Books We Love Insider Blog: The Hollywood Collection

Friday, December 20, 2024

The books I forgot I'd written...by Sheila Claydon

Golden Girl, my first book, was published in the 1983, and because things were very different then the money I earned was enough for me to fly my family to Munich in Germany to stay with very dear friends. My husband had flown before on business, but for me and my two children it was another first. We had a brilliant time in Munich and then in Salzburg in Austria, something we all remember to this day, often reminiscing about the highlights when we get together.

After that I sold three more books, The Hollywood Collection, Empty Hearts and Bouquet of Thorns. Then things began to change. An editor who was working with me suddenly left the publishing house and her replacement didn't like my next manuscript. Too much story apparently and not enough romantic action! Once I read a couple of the books she was pushing I realised I didn't stand a chance. Not with that publishing house anyway. And worse still, I was never going to be able to write that stuff, so I put away my typewriter (yes it was a typewriter in those days) and found a proper job that brought in a regular wage. It was a sort of needs must with two growing children.

Fast forward twenty-five years and it was a different world. Not only had I retired but digital books were now a thing. And suddenly all the stars aligned in my favour because that publishing house went out of business (all those books with no stories!!) so the copyright reverted to me. I approached a digital publisher with some trepidation because it was a long time since I'd written anything other than annual reports, newsletters and company reports and I didn't know if my stories stood a chance. The news was good though and those four books were soon back on the market, this time in digital print. That gave me the confidence to start again, and that's when I found Books We Love.

Many digital and print books later, the copyright of those original books again reverted to me as another publishing house bit the dust. Too busy writing for the hugely successful Books We Love and treasuring the support that all its authors get, I ignored them for a long while. Then one day I had an epiphany. Would Books We Love republish them? Jude was more than helpful, dismissing my concerns that they were written so long ago that much of the content would seem out of date. So now they are re-published yet again, but this time as Retro romances, and with the year they are set in clearly marked at the start of the first chapter. I had to re-edit them of course, but with much nicer covers they have now been part of my Books We Love stable for several years. They are also published under my own name, not the pseudonym I used before.

And this brings me to a whole new situation. We have just had our loft cleared, no longer having any use for the myriad belongings that have been clogging it up for years, and not wishing to leave it for someone else to deal with when we get too old to cope. The only things left are the Christmas decorations, suitcases, photos and a stack of long forgotten manuscripts. Amazed they were still there, I started reading them, and yes, they still have a lot of story, but the romance is there too. I haven't decided what to do yet because I know they will need editing, but I'm tempted. Will Books We Love be interested? Will I be able to update them or will they have to be published under a retro label again? I haven't had the thinking time to start something new for quite a while now, so is this recent discovery what I need to get me writing again? Time will tell. In the meantime I'm enjoying revisiting my past.

Thursday, September 14, 2017

Clothes and how to wear them... by Sheila Claydon

In my book The Hollywood Collection, I write about clothes and fashion. I do the same, to some extent, in Golden Girl, another book which will be published early next year. Both these books are vintage romance, however. Books that I wrote in the seventies and eighties when I was into fashion and loved buying new clothes.

Oh how things have changed. Clothes! Do you love them or hate them, and I don't mean that in the 'let's get naked sense.' Me? The older I get, the more I hate them...well hate the ever changing fashion of them, and trying to find what best suits me. No, strike that. I know what suits me, it's just that nowadays I have to plough through a whole lot of 'mutton dressed up as lamb' stuff to find what I want.

Then there's the fit. I'm the same size now that I've always been, so how come pants sag and sweaters often have sleeves whose length is out of all proportion to the body shape. Oh, I know. It's because they are designed to be worn by young girls with pert behinds who like to pull their sleeves down over their fingers, and I have to admit they look cute. What looks cute on a teen or anyone under 40 for that matter, doesn't look cute on a woman of more mature years, however. And it's not going to change because the fashion industry is not interested in the older woman, and doesn't design for changing body shapes.

There are solutions of course. Buy expensive or find a really good dressmaker who does fittings and alterations. This is the advice I saw recently in a fashion column that I can't seem to stop reading even though most of the clothes featured are either beyond my purse or things I wouldn't be seen dead in. The same fashion editor also listed which pants give the best fit. Unfortunately I threw the article away without making a note, so here I am, back to square one.

When I was young I loved fashion. It was mini-skirts and long white boots (with matching lip-stick!) in the sixties, flares and stack heels in the seventies, leg warmers, shell suits and sweaters with garish motives in the eighties, pants-suits in the nineties, and so on and so on. I bought them all, loved bright colours and made some terrible fashion mistakes which I fortunately didn't notice at the time.

Now, however, I am much more comfortable in quieter clothes, mostly pants and tops, and shoes that are easy to walk in. They are available of course. Jeans, trainers, sweatshirts and gilets are fine for shopping, lounging around, dog walking, housework, but fashion wise they don't quite hack it, so I have a plan. From now on I am going to wear a uniform of sorts. I know what I like: slim cut pants, longish tops, scarves, boots, and on the rare occasion I wear a dress, something plain brightened up by accessories. I also hate mixing too many colours, so my future uniform will be a mix and match wardrobe that doesn't stray much beyond navy-blue, black, grey/charcoal, and to brighten it, fuchsia , pale blue, emerald green or turquoise, the colours that I know suit me well. I might also go searching for a seamstress who can take the sag out of those pants, unless I'm lucky enough to find some that fit properly. Of course I'll keep the jeans and sweatshirts because the dog still needs walking.

OK, so it might sound boring, but oh the relief. A uniform that I can put on and forget, knowing that while it might not be up there in high style, it is too conservative to ever really go out of fashion. Oh, and I'm going to buy lots of scarves as well. Bright, bright, cheerful scarves.