I really? by Sheila Claydon

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My publisher has suggested that I and my fellow authors start the year off by introducing ourselves properly on the Books We Love blog. It's a much taller order than it seems. It depends is the only answer I can give about who I am and what I do.

Although I'm always a wife, a mother, a grandmother, an aunt, a cousin, a friend, a colleague, and a neighbour, I'm also a writer, a reader, a gardener, a cook, a dog owner, a traveller, a walker, a carer, a Yoga practitioner, and a whole lot of other things besides, and that's before I get on to control freak, micro-organizer and (you might already have guessed this) list-maker! Then there's my working life  - the jobs I had, the things I learned - but I'm not even going there.

I'm no different from anyone else of course. We are all made up of the little bits of  everything that are our day-to-day lives. It's how we form the memories, some bad, some good, that we reminisce about as the years go by. Oh hang on a minute...I'm a writer (it said so in the list) so I am a little bit different after all. Its why I store all those experiences in my sub-conscious until I'm ready to retrieve them and download them onto the pages of my latest manuscript.

I'm not proud of it, but it's how it is. When I travel most of the details of the journey remain lodged in my brain. A new environment is uploaded to my sub-conscious lock, stock and barrel and sits there until I need it.  Time spent with my grandchildren, visits to family, walking the dog, talking with friends, shopping for a neighbour, even visiting someone in hospital...it all goes into the swirling cauldron of memories that I call upon when I'm writing.

Sometimes an experience will trigger an idea for a story and when that happens, it will, if left to its own devices, weave itself around the memories I have stored in my head, rejecting some of them and trying others for size until the outline of a new story emerges with very little conscious effort on my part. It's not until I fire up my lap top that the real effort of joining it all together begins.

In Reluctant Date the trigger was a place I stayed on a holiday. This somehow wove itself into another landscape 3,000 miles away, picking up a hero and heroine on its journey. In Mending Jodie's Heart the idea for the story was prompted by an actual event involving horses and disabled children, which, before I knew it, had turned into the When Paths Meet trilogy. Then, in my latest book, Miss Locatelli, half-forgotten memories of Italy forced themselves back into my consciousness as soon as I realized my heroine had to visit Florence. A magazine article about a jeweller triggered that one.

When I look back at the dozen or so books I've written so far there is a real bonus, however, because every one of them has special memories woven into the story. None of them are about me or my family although, inevitably, some of the characters will display traits I've observed in the people I know, but the story still resonates with me on a personal level. The children in my books often behave in the same way my own children and grandchildren did when they were small, and then there are the animals. Dogs, horses, birds...even the wild ones...all trigger a memory. The grown up characters too. I rarely spend long describing any of them. They are just part of a continuing story of memories that I like to think helps to make my stories real.

So that's who I am. Someone who is made up of little bits of a lot and who never knows which bit she is going to wake up to.  Today it was the micro-managing/list-making persona. Tomorrow it's grandchildren day, so cooking, cuddling and playing games will dominate along with supervising homework and listening closely to whatever they want to tell me.  With any luck I'll wake up to my writing persona the following day and by then I'll have more memories to call upon, so when the book I'm writing at the moment, Remembering Rose, is published at the end of June, I will be able to read it and remember.

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All of Sheila's books can be found on the links below:

Books We Love

Amazon

Barnes and Noble

Kobo

Smashwords

She also has a website and can be found on facebook

Listening to a different voice

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A really strange thing has happened to me since my last book, Miss Locatelli, was published. I've started listening to a different voice.

Instead of waiting for a while before I started a new story, I began writing straight away. This was because I'd had an idea buzzing around in my head for a while and I wanted to grab it before it went away. I talked about it in an earlier Books We Love blog, Sepia Photos and Other Stories, and now the time had come to see if it would work. I had a problem though, or I thought I did, because up until now all my books have been written in the third person. This time I knew I had to write in the first person because it was the only way the story was going to work. I have no idea why this is the case. It just is.

There is also the problem that the story involves quite a lot of historical time travel, which is something else I've never attempted before. 

I expected to spend hours staring at a blank screen as I wrestled with this mix of ideas and challenges. Instead the opposite has happened. Rachel's voice, as the storyteller, is loud and clear in my head, and her words just keep pouring out. The only thing that is slowing me down is my everyday life and all the things that entails. The days when I don't have time to write don't seem to matter, however. Whenever I come back to the story I barely need to refresh my memory by reading the last few pages I've written because Rachel is there waiting for me with a whole lot of new things to say.

What I don't know is whether it is just Rachel and  this particular story that is making writing in the first person so easy, or whether it is my authentic writing voice and I've only just discovered it. I don't know, either, whether the other stories I have stored in my head would translate into this type of narrative. Maybe this is a 'one off.' If it is, then it's strange, because although the basis of the story is a family history, it's not my own family history, nor does Rachel bear any resemblance to anyone I know.  She just came, fully-formed, out of nowhere.  I didn't need any triggers to see her face, like I normally do. Nor have I had to make up her back story because she tells it to me as we go along.

It's a joyous experience, to find words flowing so easily. I just hope it keeps on happening as I travel further into the book.

One other thing I don't know is whether readers will like it, especially those readers who are faithful to my books and buy a copy of every one. I've already tried the first few chapters out on one of my Beta readers though, and she liked it. I just hope the others will too.

Of course the final challenge is getting it finished. Words flowing easily are one thing, finding enough time to get them into the book is entirely another. The voice of my first person narrator is pushing me though. Every time I have a few moments to spare she propels me towards my computer screen, and for that, if nothing else, I'm grateful. 

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She also has a website and can be found on facebook

A Paean to Tidiness by Sheila Claydon

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I've been thinking about the heroines in my books and discovered a very surprising thing. All of them are tidy. They have the odd moment of course...like single mum Kerry in Double Fault when she's trying to juggle childcare with setting up a new business, or Ellie in Cabin Fever when she's too busy thinking about charismatic Drew Pennington-Smith to bother to pick up her clothes, but despite these falls from grace, they are still tidy. Why? The answer is simple. Every one of my heroines is a strong, successful woman who is holding down a busy job while trying to cope with the messiness of her emotions. In Saving Katy Gray I even dedicate a whole chapter of the book to Katy's attempts to introduce some order into her elderly patient's life. Nor is it wasted when the hero visits.

So is life too short to peel a grape? Is a tidy house really a sign of a wasted life, or as the modern update says, the sign of a broken computer? Even Einstein got in on the act with his sarcastic - “If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk a sign?”

There are many, many more and we've probably all heard most of them, laughed at them, identified with them, and even quoted some of them. Why? Because it's good to have an excuse when we're so pressured that we can't keep up with the demands of daily life. We all prefer to think of ourselves as interesting so if the accepted norm is that we can't be interesting and organised and tidy, then we'll celebrate messiness and chaos.

A great many of the people who are the successes of modern society don't buy this however. (Einstein excepted!)

Bill Gates, Richard Branson. Donald Trump, the late Steve Jobs, Angelina Jolie. Jerry Seinfield, Fashion designer Roksanda Ilincic and many, many others, all are or were notoriously tidy. To them, organisation, 'to do' lists, tidy desks are a means to an end. Without them they wouldn't have the time to be creative or, more importantly, put their creative ideas into action. 

Indeed, when I worked in the corporate world I learned very quickly that the most successful managers were, almost without exception, those with tidy desks and clean shoes! Think about it.  If someone has time to polish their shoes before work, then they are probably meticulous in every area of their lives...not a bad character trait if you want to succeed.

I prefer this quote:  'If you can organize your kitchen, you can organize your life.' Ditto your desk. That doesn't mean that you can't let things get untidy. Far from it. What it does mean though, is that you have to clean up afterwards, just like my heroines. 

If you've never faced pile of washing up from the night before at the start of a new day and not experienced a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach then maybe you're the exception. As far as I'm concerned though, a new day is a day full of infinite possibilities, it's the day when I might just have the idea that will become a best seller, so if I have to start it by sorting out my messy from the day before, well that just ain't going to happen. I'll probably have lost the will to live before I'm halfway through. In future then I'm going to live by my new mantra:

Organize your life around your dreams - and watch them come true.

All Sheila's books and her organised and tidy heroines can be found on Amazon at http://amzn.to/ZSyLpf

She's also on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/SheilaClaydon.author or visit her website at http://sheilaclaydon.com

Who said never work with children or animals? ... by Sheila Claydon

The legend is that it was the comedian W.C. Fields but this is frequently disputed. It is generally accepted, however, that working with either children or animals on stage always carries risk. A child may steal the whole show or, instead, behave in an entirely unpredictable way, either of which is a challenge for the other actors. This is only too well illustrated by this TV clip from 1969. Admittedly the presenters were probably asking for it as they don't seem very prepared for what might go wrong on a live recording, but what did go wrong remains a favorite memory for everyone who saw it. Over forty years later it's still shown on British TV from time to time, and it still makes everyone laugh.



Using animals and children in books though it's an entirely different matter. They can be the focus of the story or act as a link between the main protagonists. They can inject humor, fear or pathos into the narrative or just provide a colourful background. They can also be used to give individual characters status. After all if a writer wants her hero to be a father, then he must have a child. The trick for the author is to decide how much of the story should be given over to the children.

I've just finished reading those great imaginary essays on history, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel and she uses children brilliantly. There are many of them woven into the  epic story of the court of Henry VIII and yet none of them have a star part. What they do instead is, by their behaviour, show the reader who the adults are. Thomas Cromwell, for instance, reported by history to be many things from great statesman to cold-blooded opportunist, is, in Mantel's books, a loving father and uncle. His house is full of children and when his own daughters die of the sweating sickness that was so prevalent in London at the time, he doesn't forget his responsibilities to his dead sister's children, but makes a home for them even though they can never replace his own. Yet despite this, none of the children are more than shadowy background figures. What they do, however, is remind the reader that whatever else he was, Cromwell was a man full of human warmth who was kind to those he loved. He also loved dogs and in the books is never without one and from time to time he has the sort of conversation with his dog that all pet owners will understand.

In the same books, Mary Tudor, only daughter of Henry and his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, is portrayed through the eyes of the many adults who surround her. She rarely appears herself even though she is integral to the story. Instead, the reader learns much about her and about how cruelly she  is manipulated while she is still a child through the words and sniggers of the courtiers. As a consequence of this clever narrative much is learned about Mary's royal parents, Anne Boleyn her stepmother, and also about Cromwell himself. Whether any of it is true is a matter for conjecture, but as a story telling technique it is masterful, as is the reference to Anne Boleyn's small dog whose untimely death supposedly caused her more grief than the loss of her own infant baby.

Ruminating on this after I read the last page, I thought about my own books. Slight they may be compared with the epic histories of Mantel, but I realised that in some of them I have used the same technique. In Mending Jodie's Heart I've gone even further. Without the children, the dog, the birds and the horses, there would be no story. The children's likes and dislikes, their hopes and ambitions are the things that fuel it. Without the children and the animals the reader would never have learned about the hero and the heroine's flaws and their strength. The children and the animals were also the reason I had to turn what was meant to be one book into a trilogy. I had to know what happened to them. Whether I managed to use them skilfully enough to show the true characters of the adults in their lives is for the reader to decide.

My books are available at http://bookswelove.net/authors/claydon-sheila/ and also at Amazon. I'm also at:

sheilaclaydon.com

facebook.com/SheilaClaydon.author

twitter.com/SheilaClaydon

Home again, home again, jiggety jig... by Sheila Claydon

As the nursery rhyme says, Home again, home again, jiggety jig. Here I am, back in England after 5 months in Australia, and one of the first things in my diary is the Books We Love Blog.  With jet lag from the 11 hour time difference and the remains of a heavy head cold, courtesy of my last days in Sydney, blurring my thoughts, what am I going to talk about.  Well the obvious is what is it like to be back home again?

Coldish, wet and windy is my first answer but then I pause and think. No! Blue skies greeted us when we arrived home and it hasn't rained that much either, just enough to keep everything fresh. Anyway we wouldn't have the nodding snowdrops and  daffodils or the cheerful yellow primroses in the garden without it, nor the lake full of birds and the very welcome spring catkins on the trees. The cold isn't all that bad either, not with the right clothes and boots. Nor is the wind any worse than the one we experienced most days in Sydney, it's just a lot cooler.

So what is different? Well a brisk walk along the beach showed us how the winters winds have reshaped many of the sand hills, uprooted trees and  carved new paths amongst the spiky maram grass that holds the dunes together. Whole swathes of the old Christmas trees that are used every year as barricades against the worst of the weather have been washed away by the high tides, leaving jagged stumps and broken branches behind them, while familiar logs and sheltered hollows have disappeared completely. Similar things happen every winter without doing much to attract our attention but after 5 months away we find ourselves looking at our familiar walks with new eyes.

We've looked at our local supermarket in the same way too and been very surprised. Where half a year ago the shelves were full of fresh meat, now the butchery has whole sections of pre-cooked joints and fancy cuts that only need twenty minutes or so in the cooker. The instant food aisle has expanded too with more ready meals than I knew existed. Although I'm not very interested in either of these phenomena I can appreciate that many people will benefit greatly from the time saved or, in the case of the older people who live in the community, a much easier cooking experience.

The people haven't changed though. Our neighbours are the same. There are the same number of dogs being walked on the field opposite our house. The garden has held together through the winter too, as have the fences, which has not always been the case in previous winters. True one friend has suffered a mild stroke but she has fully recovered, while another has come into some unexpected money which is lovely, but on the whole everyone is the same.

So if everything is much the same back home what are we missing about Australia?  Well the warmth obviously, although not the searing heat we experienced at times which was a bit too much for us. We do miss going bare foot in the house though, and only needing our sandals outside. Our skin was better too. The constant heat meant that it was always slightly damp and hydrated whereas in England the winter winds and the central heating have already made it feel tight and dry.

We miss the family of course but our English family are doing their best to compensate. Ditto with friends. Having to spread ourselves between 2 continents is difficult, expensive, and when we have to say goodbye, heartrending. On the other hand it has broadened our experience of life immeasurably, given us new friends, and also made us appreciate our home more than we might have done if we'd never been away.

People who read my books say that it's like buying a ticket to romance because I use many of my travelling experiences in my stories. I'm sure I'll be doing it again when I've had time to think about all the things that have happened in the past 5 months, but in the meantime I have already set one of my books partially in Australia. In Cabin Fever the hero and heroine are working on a cruise ship as it sails from Auckland to Sydney. This book was the result of a previous trip to the other side of the world. Who knows what will result from this one.

http://amzn.com/B007H2AJMI

My books and the buying links can be found at http://bookswelove.net/authors/claydon-sheila/