How not to write a blog..by Sheila Claydon

 

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I usually think about my Books We Love blog a week or so before I write it. Will I write about something that has happened in my life since I last blogged, or will it be about writing itself, or about one of my books. Over the years, like the rest of my BWL fellow authors, I have written about many different things. Today, though, is different.

For the very first time I missed my deadline of making sure the blog was ready to post at least one day before its due publication date. My excuse is that having had my son and family who live in Singapore staying for 5 weeks (wonderful), followed by contracting what is referred to as 'the hundred day cough' over here in the UK (horrible and debilitating), my mind was on other things until I saw the date! 

Anyway, here I am, writing this in a hurry so it makes it to the blog site hours, not days late! 

My book The Hollywood Collection was first published in the 1980s under a pseudonym, as were several of my other books,  Bouquet of Thorns, Golden Girl (my first ever book) and Empty Hearts. I was, of course, thrilled, but when, a few years ago the copyright returned to me, I was even more thrilled to discover that I could republish them as Vintage romances with Books We Love. 

I had to re-read them and tweak a few things but they remain much the same, so if you are interested in what life was like in the '60s (Golden Girl) and then through the '70s and '80s, before cell phones, before the Internet, before mass tourism when London and England were quieter places, and when Russia (Empty Hearts) was a very different country, then these books will tell you. The Hollywood Collection imagines a very different America too. 

I worked hard to get my facts right but research was so different then. The National Geographic Magazine was one of my main sources for books set in other countries, as was the local library and newspapers. I also leant heavily on personal experience. Nowadays anything can be discovered at the click of a button, which actually is pretty wonderful. 

Writing the books was different too. Using a portable typewriter to produce a top copy and two flimsies using carbon paper, it took a lot longer. Mistakes had to be painted out with Tippex, or rubbed out with a special typewriter eraser, neither of which produced a very pristine copy, so often retyping was the only option. Then the manuscript had to be printed, loosely secured with an elastic band and boxed up before being sent to the publisher, who might just send it back asking for alterations! It was arduous but worth it if a book was published. Some of my early ones were not!

Re-reading them was fun though. There were so many reminders of my life when I was much, much younger. Nowadays I am vintage too. Hopefully, like my vintage books, I have stood the test of time!

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.

Can you tell a book by its cover?...by Sheila Claydon

Click here for my BWL page

Once, long ago, I wrote under the pen name Anne Beverley, and Golden Girl was my first published book. Then I wrote more books, still as Anne Beverley, until my family eventually persuaded me to stop hiding behind a pseudonym and write under my real name. That earlier book was still out there though, and to say the cover looks dated is an understatement!

Original cover

Then, many books later, the publishing house that owned it closed and the publishing rights returned to me. I sold it on to another publisher on the proviso that it would now be published under my real name. But in the field of publishing things are not always straightforward, so in the end I had to agree to Sheila Claydon writing as Anne Beverley, as well as a new cover. One that was certainly an improvement on the first.

Second edition cover

Then, a few years later, the same thing happened all over again. Another publisher, this time Books We Love, another cover and, finally, Golden Girl published under my own name. By then this book had been out there for a long time, so now it is a vintage romance with characters behaving a little differently than we expect them to in the twenty-first century. The heroine is still feisty though. It just takes her a little longer to get there!

Third edition cover

Now, thankfully, all my books bar one are with BWL Publishing, and I am very happy indeed about that.

In my next blog I will introduce another of those early books together with the covers they have had over the years. In the meantime, if you would like to have a taster of Golden Girl, then go to the Book Snippets page on my Website and let it take you back to what it was like to be a secretary in a large company in London and Paris in 1964. Manual typewriters, desk phones connected to a central switchboard, no screens, hardback dictionaries, shorthand dictation, blotting paper...I could go on. It was a different world except for one thing...people still liked to read romances. And if you would like to let me know which of these is your favourite cover, I'd love to know.

Coming Back...by Sheila Claydon

For many reasons, but mainly because I've been looking after my 3 year old granddaughter, I haven't had much time to write this year. In fact make that 18 months what with journeys to Australia and Hong Kong to visit family and friends, and longterm guests at home. It's just been one of those times when writing has had to take a back seat because people, when all is said and done, are more important. On top of all that I've had trouble with my website and, with no time to fix it, have wiped that as well.

I have had one thing going for me, however - Books We Love. Always there for all its writers, it has continued to give me an online presence as well as republishing 3 of the books I wrote in the eighties when the copyright unexpectedly reverted to me, so 2017 has not been entirely book free. Vintage romance! How did I get to be so old?

The republication of those books has been a boost to my writing morale too, especially the fantastic new covers courtesy of the wonderful Michelle ( http://www.michelleleedesigns.net), and now it's time for a comeback.  January 2018 is definitely a time of new resolutions, although right at this moment the workload looks overwhelming.  A book to edit before it can be republished, a half-written book, Part 2 of a series, to revisit and finish, and a website which is still only a work in progress.  I'm enjoying rereading the story of Golden Girl though, the Vintage romance soon to be republished, and it has reminded me of how difficult writing used to be.

Golden Girl was my very first book. I wrote it by hand in notebooks and on sheets of paper at the kitchen counter while my children were at school, and then typed it (a top copy and 2 carbons) on a portable typewriter. I also had a part-time job.  When a publisher accepted it I blew the money on a holiday for the family, our first ever abroad and my first ever flight. I've done a lot more travelling since then but nothing has quite replaced the thrill of that trip to Munich although strangely enough, given that nowadays I hang my writing identity on a have pen/will travel persona, I've never written about it. In 2018, with a study, a computer and the Internet for reference, writing a book is much less onerous. Another big plus is that publishers now accept books online. No more printing, collating and packing up copies and making sure return postage is included. In 2018 the whole process is much more manageable.

Anyway, back to Golden Girl. The story is based on an experience I had when I was a young secretary and was asked to front the launch of a range of  new cosmetics. It only entailed a couple of days in London, nothing so exotic as Paris, which is featured in the book, nor did I meet such charismatic characters as Alain Matthieu and Paul Genet, the hero and anti-hero. The experience gave me the idea though and now that I am re-reading it prior to publication, it is reviving many memories.  Faces and names from the past have come back to me as I wonder what happened to all those people I used to work with. I have also remembered that part of the launch included sitting on a carnival float dressed as a French courtesan, something I had completely forgotten until now!  It was all very tame stuff compared with what the heroine has to put up with in Golden Girl though. And I remember it was fun. 2 days away from the office, free cosmetics, a new dress...what was not to like.

My Golden Girl heroine, Lisa Morgan, has it a lot harder and copes in ways I would never have managed myself. She also has to deal with the sexual politics of the 1960s which were very different from those of today. I got a lot wrong too. I wouldn't write a book now with so much sight-seeing detail, even though it has its uses. For anyone visiting London or Paris for the first time, following in Lisa's footsteps as she explores them offers a blueprint of where to go and what to see.  Maybe I'll go back one day and revisit those places myself but if I don't make it at least I have the memories.

My other Vintage Romances were republished last year. Set in Moscow, Hollywood and, more prosaically, an English town, they set me on the path of writing about faraway places when they were first published. In those far off days I was prepared to write about places I'd never visited, using reference books and travel magazines for authenticity. Now I wouldn't dream of doing that. If I haven't been there then I don't write about it. Since those early days as a writer I've learned a lot, but re-reading and editing them has been fun and the stories still stand up, so if you decide to read them to learn about a different time that is not exactly history but is still very different from the Twenty-first Century, then enjoy.

You can see all of Sheila's books Vintage, Contemporary and Series at: http://bookswelove.net/authors/claydon-sheila/ They are available at:

Amazon

iTunes

Kobo

Barnes and Noble

Smashwords

And if you have time, then stop in and visit her at:

Sheila Claydon on facebook

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:

Amazon

iTunes

Kobo

Barnes and Noble

Smashwords

Also visit her on Facebook and have a chat :

Sheila Claydon on facebook