Making Marmalade by Priscilla Brown

 

https://books2read.com/Hot-Ticket

In this contemporary romance, Callum is an innovative cook, 

while Olivia's specialities are baked beans on toast and home-delivery pizza.  

Neither has ever made marmalade.

     

 In The King's Breakfast, a poem in When we were very young by A.A. Milne,

 the Queen is persuading the King to try marmalade instead of butter - "Marmalade is nicer."

 

For several years I have complimented my friend on her home-made lemon marmalade; my only contribution to this had been helping her pick fruit from the tree in her garden.  But moving to an apartment meant marmalade making with her own lemons could be no more. Together we picked the lemons, reminiscing about previous occasions. Then she surprised me by saying she didn't have the time to make it before her relocation in a few days' time, and presented me with not only all these lemons, but with an enormous saucepan, what seemed a lot of sugar, six jam jars and a recipe that had been in her family for a couple of generations. She explained that this was not the only possible recipe, but it had always worked for her so I should not have any trouble. Hmm. She had more confidence than I had in my cooking abilities.

 

To begin the great marmalade undertaking, I learnt I had to cut the fruit up, tie the pips and pith in a scrap of muslin thoughtfully supplied by my friend, luckily as the only muslin in my house is a smart dress, and place everything in water to soak overnight.Relax, this job was easy! My overnight relaxation included a dream of sailing on a sea of marmalade in a lemon-shaped boat which hit a large pip and sank. Next morning, my concoction had to simmer for about one and a half hours, after which I took out the bag of pips and added the sugar. Boil rapidly, the recipe instructed. No trouble about that, the brew was rising at an alarming rate. According to the recipe, setting would take between three and fifteen minutes.

Optimistic, I tested after five by dropping a teaspoonful onto a saucer. The marmalade was liquid...after ten, fifteen minutes, it still didn't look like anything with the potential to be eventually spreadable. The instructions advised using a clean saucer for each test, and at twenty-five minutes I had to start using those from the best tea service. If it boiled too long, the recipe admonished, it would never set. Had it boiled too long, or not long enough? What to do with a pan of unset marmalade? At thirty minutes I was giving up hope, when at last the sticky mess on a saucer formed a skin. I touched it and watched it wrinkle - yay, my effort had metamorphosed into marmalade!

Who knew all this would take so long! In such an amount of time, I could have written a couple of chapters...or perhaps not. After this culinary experience, I returned with some relief to my novel-in-progress, where I needed to rescue two characters from  a 'sticky' situation which had nothing to do with marmalade.

Best wishes, Priscilla

https://bwlpublishing.ca 

https://priscillabrownauthor 

Writing Villains by Priscilla Brown

 

 

 

Scottish laird, Australian  journalist - and villain at work 

https://books2read.com/Dancing-the-Reel 

 

'There's no hero without a villain' 

 (https://www.brainyquotes.com/mark_pellegrino_959913

 

 

How would fairy stories be without their villains?  Hansel and Gretel, Red Riding Hood, Cinderella and many more involve malevolent characters intent on harming the 'hero' or 'heroine' by eating them, denying them something they need or want, or making them stay at home to do the housework.

 I would like the characters in my contemporary romances to be 'nice' people with 'normal' every day  lives.  However, such paragons would not make an interesting strong story, and I need to deal with the challenge (to me) of giving my individuals problems, conflicts, tensions, ups and downs.

Enter villains.

In such a romance, the main characters are heading to a 'happy ever after'. or at least, a 'happy for the time being', and the role of the villain is to set them apart. This troublemaker has a single-minded personal agenda, a motivation for interfering with their developing relationship. On an early draft of Dancing the Reel a critique suggested  that the character I'd built as the villain needed redemption. I was surprised, and had no idea how to redeem her without compromising most of the plot. However, having considered this, I decided that as she was such an unsympathetic personality totally focused own her own ambition and attempting to walk over everyone in her way, redemption would be misplaced. In fact, the very suggestion of it led me to strengthen her personality, actions and dialogue, so that, while still credible within the story, this villain is unlikeable. Ultimately, she fulfilled her necessity to the plot, so I wrote her out in a tactic pertinent to her behaviour and preferred lifestyle. And the hero and heroine eventually arrived at their 'happy ever after'.

Wishing you lots of enjoyable reading, Priscilla

https://bwlpublishing.ca

https://priscillabrownauthor.com

Choosing Characters by Priscilla Brown

 

Mayor Anna agonises over the parlous finances of both her alpaca stud and her country town.

 Is this sexy television producer financial salvation or major trouble?

https://books2read.com/Sealing-the-Deal

 

Several characters in my contemporary romantic fiction choose themselves. Sealing the Deal developed from a farmer sitting on a gate watching her alpaca stud; for Hot Ticket, I had noticed a woman looking in the window of a lingerie shop;  the ferry hand who managed to get me and my rental car aboard his tiny boat without a scratch won a place in Dancing the Reel.

As an author, I need to know my characters well, and ensure they and their actions are appropriately motivated and credible; my familiarity with them increases as the story progresses. I don't plot in advance, thus offering them a lot of freedom to change or augment their personalities, backgrounds, mindsets, actions. But they must always have a narrative purpose - the rationale behind their existences, earning their keep so to speak. Every character has strengths and weaknesses, which, among other ramifications, determine how this person will respond to obstacles and to the behaviour of others; basically to move the story along.

I often find this character development a challenge - for example, I may like a certain individual, but will the reader be sympathetic to her/him?  And when I introduce a villain into the story, will the reader judge this character as such, and, as I intend, worry about the connection with the main characters? In my romance stories, the 'villain' is frequently the person keeping the hero and heroine apart.

Although I do not plot at the start, I always need to keep my characters under control. It may sound crazy to a non-writer, but our fictitious people do take on a life of their own. I have to stop them from wandering into idiosyncrasies and behaviours that do not fit with my overall idea of their place. A couple of stories ago, one of my chosen secondary characters wandered out of the story and into one where he was more important, so choosing him like that for the length of a novel was not going to work. He's waiting for a story of his own.

Ultimately, by the time I have finished the drafts, I must be sure I have chosen the characters suitably, and that the tone, the mood, which I  impose on them are relevant both to what they have by now turned into a plot and to the genre; the whole narrative should coalesce into a pleasurable read. 

Enjoy your reading, best wishes, Priscilla

https://bwlpublishing.ca

https://priscillabrownauthor.com

 

 

 

Serendipity or Fate? ... by Sheila Claydon

Click here to find my books at Books We Love

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!

Priscilla Brown inhabits several houses

Mayor Anna's town and her farm are struggling.

 Is this sexy television entrepreneur financial salvation or major trouble?

Find details of this and my other contemporary romances on

http://www.bookswelove/net/authors/brown-priscilla-romance 

and visit Priscilla Brown at your favourite e-book store

Inhabits all those houses in my head, that is. In my real life, I have just one house, a small house in a small town in New South Wales: the design and appearance of this dwelling, nor any that I have ever lived in, do not appear in any of my novels. Where do I get the ideas for my characters' homes?

In my stories, the only house that owes its presence partly to an existing building is Anna's farmhouse in Sealing The Deal. Some years ago I used to visit this homestead, and my writer's mind stored its appearance, its timber construction and wraparound veranda for possible inclusion in fiction one day.

Other than this, I am not writing about houses I've met. I glean impressions from various sources, including observations while visiting other areas, travelling, magazines, and some of these fragments gel into composite yet incomplete images for my characters to call home.  Such snippets are merely a small part of the final pictures in my head. Imagination personalises the dwelling, ascertaining the size, appearance and location, adding details. Occasionally the character may have a suitable finished place to live when I begin a story's first draft, but usually this evolves as the plot develops. My aim is to create the home, outside and inside, appropriate to the personality and lifestyle of its inhabitant; it should also promote an atmosphere in which the storyline can flourish.

Each of my stories has a notebook, and among pages of scribble I sketch a rough floor plan of the plot's most important house, not attempting to design it anywhere near to scale. I do this to anchor some ideas for the story, perhaps since I don't devise a plot plan, rather let the narrative carry on. In most cases, the original layout needs adjusting to accommodate not only proceeding scenes but the workability of the whole floor. The sketch for Cassandra's cottage in Silver Linings had the bathroom squeezed into a corner with no place for a door, and much too small for the spa crucial for a significant scene; as a result, the kitchen got moved and reduced. (No significant scenes there and not much cooking either.)

When furniture and other objects are necessarily mentioned, their placement and style may or may not be detailed depending on how important these are to a scene; readers may arrange them how they wish. Furniture can suggest a facet of the occupant's taste and lifestyle: colourful or drab, tidy or untidy, overcrowded or short of seats.

The view from the windows may be critical to the storyline as in the ocean panorama from the Caribbean island cottage belonging to Cameron in Where The Heart Is; Cristina must leave the man and the view, but is finding it hard to say goodbye. In Silver Linings, windows are useful to indicate the weather, if it's suitable to go beachcombing on the blustery Southern Ocean beach (or if spending the day in the spa is preferable).


Physical  surroundings are important contributors to a home's overall ambience, and to the 'feel' of a story. Is the dwelling rural or urban, isolated or on a busy street, and how does this particular location affect the character both emotionally and practically? Is there a garden? If so, is it looked after? Anna's caring nature tends to her roses in Sealing the Deal; Cristina's mature Australian garden of flowers and fruit trees contrasts with Cameron's tangle of tropical vegetation.

While the settings of my novels are clear and complete in my head. I try not to over-describe, to allow readers to use their imaginations, thus perhaps feeling they themselves are inhabiting the story.

May 2019 be kind to you. Best wishes, Priscilla

http://bwlpublishing.ca

https://priscillabrownauthor.com