Friday 26 April 2013

Sunshine, lemons, hope and the beauty of simplicity..........


My friend Lisa from MoreSouth - http://moresouth.com/blog/ - asked me to comment on her blog about lemons. So here goes. Thanks Lisa.

Lemons are very much on my mind at the moment. The lemon plays a major role in my work-in-progress novel 'Honey Lemon'. To one of the central characters - Inez - lemons are sacrosanct!  To Inez the lemon symbolizes hope, life, vitality; it symbolizes sun. Inez sees her lemon tree as her protector against all things evil. Inez feels her life in 2013 Spain is falling apart. She clings to hope for better things for the future. She is young and without qualifications. She works in a low-paid job. Her problems are those faced by so many of her friends.

Then she meets Luis. Both she and Luis are young Cubans, living in Barcelona. Both work in menial jobs with no prospects; both have lost hope that they’ll ever have a better future. They are strangers to each other and feel adrift in a modern Europe gripped by recession.

Apart from their nationality, they have one thing in common; Ines sings to her lemon tree each morning before she goes to work at the bakery deliciĆ³s close to Gracia, believing her lemon tree holds the secret to her existence. Luis, a porter at the Hotel Central close to the Ramblas, is addicted to the taste of organic honey. He worships honey and saves as much of his low pay as he can afford to buy the best he can. Both feel lost in the midst of menial work, low pay, struggle, disconnection, loneliness and fear.

One cold February morning, Ines and Luis meet. They become friends, then lovers, and over the coming weeks challenge each other to find out the reason for their love affair with the lemon tree and organic honey. What they discover surprises them. They discover not only a common heritage, a joint past, a new hope for living and the key to a life full of promise, they discover love and connection with their own history and within that the reason for their own being.

'Honey Lemon' is a simple love story about connecting with our ancestors and living true to your dreams. 

I wanted to write a novel about symbols, about simple things that inspire us, about the disconnection many of us feel with what is truly important. That's one of the reasons why I love Lisa and Haim's business MoreSouth – which is about the simple, yet powerful act, of eating beautiful food, and nothing feeds the spirit and soul more than delicious food shared with family and friends xxx.

Thursday 18 April 2013

On stage or in the shadows……

I read it everywhere…….to be successful you almost have to brain-wash people into ‘wanting’ you. You have to shout about how good you are, how talented you are, how ‘out there’ you are. You have to shout the loudest, the longest, be a bit of a diva. You have to ‘brand’ yourself (your physical self) in order to be noticed.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately. On Tuesday night I found out that I had made it to the semi-finalist section of the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award for my novel The Hidden – 10,000 entries into the competition and now I am in the last five for my category ‘Thriller’.

I’d been nervous in the run-up to Tuesday, knowing that they would announce the semi-finalists on that day. I was ecstatic when I heard but I find it hard to shout about it too much.

But I am so grateful to Amazon for the chance to be read. My novel The Hidden was written after two years of research and was finished in April 2001, just two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Because the plot involves terrorism, no publisher or agent would touch it at the time. I rewrote the novel 10 times and then it languished on a computer pen drive for many years. I dragged it out of the computer file on a whim in December 2012 and submitted my application to the ABNA competition. Now it is out of the shadows and that’s fantastic. But I still feel more comfortable in the shadows. I want my novel to be read and my words to talk, but I don’t want to say much at all.

This privacy mania comes being a person who does not like ‘diva’ behaviour at all. All I want to do is write my stories. I don’t want to sell myself but my stories. I watch favourite authors on social media and rate them according to how they present themselves. If they go over the top, I stop liking them and it turns me off reading their work. So the same must apply to over-selling yourself as a writer, digitally. 

I don’t mind if people hate me or like me (their choice) but I want them to buy and read my novels. Digitally promoting yourself and your product comes down to the promotion of self, and I don’t want to promote my ‘self’ rather my stories.

Is there a way around this? I am not sure. Because in this digital world everything comes down to ‘personality’. Personality sells. Having worked in PR for many years I know all about this.

My novels are not about me. They are fictional stories that I make up in my mind. Then comes the act of setting the stories down on ‘paper’. Once that is finished I launch them into the world and hope that people enjoy them. It seems like a simple process. Is the digital world simply a way of reminding people these stories are out there? 

On ABNA I am thrilled but I am just one person who exists in a world of talented people; so many talented writers with wonderful stories to tell. To me it’s the story that’s important not the author.


Please send me your thoughts. 

Warm wishes xxx