The Girl Who Cried "Publication!"

As I commented to fellow writer Carol McGrath on Twitter today, the only drawback to being a prolific author is that nobody pays any attention to your publications. New books come and go in a cricket-chirping wave of silence, where other less speedy novelists receive dozens of congratulatory messages and support with launching as soon as a new book hits the shelves.

As author problems go, it's a good one to have. And I fully understand this phenomenon. I too would hesitate to congratulate or support some Other Writer who appeared to have a new book out every five minutes, if only on the grounds that such prolificity is unfair and an affront to nature.

So I'm resigned to being ignored now on social media whenever a new book comes out, and entirely accept that I have become the girl Matilda in the apocryphal story, the tease who cried "Publication!" so often that, in the end, nobody bestirred themselves to click the link or even comment.

But a book is still a book is still a book.

And this one is WOLF BRIDE.

Debauchery and decadence at the court of Henry VIII form the backdrop to this arranged marriage between soldier Lord Wolf and Eloise Tyrell, lady-in-waiting to Anne Boleyn.

"Fifty Shades of Tudor Sex!" - The Sunday Times

Hilary Mantel meets Sylvia Day

Twitter hashtags: #WolfBride #feelupthebodies

Published August 29th 2013 by Hodder and Stoughton. Available in ebook edition now in the UK and Amazon US, paperback to follow in November.

First in the new Tudor series LUST IN THE TUDOR COURT.

Juicy and Tudorish: The Queen's Secret hits paperback

Buy me, buy me, buy me!!! Oh, I am so juicy and Tudorish.

Yes, it's official, my Tudor novel The Queen's Secret - which is NOT a romance, as some erroneously believe - is now on sale in the UK in paperback.

It's a spy thriller/adventure set against the backdrop of Queen Elizabeth I's visit to Kenilworth Castle in 1575, and also happens to be Book One in a trilogy about the life of one candidate for Shakespeare's "Dark Lady", black court entertainer Lucy Morgan.

For more on that, please see the book itself, which has an extensive Author's Note!

Anyway, 'tis the first fruits of my labour as historical novelist Victoria Lamb, and I urge all my regular readers to at least THINK about buying it. It's reduced to under a fiver on Kindle - and may drop lower - and could be as low as £3.99 when it hits larger branches of Asda and Tescos. Please support a poor poet by buying her prose.

Snort.

Deep in Revision Land

I was back in Caernarfon last week, a place I love to visit when writing. Walking out at dusk for some air, I spotted a couple of students making a number of paper hot air balloons and letting them go over the harbour.

A few moments after this shot, the hot air balloon caught fire and dropped gracefully into the water a few feet from the Harbour Master's building. He came out and stared down at this soggy pink mess in the water, then at us giggling on the other side of the harbour. At which point I made a hasty exit.

The day before that I was in the Welsh seaside resort of Llandudno, where I had an excellent cup of tea and bought Alan Hollinghurst's new paperback, The Stranger's Child. Needless to say, I have not even opened this very beautiful-looking book as I am still deep in revision land.

I have about 48 hours to complete revisions on my latest Victoria Lamb novel, provisionally entitled His Dark Lady, a Tudor four-hander which revolves around William Shakespeare's relationship with his "dark" mistress.

Researching Shakespeare in Stratford

I've been in this lovely cottage this week, researching Shakespeare's home life in Stratford upon Avon for the second book in my Tudor trilogy, written under the name Victoria Lamb.

I'm also writing that book at the same time and researching 'on the hoof', as it were, which is the best way to do it with such complicated historicals. It may seem easier to do all the research beforehand and then start writing. But that tends to make people research the spirit out of a book, procrastinate endlessly - just one more trip to the library! - and never begin the writing itself.

It's also a massively inefficient method for a novelist.

This is because you never know precisely what detail you may need until you start writing a scene and hit a snag - what soap would a Tudor lady have used in her bath? (Castille scented soap); how old was Kit Marlowe in the summer of 1586? (he was 22 that year) - at which point you would turn naturally to a book at your elbow or the internet. So I'm both researching and writing this week.  

Although I love being here in Stratford upon Avon, with its quaint narrow streets and distinctive black and white half-timbered houses, my favourite topics for research so far have been the Tudor spy network and the brave new world of London theatres. The theatre in particular is a fascinating area for research, being a popular entertainment that was just beginning to expand in the late 1580s, though still dogged by plagues, repressive laws, and a dearth of good writers.

His Dark Lady - the second book in my Victoria Lamb Tudor trilogy - is due on my editor's desk on October 1st.

There's still quite a mountain to climb, even with the help of this stay in Stratford. Will I make it?

You can also follow my Tudor-writing progress on Twitter, where I am @VictoriaLamb1

SOLD! My Tudor Witch series is acquired by Random House Children's Books.

It's been a fantastic, fast-moving day here. My agent phoned at around lunchtime to say that a publishing deal was on the table for my Tudor Witch Young Adult series. I discussed the finer details with him, hung up, and tried not to get too excited about the whole thing - though of course I was!

I tinkered with one of my manuscripts and answered a few emails, tidied my desk, sauntered out for a coffee, occasionally glanced at my inbox.

Then I got the very exciting call I'd been waiting for from my agent.

Random House Children's Books have acquired the first book, WITCHSTRUCK, and the next two books in the series. The series should launch next summer under the name Victoria Lamb, a few months after the publication of my first adult Tudor novel, THE QUEEN'S SECRET, with Transworld, also part of the Random House Group.

I'm hugely pleased and want to thank everyone who's been so supportive of my efforts on Facebook and Twitter and here on Raw Light over the past year. I know it can get confusing when I keep posting under different names, and people have been very patient and understanding about that.

I'm really looking forward to meeting the team at RHCB now. Which I shall do later this summer. And I expect a Victoria Lamb website and blog will be launching in the autumn.

To quote one of my favourite films, Almost Famous, "It's all happening!"

On the Road Again

In North Wales tonight, in a slightly chilly waterfront hotel, poring over the latest revisions to my novel. The deadline is next Monday, and I'm almost there with the book.

Plenty of fiddly little things to attend to though before I hand over the final draft to be copy-edited. Assuming my editor doesn't ask for further changes once she's seen how I've handled her original requests, that is.

Yesterday, I gave a lively workshop on novel-writing and took ten pitches for Embrace Books at the annual Get Writing Conference at the University of Hertfordshire. Some of the pitchers went away disgruntled, having been informed that their novels were neither romance nor historical women's fiction, and therefore wouldn't fit our lines. I was later described as 'the Simon Cowell of romance writing'. Some people are so touchy ...

Met some marvellous people at Get Writing 2011 - readers, writers, editors, agents, buyers - including John Jarrold, Scott Pack, Matt Bates, the inimitable Raymond Tallis, and of course our own Jonathan Pinnock, soon to be launching 'Mrs Darcy Versus the Aliens' with Proxima Books (Salt).

Tomorrow, I am giving an interview at Bangor University, followed by a poetry reading in the evening, in connection with their Creative Writing courses. I shall read from my latest book of poetry Camper Van Blues, plus one or two poems from earlier books if there's time.

The rest of this half-term week will be spent between the Midlands and the deepest, darkest reaches of rural Cornwall, where relatives will be visited and children entertained.

Then I've arranged a two-night stay at a hotel near where I live, in order to polish off the last revisions, read through the whole manuscript, and prepare my Author's Note and Acknowledgements. There may be some head-beating against the wall involved if I don't manage to tidy up my revisions before that weekend. Because Monday will be too late to change my mind about them. 

Roll on, the ides of March. By then, I plan to have started my next novel.

Dabs with the Language Sander

Revisions on my Tudor novel are almost done. I mention this because I've been blogging mainly about poetry in recent months, yet I seem to have spent most of that time writing - or fiddling about with - prose.

It's always been a secret thought with me that prose rhythms are akin to poetry, or ought to be. Certainly I take my time over sentences that don't sound 'right' to me in their context, whatever that may be.

A good sentence should flow, should be both elegant and fit for purpose - by which I mean it should communicate whatever the writer needed it to communicate, which might be nothing or everything, or any point in between.

Clumsy writing is the last thing I want to find when looking back over what I've written.

Unfortunately, it's almost unavoidable in early drafts.

This is how it happens. You need to present a thought or a situation or a mood, and the words don't want to come, but you don't have time to coax them. You're a professional writer, you have deadlines, you have bills to pay. So you bodge it. You write what is needful and make a mental note to return later - preferably after dark when no one but the night watchman's cat is there to witness your shame - and rewrite the damn thing so that it says what is needful without leaving mental splinters in your reader's head.

That's one part of the revision process. Sanding off the rough edges.

A less pleasurable part of revision is having to rejig characters who now have beards, or no longer have beards, or whose motivation is entirely changed, or who must now swim the moat instead of swinging across it with the help of trailing creepers.

I'm joking, of course. But when you change even one detail, you quickly realise that nothing happens in isolation. Everything in the novel is interconnected. This is where we get our word 'text' from, a marvellously hard-working word which is related to 'textile' and the idea of weaving.

So once you decide, at the revision stage, that a minor change needs to happen, you also need to find places where a knock-on effect will occur following that change, and to make sure everything remains consistent within the world of your novel. Once you have six or seven 'minor' changes like this to make, the process of scouring the book for places where further changes need to happen becomes quite time-consuming and fiddly.

And meanwhile, you can't help little dabs with the language sander ...

But the hardest work is more or less over. I have one key scene to entirely rewrite, and maybe a short chapter to add early on, and the rest is about style.

Then I have the next book to begin.

Happy Birthday: Sold!

Yesterday was my birthday, which made it doubly exciting not only to travel down to London for the RNA Winter Party, but also to be called by my literary agent in the morning, quite out of the blue, and told that a potential deal was on the table for the huge Tudor historical I've been writing most of the year. Transworld had only received the full manuscript a couple of weeks before, so I hadn't been expecting such a rapid response.

An astonishing phone call. And what followed was my most memorable birthday ever!

Ten minutes after our little group of novelists was due to leave our Waterstones Picadilly pre-party 'tweet-up' and move on to the winter party proper, my mobile went. I dashed off to answer it somewhere quiet, and returned glowing, to let the others know my book had sold, as part of a three book deal, to Transworld for a very generous six figure sum.

Still processing that information here. It's so exciting and such a marvellous birthday present.

Though, perhaps needless to say, my youngest kids are all busy drawing up their hurriedly revised Christmas lists.

Longhand v. Keyboard

Working on this Tudor novel, which is longer than anything I've written since an unpublished psychological thriller I grew, almost under laboratory conditions, in the early noughties, I've been returning to earlier ways of generating inspiration.

In other words, I've started writing new sections longhand, and then transferring them to the computer later in the day. I also rather cunningly expand and revise as I type up, so that 500 words by hand develops into 1000 on screen.

This seems an ideal solution to keeping up the daily word count, which does feel inexorable at times, especially since I occasionally become inexplicably blocked at the sight of my laptop. Association of object with activity.

It just seems nice and undemanding, kind of old-fashioned, writing a few carefully-chosen words by hand into a notebook. Those then grow, line by line, into paragraphs, and then pages ...

I couldn't write the whole book like this, of course. It would probably kill me, and take over a year to do so. Let's face it, I can type much faster than I can write longhand. Legibly, at least. But when it's cold and damp outside, as it is today, and I can curl up on the sofa with a notebook and ink pen, there's a Virginia Woolf feel to the process of writing a novel.

Shh, if you listen carefully, you can hear the birds singing in Greek.

The grim beauty of a deadline

I was chastened to see how long it's been since my last blog post. Many thanks to writer Talli Roland for leaving a comment on my last entry and reminding me that people do actually read this blog.

It's been an astonishing summer, work-wise. Things have just blossomed and ballooned, on a number of fronts. That's partly why this blog has been so silent, as I've been trying to spend some quality time with my three youngest children over their summer holidays at the same time as getting up to speed on some rapid developments in my career as a writer and editor.

I'll confine my comments today to my novel, since that's the least complicated situation. It's a long Tudor historical, set in 1575, and features Elizabeth 1st as a point-of-view character. Though the novel is not actually about the queen, per se. It's about one of her court entertainers. More I am reluctant to say at this stage. But the book is just over halfway through, and I've agreed to finish it by the end of the first week in October.

That's a tall order. We're talking roughly 60,000 words in just over 4 weeks. But it's not an impossible task. I need to knuckle down to a serious daily word count, improve my time management, and say 'No, thanks' to nearly all offers of other work.

What's brilliant in all this is that I'm up against it so severely, and have so many other things revolving about in my head whilst writing, that I am very unlikely to suffer from 'can't finish it' syndrome. That tends to strike when you have nothing else but the novel to consume you, and it's so large in the window the thought of waking up one day to an empty view begins to terrify you.

So you put off finishing for as long as possible, and keep polishing instead, or making 'necessary' changes, or suddenly get absorbed in some other non-writing activity that takes you away from the keyboard, or obsess about other, far better stories you could be writing.

Thank goodness for deadlines, that's what I say. The sine qua non of novel writing.

Embrace Books

For those who don't know, I recently accepted an invitation to edit Embrace Books, a new digital romance line coming out of Salt Publishing in the UK.

While I wait for the website to be ready, I've launched an Embrace Books blog so that prospective writers can find the necessary guidelines and details of how to submit work.

I'll be keeping that side of my career separate from my writing, so don't expect many posts here about my work as an editor.

Indeed, I write this surrounded by research materials, reference books, my thesaurus, and a rough handwritten draft of my latest chapter. Yes, the great Tudor novel continues to grow apace.

"Didn't we have a luverly time the day we went to Bangor?"

Off to Bangor in North Wales this afternoon, to pick up my second eldest from university ... along with all her bags and general rubbish.

It's a long trip, but I shall be driving along with several happy thoughts in my mind:

• How I'm going to open the next intrigue-ridden chapter in my historical Tudor novel

• That I now have a most excellent literary agent to represent me in fiction.
  

We were in rainy Folkestone over the weekend, visiting my father and his sister's family down there in Kent. Tonight I'll be staying in a hotel near - hopefully sunny - Rhyl. On Friday and Saturday, Steve and I will be in Hayle for his daughter's birthday party, staying in a caravan near the sea, not many miles from Land's End.

That's three coastlines in one week. Not bad going, for someone who lives at the dead centre of England.