News

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Absence makes the heart grow fonder

Is it ‘absence makes the heart grow fonder’? Or ‘out of sight, out of mind’?

You may have noticed I haven’t been around much. We’re selling our house and buying a new one, and my life is teetering on the edge of out of control. I’ve been proofing the Bluestocking Belles’ next anthology, Fire & Frost so we can get the ARC out. Add to that, I’ve other books to finish, grandchildren to cherish, and a day job.

Furthermore, we’re off on a road trip (organised months ago) a week today, so things are unlikely to improve for a while.

Received wisdom in the writer community is that we need to be constantly engaged on social media to keep people thinking about us, and buying the books we’ve written so we can afford to pay our bills for the books we want to write. If that’s true, I’m in trouble!

However, I won’t disappear entirely. I’m still promoting the Bluestocking Belles’ next anthology, Fire & Frost. I’ve written a short story for my newsletter, and will get that out before I go away. I’m about to put up the publication date for my novel The Darkness Within. (I’ll do a preorder on Smashwords which will feed back to the retailers it serves, but leave Amazon till I’m confident, because their punishment for getting it wrong is a year without preorder, and my life could spiral completely out of control at any moment.)

I also need to decide whether I’m going to publish something on 15 December. I’ve done so every year since Candle’s Christmas Chair came out in 2014, and I hate to miss a year. Options are a version of Chasing the Tale, my collection of newsletter subscriber short stories, and Paradise Regained, the prequel to the series I’m publishing next year, Children of the Mountain King. Let me know what you think!

Meanwhile, here’s an excerpt from the next newsletter subscriber story, which may (or may not) be called The Delinquency of Lord Clairmont. My heroine has waited years for her husband to return to England. When she learns from the gossip columns that he has done so, but is remaining in the south instead of coming home, she decides to retrieve him.

She would not apologise for making sure he came home to lands and investments that were more profitable and in better heart than when she took them over. Surely, even the most selfish of men must see that she had a vested interest in securing the future of her children.

Which brought Seffie to the reason why she, Anna, and the servants were about to descend from their coach at a manor owned by one of Clairmont’s dissolute friends. Children. She would be twenty-four in a few days, and she was not waiting another twelve years for her errant husband to at least make the attempt to get her with child. Not another year, nor a month.

Given what she’d heard about the nature of the parties held in this rather pleasant-looking country manor house, Clairmont may have one or more other entertainments already at hand, but Seffie was prepared to do whatever she needed to oust them and take their place. Surely a man whose name had been linked with women all round the world would not refuse to bed his lawfully-wedded wife?

Seffie nodded to her footman, giving him the signal to rap the door knocker. Let battle commence.

The footman knocked twice more before the door opened a cautious crack to allow an elderly maid to poke her beaked nose around the edge of it.

Seffie stepped forward, and footman pushed the door fully open, overcoming the maid’s brief resistance. Not a maid. The bundle of keys at the woman’s waist indicated the housekeeper. She stepped backward at the aristocratic advance and curtseyed.

“I am Lady Clairmont,” Seffie said. “Announce me to your master.”

The housekeeper shook her head, cringing as if she expected a blow. “’is lordship be asleep,” she whined. “Them all be asleep. Even Mr. Barton, who be the butler. All night they was up, and be as much as my life to wake ’uns.”

Seffie gave a short nod. She should have expected this. “Show my cousin and my maid to a parlour where they can wait, and send someone to conduct me to Lord Clairmont’s room,” she commanded. She added instructions for refreshments to be brought to her and her cousin, and told William to stay with the other two women. They might need a stout defender in this house, though perhaps they could all retreat to a nearby inn before the other denizens woke up.

“Should you be alone, ma’am?” Polly ventured, and Anna agreed. “We could send for another of the men to go with you.”

What Seffie had to say to her husband was best said in private. “I shall be safe in Clairmont’s room,” she insisted, and followed another servant, this one still straightening her cap and tying her apron, up the long curve of the stairs.

It wasn’t until the housekeeper put a hand up to knock on the door that it occured to Seffie that her husband might not be alone.

“Don’t knock,” she said, hastily. Should she enter, or not? She had come this far, and she did not like to retreat.

She tried the handle. Locked. “Open it,” she insisted.

The housekeeper frowned but obeyed.

“That will be all, Mrs… ?”

“Barton, my lady. I’ll bring thy tea.”

“Do that.”

Seffie waited until Mrs. Barton retreated back towards the stairs before opening the door enough to slip silently into the bedchamber. A large four-poster bed dominated the room. To Seffie’s relief, the man sleeping in it was alone. She was less comfortable with his attire—or lack thereof. He lay sprawled on his front, his face turned away from her, the sheet pushed down to show his bare back from his broad shoulders to his narrow waist.

Seffie froze in the doorway. He was no longer pudgy; nor was the glorious expanse of skin marred by pimples or any other blemish. She gave herself a shake, stepped inside, and closed the door. She might be a virgin, but she hadn’t lived in a box for all the past years. Being married didn’t stop her from admiring a male form, and she knew desire when she felt it. She had never acted on it, and she could ignore it now. She wasn’t here to lust after her husband. Actually, that wasn’t quite accurate—if they could resolve the distance between what she wanted and what he apparently wanted, lust would be appropriate and useful in gaining her the children she yearned for. Provided he felt the same about her.

For a wild moment, she was tempted to undress and climb under the sheets with him, but she resisted the impulse. The maid would return with the tea. Besides, they should talk first; negotiate a way forward. In truth, despite her unexpected physical response, she was a little afraid. He was a stranger, and she had only the most general of ideas about what to expect of the marital act. It sounded like something better done with a friend, or at least a more than casual acquaintance.

She took a seat in the window bay, and pulled the book she had been reading from her reticule. From here, she could see his face. She would have walked past him in the street, except that she was very familiar with certain elements of his face. That square cleft chin appeared in a number of paintings at Clairhaven; that strong nose and those arched eyebrows in others. The boy of fifteen was still there, too, when she examined him closely, pared down, toughened, more square and decidedly formidable. In repose, he was not classically handsome, but he was attractive.

Her husband. She whispered it, to see if it felt more real when voiced aloud. “My husband.”

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Is it news if not much is happening?


I’ve not been doing much writing. Instead, I’ve been doing a heap of reading, quite a few tasks around the place, a modicum of socialising, and thinking. Mountains of thinking.

The thinking is partly about plot and character. Unkept Promises needs more work before it is ready for someone else to edit and proofread. I’m rewriting large chunks of To Wed a Proper Lady to tighten the story and introduce plot elements that will work themselves out over the series (the Duke of Haverford and his slow demise, for one). I keep seeing scenes from the next two books in the Mountain King series. I’ve worked out plot motivations for the next Redepenning book. And I’m about to set down and do a Hero’s Journey for Maximum Force, the contract killer, and his heroine, Serenity Christian.

It’s also partly about my own motivations. Somewhere in all the discussion about how hard it is to be seen in the bazillion book marketplace, with its pirates and its scammers and all the barriers put up by the retailers and social-media companies in their bid for world-domination, I’d lost track of the fact I don’t care.

It isn’t that I don’t want my books to be read. I do. I really, really do, and I humbly thank all of you who have followed me and supported me. But that isn’t why I write.

I write, and I publish what I write, because telling stories is a huge part of what I am, and a story isn’t real until a reader or listener recreates it in their own imagination. To put it in religious terms, this is my vocation. I need to tell the stories that are in my head to tell, and to do so with all the skill and imagination at my command. I need to slave and fret over them till they’re the best they can be. That’s my calling. That needs to be my focus.

I’m not going to ignore marketing, because to do so would be stupid. I’m not going to worry about it, either. My job is to write.

 

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Historical? Romance? Or Thriller? If the genre fits, wear it!

I’ve always had trouble categorising my fiction, which in one sense isn’t a problem. After all, genre is a device for shelving books.

In another sense, it doesn’t help. Booksellers — including Amazon — use genre for sorting books and showing them to readers. If I’m not clear what I’m writing, my books are likely to go to readers who don’t want them!

My weekend at the first New Zealand crime and thrillers convention, RotoruaNoir, has helped me clarify my thinking. Especially my preparation for the panel discussion on Genre Blending. I represented historical romance on the panel. Other members represented horror, young adult, and contemporary romance.

So here’s where I’ve got to. So far, what I’ve written represents any two and up to all three of historical fiction, romance, and crime/mystery.

I write historical fiction

Historical fiction is fiction that is is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other details of the story’s setting in time and place. Such stories may focus on major historical events and characters, but even if they don’t, they should at least recognise such events when they’ve recently happened, or are happening, during the time period of the story.

All but three of my stories (so far) are set in the past, most in the Regency era. I love historical detail, and do a lot of research to get it right. I try to create characters that could only have existed in that time and place, and the events and activities that are natural for people like that in a time like that. Some readers find my women too stroppy and independent for their times. I disagree. History is full of women who defied the current norms to forge their own path. Also, many people judge the whole of society by the pampered debutantes in their gilded cages. To take one example, people have commented on my character Minerva Bradford, who ran a workshop that made invalid chairs. She would not have been unusual for her time. Women of crafter families had always been crafters themselves. Indeed, part of the story is that Minerva’s family is upwardly mobile, and her father wants Minerva to give up the work and become a social ornament, like her betters.

(Not all historical romances are also historical fiction. Some are stories that could happen anywhere or anytime, but the gowns and cravats are a nice added touch. I don’t write those, but I’ve enjoyed quite a few.)

I write romance

Romance is fiction about two people (except at the menage edges of the genre) who fall in love, face challenges, and finish the story with a strong possibility of happiness together. Romance is a subset of the love story category. What sets it apart is the happy ending. I’ve always taken ‘happy ever after’ as meaning ‘having resolved conflicts in a way that gives us hope they will resolve the conflicts that are yet to come as they live their lives together’. Romance is a broad category that includes historical, contemporary, paranormal, science fiction, and suspense. It can also be categorised by the gender, species, and number of the participants, and by the ‘heat’ level — that is, by the emphasis on and level of specific detail in the sex scenes.

I believe in happy endings. I’m living one myself, and so have all my siblings and my husband’s siblings. True love isn’t magic and it isn’t easy, but it is possible and worthwhile. The ending of the written story is the beginning of a life together, which will have its ups and downs, but empathy and commitment will see the couple through. Those are my kind of romances. I’m not one to add a sex scene for the sake of it, but I don’t shy away from leaving the door open in the plot or character development require. Heat level is anything from ‘sweet’ to ‘moderate’.

I’ve written across a number of romance subgenres. Contemporary suspense. Historical suspense. Paranormal suspense. Straight historical. At the heart of it are two people in the crucible of initial attraction, learning about one another and growing to be more than they could have been alone.

I write suspense

The last category I write in is crime/mystery. This is another huge genre with blurred edges. People seem to use the term mystery for stories about solving a crime. Crime is a bit broader, including the effects of the crime. RotoruaNoir had writers from across the spectrum of the genre (most of the following can be contemporary, historical, paranormal, or sf): cosy/traditional, noir (gritty and pessimistic), hard-boiled private investigator, police procedural, spy/espionage, suspense, and thriller.

I’m struggling to fit mine in there. They’re not cosy, since they don’t shy away from gritty detail, but they’re certainly not pessimistic. I do have a private investigator, but he isn’t hard-boiled. Not police procedural. Espionage can be an element. Thriller is about high stakes and swift actions, which might be close to some of my plots. Suspense is probably closest — characters confronting evil and overcoming danger.

I knew I had romance in all my suspense stories. But I went through my titles and listed all the plot lines. With rare exceptions, they all involve solving crimes, from fraud and intimidation to blackmail, people trafficking, and murder. Turns out I have suspense in almost all of my romance stories. Certainly, all three of my contemporary romances are also suspense.

 

So this leaves me needed a new strapline

Okay. So far so good. The first step to fixing a marketing problem is to diagnose the problem. If I didn’t know what I did myself, I can hardly expect to attract readers who like it.

I’m okay with Jude Knight Storyteller as an overall brand. It covers the fact that I don’t stick to one genre but write in the overlap between them. I tell stories. But the visual imagery and the strapline (Stories to thrill, intrigue and delight) could do with some work. Watch this space.

 

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My writing life or It’s all a plot!

Here’s what I’m working on at the moment:

Marketing last year’s holiday anthologies. I have two novellas: Paradise Regained, historical fiction, in the Bluestocking Belles’ Follow Your Star Home, and Abbie’s Wish, a contemporary romantic suspense, in Christmas Wishes on Main Street.

Doing the final check of and marketing the next Belles’ box set, Valentines From Bath, which includes my Regency novella The Beast Next Door.

Writing the next novel in the Regency series The Golden Redepennings. Unkept Promises is around one third written. Earlier this week, I mapped the scenes to the darkest point, where all hope is lost.

Writing the made-to-order I gave away as a party prize at the Follow Your Star Home launch. The winner asked for a laird, a distant castle, and the enemies to lovers plot type. It turned out to be a medieval and begins with a nun sitting beside the bed of the knight who was wounded saving her life.

Writing, with Mariana Gabrielle (Mari Christie) the final chapters of Never Kiss a Toad, a Victorian saga about the children of her rake and mine from our Regency books. Their fathers catch the son of one in bed with the daughter of the other, and they are forcibly separated. At long last, after 76 chapters, they are back in England together. We’re posting a chapter at a time in Wattpad, and are currently posting chapter 68.

Rewriting The Bluestocking and the Barbarian, a Regency novella from the Belles’ Holly and Hopeful Hearts box set. I’m going to turn it into a novel, the first in a series about the children of a Duke who has been king in a remote central Asian kingdom.

Beginning the planning for the next two books in this series. (Hint: book three is about Aldridge.)

Planning a Regency novella for the next Belles’ box set. All the novellas will be about people who return to England for the reading of a will. There may be ghosts.

Planning a novel for a series by different authors with common elements. My hero is a veteran of the Napoleonic Wars. He was trained as an assassin and is now a contract killer. The heroine is either a Quaker or a Wesleyan, and a pacifist.

All of these are for publication this year, which I can manage if I get off the internet and write 2,000 words a day.

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Good riddance 2018 and hello 2019

Fond Farewell, by Edmund Blair Leighton
DM16545 The Fond Farewell by Leighton, Edmund Blair (1853-1922) Messum’s, London, UK English, out of copyright

To be fair, heaps of good things happened in 2018. For one thing, I finally began to recover from the polymyalgia rheumatica, and I discovered a few food allergies that restricted my diet still further, but got rid of my sinusitis, my hives, and my migraines.

For another, I published stuff: novellas in three multi-author box sets plus two novels. I wrote another novella that will be published next month, at least six newsletter subscriber short stories, most of the rest of the co-authored book Mari Christie and I are publishing on Wattpad, and a third of another novel.

My personal romantic hero and I had an absolutely fabulous holiday with Carol Roddy (aka Caroline Warfield) and her beloved, and built some wonderful memories.

And I spent another year with my best friend, culminating in our 47th wedding anniversary just after Christmas.

On the other hand, for most of the year I was just hanging in there.
Family crises, the busiest year at work ever, illness, and all sorts of other hiccups meant I finished the year with less done than I’d planned, and a good case of exhaustion.

I’m back at work on Monday 7th, after two and a half weeks off. For the first nine days, I slept ten hours a night, and then had a two hour nap each day. It’s nice not to be tired, and I’ve come back to a three-day week at the day job.

I’ve upped my expectations for writing in 2019 to allow for two things.

First, I have that extra two days a week — counting travelling time, that adds up to an extra 18 hours for stuff that isn’t the day job.

Second, my personal romantic hero gave me Dragon, the dictation software, for Christmas. I’ve been using it less than a week, and I’m already achieving a slightly higher word count dictating stories than typing them. As I get more skilled, I hope to at least double my writing speed.

So here’s the publishing plan for 2019. Two long and at least four short novels; at least two novellas; six subscriber-only short stories; a collection of my published New-Zealand-based stories.

Given the extra time, it’s feasible, but of course it could change on a dime, since family and friends come first.

Still, if I want the mountain top, I need to aim at the stars. Roll on 2019.

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On the move

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No time to sit still at the moment. We’re preparing the house for sale, and this weekend I stained more than 100 square meters of deck (over a thousand square feet for those of you who haven’t gone metric). One more weekend of hard push, and we’re ready to go.

In addition, I finished writing an application for the Katherine Mansfield Menton Fellowship, which provides a grant for New Zealand writers to live in Menton, France, for a few months, and work in a room in the villa where our famous writer Katherine Mansfield lived in 1920, Villa Isola Bella. Who knows how that will go? But gathering all the material together has been a useful exercise, and the letters of support I received from those I asked were very good for my ego.

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So many stories, so little time

Our house — 5 bedrooms in nearly 2 acres of established garden and lawn, with a separate studio, in one of the loveliest commuter towns in the country

Life is frantically busy. We have several major projects on at work, all of which require effort from me this week. My beloved and I are preparing our house to go on the market in three weeks, just in time for all the trees to be in blossom (so removing clutter by packing stuff I want to keep and giving the rest away, touching up paintwork and other minor repairs, weeding, etc etc). And on the book front, I have six projects running.

  1. The Belles’ box set has been proofread and the cover launch is in a fortnight. So Paradise Regained and its companion stories are almost at the ‘market, market, market’ stage of the process.
  2. Abbie’s Wish, for the Author’s of Main Street Christmas box set has been written, but I have some editing to do before I can send it to beta readers.
  3. The Beast Next Door, for the Belle’s Valentine box set, is due for first peer review on 1 October, but is currently on the back burner while I work on more urgent projects.
  4. House of Thorns is back from the editor (as I wrote a couple of weeks ago) and the rewrite is becoming urgent. I don’t know what publication date Scarsdale Publishing have in mind, but I do know I don’t want to hold them up!
  5. Never Kiss a Toad has chapters almost up to Sally’s return home, but they need review and I have to write more to bring the story to a close. Absolute priority for this week is to finish Chapter 61, a new Sally chapter that fits between the chapter Mari and I are currently publishing on Wattpad and the next prepared chapter.
  6. Unkept Promises is stalled while I clear the other projects, but Mia and Jules are not impressed with the decision and keep yammering at me.

My beloved says that my hobby is getting out of hand, and when I think about all the ideas crowding for their place, he might have a point.

And have I been doing book appearances, FaceBook parties, email outreach, and all the other book marketing stuff? Not so much. But I’ll be back, I promise. The goal is a smaller house on a smaller section. Less effort, and more time to write. Yay!

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Tea with readers

Join Jude Knight, the Duchess of Haverford, and an assortment of Jude’s heroines on FaceBook, to celebrate the opening of Jude’s new bookshop.

We’ll be on Jude Knight’s Regency World during Saturday New Zealand time, which is Friday afternoon and evening US time.

Come with your questions for Jude, the Duchess, or any of Jude’s female characters (the men will have their turn another time). Or comments. Or anything you wish.

We’ll have stories and discussions and games. Would love to see you here.

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Ch-ch-ch-changes

Expect some changes in the way I sell my books in the coming months. I’ve been thinking and reading and collecting ideas. I’ve been planning and preparing. And I’m just about ready to start implementing.

Buy from the Jude Knight shop

First up, I’m going to open my own shop on this site, with print and ebooks available in formats to suit any reader, and direct-to-customer benefits.

  1. I’m planning to have new books available in my shop before you can get them anywhere else — and I hope to start with The Realm of Silence (publication date 22 May, so 15 May here).
  2. I’ll be adding extras such as deleted and background scenes to the books sold through my shop that you won’t get at any of the major e-retailers.
  3. Over time, I’ll have books here that aren’t available anywhere else.

Can you think of anything else you’d like to see me doing? I can’t discount ebooks over the Amazon price, because of authors agree, as a condition of using KDP, that they will not sell at a lower price elsewhere, but everything else is up for discussion.

Enjoy changes to my newsletter

I’m keeping the story, but I’m cutting back on content and putting most of it in links to stop cluttering your box. If you want to read more, click through. And I’m planning to feature more on other authors — their new releases, books I’ve been reading, interesting things happening in the world of historical romance.

How does that sound? Good? No? Please tell me what you’d like. My newsletter subscribers are my go-to-people, my strongest supporters and advocates. I care what you think, and I want to entertain you.

Watch me try to reduce my dependence on the megaliths

I have always tried to diversify: going wide instead of exclusive to Amazon, using Twitter and Goodreads and Wattpad instead of relying on Facebook. I’m more and more convinced this is the right approach, but I need to be more strategic about it. So here are some of the things I’m planning.

  • Making my website is up-to-date
    • giving the book pages a new look so they’re easier to explore now I have so many books
    • adding 1st chapters and excerpts for all my books
    • updating book information where it’s needed in the book pages
  • Rebalancing my sales through eretailers:
    • joining Kobo directly (I currently publish to them through Smashwords) so I can use their author marketing tools
    • exploring options for marketing specifically to Apple and Barnes & Noble customers
    • fixing the gaps in my sales information, such as editorial reviews on Amazon
  • Optimising print distribution:
    • looking again at Ingram publishing, and other options for reaching bookstores and libraries
  •  Finding new ways of getting excerpts (and full stories) in front of readers
    • revisiting Books + Main and getting ‘bites’ of all my books up there, then figuring out how to get readers to go looking
    • starting to post excerpts on FaceBook again
    • continuing to post on Wattpad
    • exploring ways to use Instagram with taglines
    • reopening the YouTube channel I started, maybe for book teasers, maybe for discussions with friends — what would you watch?
  • Being strategic about advertising, by keeping data on what works and what doesn’t
    • trying more Facebook ads
    • making some video book teasers
    • learning more about Amazon ads and trying them out
    • investing in advertising through e-newsletters.

And, of course, the big unspoken. Continuing to write and publish.

Do you have any suggestions? I’d love to hear them.

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Authors in Bloom, and zucchini fritters

Dianne Venetta_AIB Logo_2015

PROMOTION IS OVER: CONGRATULATIONS TO THE WINNERS

My ebook special edition has been won by ELF. Thank you to all who entered.

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Welcome to my blog. I’m delighted to be an author in bloom, though down here in New Zealand, we’re sliding into Winter while you Northern hemispherites are busy preparing your Spring gardens.

But it is never too early to plan what to do with the harvest, and prizes are don’t have to wait for any particular season. Am I right?

 Zucchinis, courgettes, or as we call them when I fail to pick every day, marrows

There cannot be an easier or more prolific crop on the face of the planet. Plant, feed (they love manure and compost), and — whatever you do — don’t forget. Once they start to produce, you’ll need to pick daily, or one day you’ll come out and find a marrow the size of Africa smothering everything else in the garden.

We usually plant several different types: green torpedoes, yellow torpedoes, and both green and yellow patty-pan shaped. Picked little, they slice into salads. I also liked them fried with a breakfast of eggs and bacon, or cut into small cubes in a salsa. You can grate them for fritters whatever the size, but bigger is faster.

This year’s marvelous discovery was that grated zucchini freezes really well. Most of the liquid drains out of the zucchini while it is defrosting, making even better fritters than the fresh stuff. Yum!

Zucchini fritters — Paleo and auto-immune system friendly

Tips: weigh your zucchini before grating. It’s easier. Get out as much water from the zucchinis as you can. This is really important. If you don’t freeze the grated zucchini, salt it to draw the moisture, then twist it in a cloth. If you have time, leave it overnight in paper towel. Really squeeze the last drop out of it.

1 pound of zucchini, grated and drained (about 2 of medium size)
2 green onions, thinly sliced
/4 cup almond flour (or arrowroot or coconut if nuts are a problem)
1/4 cup of freshly grated parmesan (if you can take dairy)
2 eggs (if you can’t take eggs, try this gelatin substitute)
salt and pepper to taste
1 tsp lemon juice

Put everything in a bowl and mix.

Heat two tablespoons of your choice of cooking oil in a pan and wait for the pan to get super hot. When the oil is shimmering, add spoonfuls of the mixture and fry until golden brown, about two to three minutes each side.

Serve with sour cream and extra green onions. Or with eggs, mushrooms, and homemade hollandaise sauce. Or with spinach and salmon. Or with applesauce. Or any way you like, really. We make up huge bowls of these and use them often.

GIVEAWAY

Comment on this blog post and note in the Rafflecopter that you’ve done so. That’s all you need to do to be in the draw to win your choice of my prizewinner special edition ebooks, and answer the extra questions to be in the draw for an advance reader copy of The Realm of Silence, to be sent early in May.

a Rafflecopter giveaway

GRAND PRIZE

We are giving away a Kindle Fire or Nook (winner’s choice) along with a 2nd prize of $25 gift card to those who participate in the whole hop by visiting each and every spot and leaving a comment or email through the blog post or the giveaway.

Where to find out if you have won.

Winners will be posted on the first and last websites in the hop (Dianne Venetta and BloominThyme). I’ll also post my own winners here.

 

Hop along for more great tips, recipes, and giveaways