A GLASS OF WINE AND THE RING OF TRUTH

UK author, Isobel Rey, is my guest today. I enjoy hearing how writers get ideas to write their stories. Isobel's started with a glass of red wine and telling tales from work. 

Her topic is on the glitzy and glamorous life of the rich and the powerful and how hard it can be for women to navigate the high octane business world. She says that any workplace that draws big money and people with big egos and ambition attracts partying, champagne, and bed hopping. But regardless of your place in the social strata, everyone wants the same things in life.

I love telling stories and I love listening to other people’s stories. So I guess it was inevitable that one day I’d end up writing.   I fell into this genre almost by accident. I was out with a friend one evening and she introduced me to a publisher friend of hers.   The three of us ended up having dinner and a lot of wine, and I mean a LOT of wine!   I was talking about some of the crazy worlds that I get a window into from my job and all the politics and sexual tension that go with them.   I work in advertising in London and I've worked with clients from all kinds of industries, some of them pretty glitzy and glamorous.  And what I've learned is, it doesn't matter who you are, what you do, where you are from, how much bling you wear or how much money you earn, everyone wants the same things in life and everyone worries about the same things.  

Several more glasses of wine into the conversation the publisher asked me to tell her some of the stories of the things I’d seen and heard.  Well the stories came tumbling out didn't they?!   There’s a scene in Substitute involving a one way mirror, three guys, two girls and a hidden audience,  and many people have asked me how I made that up, and they’re astonished when I explain that I didn't.  And no, before you ask, I wasn't there,  but the story was told to me by someone who was.   Even though the book is in the Erotic Romance genre, I think you still have to have a ring of truth in your stories!

I told the publisher how  hard  it can be for women to navigate the high octane worlds some of our advertising clients live in, when they are looking for love.  There are a lot of very good looking, charming guys out there, but they’re usually ambitious and ruthless and don’t want to get tied down. 

So the publisher encouraged me to try my hand at capturing one of these worlds in a novel.  I already had experience of writing advertising copy and I've been writing short stories for years but never done anything with them.   I wrote three sample chapters and she loved them.   So Isobel the novelist was born, almost overnight!   I can’t believe how lucky I am, I guess it was fate having dinner with her that night.

I was worried that I’d find the process difficult, but once I started writing I couldn't stop and the book almost wrote itself.    I’d sit down after work with a very large glass of red wine and start writing and then suddenly find it was 2 o’clock in the morning.   Alexia, my main character took over my life!   I went to work one morning hardly able to keep my eyes open, and my very sweet boss, Mary, asked me what I’d been doing all night, winking.  I said nothing, but Alexia has!   Mary still doesn't know what that means…….

Now I am planning my second novel,  and I've got quite a few ideas boiling away.    I've had a great response since the book was published in the UK and I’m really excited to know how readers the other side of the Atlantic will find it!   It’s set in London which can be a pretty amazing city to live in, fast and glitzy.  So let me know North American readers, I’d love to hear from you!   Right……..I’m off for a large glass of red wine……..

• Does where you work ever spawned incidents in your writing?
• As a reader, do you like stories that put you in a high octane world?

                                                                                                                                                  

She's driven by his desire...

It took all of Alexia's courage to leave her abusive boyfriend and strike out on her own. When she lands a job at a glamorous sports agency, she thinks she finally has it made. But shy, blonde and beautiful, Alexia is totally unprepared for the fast sexual politics of rich men and ambitious women that is waiting for her. Most of all, she is totally unprepared for her dazzling but damaged new boss, Nathan Fallon.

BUY: AMAZON, B&N, BAM, INDIEBOUND, INDIGO

"If you enjoyed Fifty Shades of Grey, you will enjoy this "

                                                                                                                                                   

Isobel Rey is a Cambridge graduate. After interning at a stage/film talent agency, Isobel now works at a London advertising agency. This is her debut novel. Originally from Surrey, Isobel lives in London with her partner and a one-eared rescue cat called Thumper.

WILD TURKEYS

My guest is award winning thriller-suspense-romance writer, Jo Robertson  She’s also a member of one my favorite groups, The Romance Bandits. 


Jo’s debut novel, THE WATCHER, won Romance Writers of America's 2006 Golden Heart Award for romantic suspense.

Jo is here to talk about wild turkeys…

Did your mind go straight to Wild Turkey Bourbon at the title of today's blog? Well, I'm not talking about that kind of wild turkey today. I'm talking about the feathered friend kind.

Sort of.

On the way to the dentist recently I nearly hit two wild turkeys with my car as they dashed across the street. The environmentalists in our town have done a good job of preserving creek and wooded areas, so I wasn't surprised to see the birds skitter across the four-lane road.

But seeing them me think about how writers are a bit like wild turkeys – they often stand out in crowds, mainly because their minds always seem to be somewhere else.

Writers think a lot. They think about thinking. It's called metacognition, and a writer metacognates all the time. If she did it in grade school, educators called her "easily distracted." In high school or college, she was "flighty," and in the work place, "unfocused."

In reality, writers are anything but distracted, flighty or unfocused. We wouldn't survive long in this industry if we were.

But we are free thinkers, letting our minds – conscious and subconscious alike – roam freely, snagging here and there on an idea, a phrase, a character, a scene, moving on , trolling deep waters or shallow pools. Hence, we may seem out of step with the people around us.

Our ideas and inspiration come from everywhere, skittering through our creative minds like those wild turkeys.

Photo Credit: Henry Zeman

Not only are we wild turkeys in our disparate ideas and stories, but we're like them in the venues we choose to publish through. We're all struggling to find a place in the publishing industry.

The truth is that the way we look at books, purchase them, and collect them is in the throes of significant change, and publishers of all kinds – the NY Big Six, small presses, e-publishers and digital first – are all scrambling to see what's going to happen to the book publishing industry.

It's not so much that digital publishing has increased significantly.  Electronic books still account for only about 15-20-% of the market, which leaves a good 80% to the print business. It's more how quickly digital publishing has increased – exponentially. And it's got everyone wondering what the future holds.

The one point all seem to agree on is we need writers! Writers of all kinds. Writers who think inside and outside the box, those who march in step with their fellow writers and those who march out of step to some weird meter in their heads.                                           

My journey into publishing began with the purchase of my Kindle in December. The moment I held that baby in my hands, I felt like I'd birthed another child. And I knew I'd never give it up. I also knew I'd never purchase another print book again unless it was a gift for someone without an e-reader or was unavailable electronically.

When I realized that the New York publishers weren't excited about my Golden Heart winning manuscript or my Daphne-winning story – too much romance, too little romance, not enough suspense, too much suspense, all of which I translated into "Where can we place your book on the shelf in the brick and mortar bookstore?" – I realized I needed to find a much bigger store.

A virtual bookstore. Digital publishing provides shelf upon shelf for the reader to pick among, and tons of tags, descriptors, and categories for them.

Deciding to take my career into my own hands, to move at my own pace, was a seminal moment for me. I like the control I have, choosing my own genres, setting my own pace.

Once I made the leap to indie publishing, I felt like one of those wild turkeys tripping across the road – free, but a wee bit scared I might get mowed down by a speeding car!

Now that The Watcher is in print and available soon electronically, I feel my wild turkey has come home to roost.

How about you, readers? What large or small decision have you made that felt wonderfully liberating or frighteningly scary? Share the deets.

Inquiring minds want to know!

The Watcher--Available now.

THE WATCHER Forensic psychiatrist Kate Myers believes the killer of two teenage girls in Bigler County, California, is the same man who savagely murdered her twin sister over fifteen years ago. Working on sheer tenacity, she sets out to prove it. Deputy Sheriff Ben Slater hides his personal pain behind the job, but Kate's arrival knocks his world on its axis. He wants to believe her wild theory, but the idea of a serial killer with this pathology is bizarre. Together they work to find a killer whose roots began in a small town in Bigler County, but whose violence spread across the nation. A Janus-like killer, more monster than man, fixates on Kate and wants nothing more than to kill her again. Excerpt

BUY: Available in print on Amazon  Available as e-book, August 19th. 

Like many writers, I penned my first story at a young age.  However, a family and a teaching career put my writing dreams on hold until my Advanced Placement seniors conned me into writing my first complete manuscript.  That story, which subsequently won RWA's Golden Heart Award in 2006, was THE WATCHER.

From the moment I put my fingers to the keyboard, the
barrier between my brain and the paper lifted, the story flew from my mind, and I fell in love with everything about the process of writing.

Raised as an Army brat, I lived in Germany as a child, Northern Virginia, Oklahoma, Kentucky, Idaho, and Utah before finally settling in Northern California.  Whenever I visit my sister in Virginia or my brothers in North Carolina and Florida, upon returning home I remember again why I love Northern California, home of the ancient redwoods, the fecund forests and the rugged Pacific Coastline.

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