Planning Book 15

 

I know Books 12-14 haven't been published yet, but I'm now planning Book 15. This is quite a few book projects to be juggling, but Book 14 - Beginner's Guide Book 3 - is away to be edited and I'll be writing Book 15 as part of Nanowrimo2021 so want to use this little window to plot.

Book 15 is a follow-up of Book 12. I finished the book and was really sad to be leaving the characters behind, but I realised there was potential for more. I'm so happy to be back in Cleo's world, and back in Clifton-on-Sea (which is also the setting of The Little Bed & Breakfast by the Sea and The Single Mums' Picnic Club).

I've already updated the character sheets I created before writing the first book in the series, and I've created a few more for some new characters I'm going to meet. Getting to know my characters before I start to write is important to me, even if it's just a few lines that I'll add to as the book progresses. I'll definitely know my characters more by the end of the first draft, but I like to know a bit about them at the beginning.

The Five-Point Pitch

I've also started to update my Pinterest boards for the book, where I've been pinning articles and images to help with characterisation and the storyline, so now it's time to move onto the next stage of my planning: the five point pitch (I wrote a blog post about the five point pitch method I use here). I'll then expand the short pitch into a bullet point plot and finally create a three-act structure for the novel.

Read My Books For FREE with Kindle Unlimited

If you're a Kindle Unlimited subscriber, you can read six of my books for free at the moment:

Be careful what you wish for...

Ally Richmond is dreading turning thirty and bidding farewell to her youth. And when her husband says he wants to start a family, she begins to panic.

Is this all that life has to offer from now on? Popping out babies and growing old gracefully? She wants a life crammed with glamour and spontaneous adventure, not one full of dirty nappies and night feeds.

When Ally makes a silly birthday wish for a new, exciting life, her wish is granted.

But when Ally is presented with the freedom and opportunities she craves, she soon realises this new life isn’t all it’s cracked up to be and that there really is no place like home. But can she find her way back - or is she stuck in this new reality forever?

Read Now

Ruth loves nothing more than curling up in front of the telly with a family-sized bar of chocolate. She doesn’t do diets and she certainly doesn’t do exercise. But all that changes when she’s invited to her school reunion.

Bullied at school for being overweight, Ruth’s first reaction is to rip the invitation into a million pieces. But then Ruth hatches a plan. She’ll lose the weight and arrive at the reunion looking gorgeous and glamorous, leaving her old classmates in awe. Especially her former crush, Zack O’Connell.

With the help of her friends and a new, unbelievably hot colleague, Ruth begins her transformation. With six months until the reunion, losing weight will be a piece of cake, right?

Read Now

Three women. Three weddings. But who will say I do – and who will say I don’t?

Ruth can’t quite believe she’s managed to snag The One but when he proposes, she can finally accept that she’s found her happily ever after. But when Ruth finds herself booking her dream church for just six weeks away, she starts to panic. You can’t plan a whole wedding at such short notice. Can you?

Trina has only just walked down the aisle, but she’s already starting to question whether they can make their marriage work. Will they survive the honeymoon period, or have they just made a very big – and very expensive – mistake?

Erin has somehow found herself agreeing to be a bridesmaid for the tackiest wedding known to man. With drunk hens, ridiculous outfits and a terrifying wedding planner, just what has Erin signed up for?

Read Now

Will you…date me?

Delilah James, singleton and smoothie-addict, has six months to find a date for her oldest friend’s wedding. Oh, and to prove to her ex, best man Ben, that she has totally moved on since he dumped her out-of-the-blue nine months, eight days and seventeen hours ago…

So, with her two BFFs playing Cupid, Delilah launches herself into the high-tech, fast-paced and frankly terrifying world of dating. Luckily there’s the hot new guy at work, Adam Sinclair, to practice her flirting on – even if, as a colleague, he’s strictly off-limits!

Yet time’s running out and date after disastrous date forces Delilah to tell a little white lie – and invent a fake boyfriend! But will her secret crush on Adam ruin everything? Does she even care about Ben anymore? And is it too late to untangle her web of lies and take a real date to the wedding…?

Read Now

One summer can change everything…

Mae has no time for men in her life! Local vet Alfie might be totally gorgeous but she’s far too busy looking after her young daughter and running her little bed & breakfast by the sea.

Willow is in the middle of building her dream home with her husband, Ethan, when disaster strikes. And with every month that passes she secretly worries that her happy ever after will never come true…

Melody only intended to stay in the bustling seaside town for a few days. But when she meets Hugo – the charming man in the ice cream van – she decides to stay a little longer.

It seems the little bed & breakfast is full of surprises!

Read Now

What if you could go back in time and fix the biggest mistake of your life?

Two years ago, Maisie’s best friend walked out of her life and she hasn’t heard from him since. When she wakes up in 1994, she naturally assumes she’s dreaming. But when she finds herself in the past again the next night and her actions in the dream alter her present-day life, she begins to wonder if she’s somehow hopping back in time. And if she is time-travelling, can she save her friendship with Jonas?

When Maisie is forced to relive Christmases of the past, will she face up to her mistakes, or make them all over again?

The 12 Christmases of You & Me is a magical tale of friendship, first loves, and learning to live in the present.

Read Now

If you read any of the books, I hope you enjoy them. And if you do, I'd love it if you could leave a review as every one really does help. Not only do reviews help other readers find books they'll enjoy, it also make writers very, very happy :)

Writing Tips: Daily Word Counts & Total Tallies

It feels great when you have a brilliant idea for a book and the words are flying onto the page.
But what happens when the motivation slips?

This always seems to happen at some point in any book I'm writing. No matter how enthusiastic I am in the beginning, no matter how much I love the story and the characters, I always seem to hit a brick wall. I not-so-affectionately refer to this as The Slump, and I've blogged about the horrible ickiness of wanting to write but not being able to over the years and offered some tips that I've found that worked to get me on the right track again, such as 15-minute bursts.

Another trick I use to keep me motivated is to jot down my daily word counts and the total word count after each writing session. Writing a whole book can feel daunting (I've published 11 books and I still find that blank page at the beginning terrifying, and I wonder how on earth I'm going to write 80,000+ words). Jotting the word counts down helps me to see that, no matter how badly I think I'm doing, even during The Slump, I am moving forward, bit by bit.

I make a note of my daily word count and total tallies in my week to view diary, next to my daily to-do lists, so I can see how much my book is growing by the end of each week. But you could make a checklist, or write your numbers on post-it notes (because who doesn't like a post-it note?) You could make a note on your phone or share it on social media... whatever works for you.

I use this method when I'm writing a first draft and then tweak it when it comes to editing by jotting down completed chapters each day and then the total number of chapters instead of the word count. And there's nothing more motivating than seeing that '1 completed chapter' edging its way up to '40 completed chapters' and then up to 'The End'.

Another Guide To Ruth: A Happy Draft

 

I've been attempting to write the third instalment in the Beginner's Guide series for a long time. I'd written five whole drafts previously, but I was never happy with them and I'd stopped working on the book while I concentrated on writing other books. And then, a few weeks ago, I was inspired to give it another go.

I'd been working on the paperback of the first in the series, A Beginner's Guide To Salad, and revisiting the characters made me want to get that third book right and continue with Ruth's story. So I started thinking about her and her friends and trying to work out why I wasn't happy with all those drafts and I realised it was because it felt forced. I was shoehorning stories in to fit the theme, changing the POV when it didn't and shoehorning those characters in to fit it instead. And it just wasn't working. But what if I changed the theme? Tweaked it a bit?

I went back to the very beginning and replotted the book with the new theme in mind. And it worked! It no longer felt forced. It felt natural, as though this is where the characters were supposed to be. And so I started Draft Six.

I've loved catching up with Ruth and her friends and finding out where they are now and what they're up to, and I'm so pleased with the draft I've just finished. Draft Six is The One. It isn't publishable - far from it - but it is the draft I'll be working on from now on. I won't be ditching it and starting again. This is it and I can't describe how relieved I am to finally have a draft I'm happy with after all this time.

I'll be diving straight back in to edit the book next week as I don't want to lose the momentum I've built up. I don't want to lose it and end up blogging about Draft Nineteen a few more years down the line...

A Quick Catch Up

It's been a couple of months since we've had a catch up. I'd love to hear what you've been up to - do let us know in the comments! Here's what I've been up to over the past few weeks...

I've been busy working on three different writing projects:

1. I released the paperback of A Beginner's Guide To Salad

2. I finished the second draft of Book 12

3. I re-plotted the third book in the Beginner's Guide series and started Draft 6 (!)

I'm really happy with Draft 6 of the Beginner's Guide Book 3 (thankfully!) and I'm inching towards The End.

I've read some brilliant books over the past few weeks:

If You Could See Me Now by Keris Stainton

The Escape by Clare Harvey

The Family Holiday by Elizabeth Noble

Perfect Ten by Jacqueline Ward

The Ice Cream Girls and All My Lies Are True by Dorothy Koomson

Would Like To Meet by Rachel Winters

I read and loved The Ice Cream Girls a few years ago, and I wanted to re-read it before I read the follow-up, All My Lies Are True.

I'm currently reading The Glittering Hour by Iona Grey.

Like millions of others, I've been watching Line of Duty, and I'm desperate to know what happened at the end of last week's episode! I also gobbled up Behind Her Eyes on Netflix, which I'd been looking forward to after LOVING the book.

I've also been watching the new BBC gameshow, I Can See Your Voice, which I thought would be absolute trash from the trailer but... I like it. It's fun, and we need a lot more fun in our lives right now.

I've also welcomed the return of Call The Midwife and The Great British Sewing Bee with open arms, and I've been catching up on some dramas I recorded recently: Finding Alice, McDonald & Dodds, Too Close, and had my heart broken by It's a Sin.

Books, birthdays, tea, gardening stuff and Luna.

You can find me on Instagram here

So that's what I've been up to lately, but what about you? What have you been reading or watching? And have you had your Covid jab? (I haven't yet, but fingers crossed it won't be too much longer)

Another Guide To Ruth: Five POVs

 

I'm writing the sixth draft of the third instalment of the Beginner's Guide series, and things are - finally - going well in a way that the previous drafts never did.

My Beginner's Guide books have three points-of-view: in A Beginner's Guide To Salad we had Ruth, Billy and Jared's POV, and in A Beginner's Guide To Saying I Do we had Ruth, Trina and Erin's POVs. I knew I was going to go with Ruth's POV again for Book 3 (how could I not?) but the other two presented a problem.

Over the five previous drafts, I wrote the book with the POVs of:

Ruth

Jared

Quinn

Nell

Theo

But it didn't feel right, and sometimes it even felt forced, like I was shoehorning characters into storylines to fit the theme. I didn't want to give up on the book, but it wasn't working. The book had been put aside for a long time, but I gave it another shot, and this time I seem to have hit on the right combination of POV with the right storylines and I'm now over halfway through Draft Six.

And which combo of POV did I go with?

*Drumroll*

I'll be honest, I was surprised by the Richard POV, but I'm loving writing his sections, mainly because we get to see more of his dad, Kelvin. If you've read the Beginner's Guide books, you'll know Kelvin isn't the most pleasant of men (he's horrible, in fact) but that makes him a lot of fun to write. I may have taken it too far though, because I found myself writing another scene with him wearing just his underpants. Sorry, I don't know what's wrong with me.

Another Guide To Ruth

There was always supposed to be a third instalment in the Beginner's Guide series; I'd even written the first draft of the book by the time A Beginner's Guide To Saying I Do was published. But I wasn't happy with the draft. I wasn't happy with the next one, or the one after that. And by the time I'd pushed Draft Five aside, I was thoroughly fed up. I knew Ruth's story wasn't finished yet, but I couldn't seem to get it right.

There were other books published during this time. Four of them, in fact. But I kept thinking about Ruth and the next stage of her life. And when I started working on the paperback of the first book, A Beginner's Guide To Salad, a few months ago, it reignited the need to explore Ruth's story.

There was something in those five drafts, so I started to pick through them, taking out the bits I was happy with, and even the bits I wasn't quite sure about but could tinker with. And I started to re-plot the book. There's always three POV in the full-length Beginner's Guide books, and I'd tried several combinations over the five drafts. But this time, during the re-plotting, I shifted the theme a little bit and something clicked. The three POV I'd been looking for were there. I'd already tried one of them before, but their story had felt forced, shoe-horned in to fit the theme. But now it was perfect!

The book has been re-plotted and I'm about halfway through Draft Six. And I'm loving being back in Ruth's world. I've known Ruth since 2013 so it really is like being reunited with an old friend. Draft Six won't be the final draft, but it will be the draft that I move forward with and work on until the book is ready to be published.