| Romy: | How did you become a writer and what made you want to write? |
| Kate: | I don’t remember a time when I wasn’t writing, or at least making up stories. My mother told me that when I was a small girl she found me telling stories to my two younger sisters. They were in their cots and I had a big encyclopaedia from which I was ‘reading’ the story of Drippy Droppy and Droopy the three little raindrops! Then I was always scribbling some story or other as I grew up. I wrote my first ‘book’ (all of 40 pages) when I was eleven – often writing it in secret in lessons in school. I also wrote a long romantic story about a rock star that my friends read in episodes like a serial. When I was at university and just after I had a few short stories published but it wasn’t until I became a stay at home mum to my son that I started seriously working towards publication. What made me want to? It’s a dream I’d always had. I had all these stories in my head and I wanted to get them down on paper at least. |
| Romy: | Why do you write romance? |
| Kate: | There are rational reasons and emotional reasons. When I was growing up, my mother had a friend (Marguerite Lees) who wrote romances for Mills & Boon. She was the only published author I knew and she was one of the very few people who encouraged me by telling me that I could write and I should try for it. She had brought up two children as a single mother by writing and I thought she was a wonderful example. Also, when I looked back at all my childhood writings, specially the rock star ‘serial’ I realised that what I most loved writing about was the emotional stories of my characters, the male-female relationships and their romances. Even the ‘book’ I’d written at 11 had a dark, moody, ambiguous ‘hero’ in it - even if he was only 14! I loved reading romantic fiction too though I hadn’t read the concentrated form of romance that is the category romance of Mills & Boon apart from the ones my mother’s friend had written. I picked one up out of interest and loved what I was reading. With the memory of Mrs Lees in my mind, I thought I could try this sort of writing while I was at home with a small child. But when I started to try and write romance – which meant reading lots of the books – I came to love the genre and the format of what Charlotte Lamb used to call ‘these complicated little books’, I started out trying to write romances as an experiment and ended up staying with them because I love them. |
| Romy: | How did you come up with the concept for The Good Greek Wife? |
| Kate: | My editor rang me up with the idea they had had for a mini series. ‘It’s a bit different,’ she said, ‘. . .a bit of a challenge.’ |
| Romy: | How long did it take you to write the first draft of this particular novel? |
| Kate: | Well, my editor needed the book in a strict timetable to fit with the publication schedule they had planned. I had originally been meaning to work on a different story so that had to be shelved and I needed to concentrate on A Good Greek Wife? From start to finish it will have been around four months, with some revisions, which I had to turn round in two weeks to make sure we hit the publication date. |
| Romy: | How long did it take from completion of the first draft to hitting the shelves? |
| Kate: | Hmm - checking my emails, I see that the book was accepted on 17th November 2009 – so that’s – what ? – about 8 months. |
| Romy: | Did you experience much rejection before selling your first novel? |
| Kate: | I had some rejection. I think most authors do. But I was lucky - I just had two books rejected before my first one was bought. I wrote my first attempt before I’d read many romances so I’m not surprised it was rejected. It was pretty bad. My second book earned me a personal rejection letter. It was actually from a Senior Editor which meant that the book had been passed to her . I didn’t realise at the time that this was a real compliment and meant I was getting closer to acceptance. I just saw it as a rejection. But in the letter she did say to ‘try again’ – so I did! And the next book was The Chalk Line which was accepted. |
| Romy: | Tell us about The Call (your first sale). |
| Kate: | As I said, I’d tried writing a couple of books and had them rejected. Now I’d been asked to try again and I needed a new story. I didn’t have an idea. But then I got a dose of flu and a temperature of 102 – and I had a great idea about a couple having to share a house – a bungalow – and dividing it in half by putting a line – a chalk line down the middle of it. |
| Romy: | What was the easiest part of writing this novel for you? |
| Kate: | Well, when I was writing The Good Greek Wife? it was a challenge and made easier by the fact that I was modernising a Greek myth. The story was there but a lot of it didn’t fit. So the easiest bit was knowing that my hero had been lost at sea and had now come home, with all the drama and confusion that unexpected return had created. It was exciting creating the moments when my heroine met her husband again after two years of thinking he was dead. But then I didn’t have events like the Trojan war and the giants and nymphs etc who had kept the original Odysseus from returning home so I had to think of very different answers for those. |
| Romy: | What do you struggle most with when writing? |
| Kate: | I always write long. When I first started writing romance, the word length was 55-60,000, now it tends to need to be closer to 50,000, so I’m always having to struggle to fit in everything I want to put into the story as I’m getting so very close to the end. Personally, I think it gives the reader a fuller story, but the word limits are pretty set. |
| Romy: | How important is research to you? |
| Kate: | If there is something that I need to make sure that it’s accurate then research is vital. I would hate to get facts wrong or mislead someone over the truth. For example, I recently wrote a book about a heroine who has suffered with post-natal psychosis. Not just depression but the full-scale illness. I had some experience of PND, but I wanted to make sure that this was really right. I didn’t want to write the book unless I could show something of the truth about the condition. So I researched that a lot, reading books about it and talking to people about their experiences. I was thrilled to find that when the book (Kept for Her Baby) came out I received a lot of emails from women who had suffered with this problem and a couple of health professionals too. They told me that I had got the facts and the details right and as a result my book had touched them, brought them to tears - and in some cases helped them to feel that they were not alone. That was a wonderful reaction and I was so happy with the response this book has had. |
| Romy: | What did you learn while writing The Good Greek Wife that will always stay with you? |
| Kate: | Writing The Good Greek Wife? meant that I needed to do a little bit of research as well. My hero, Zarek, is lost at sea at the opening of the book. What has happened to him is that his boat has actually been attacked by pirates and he has been kidnapped. I thought of that idea after reading some reports of pirates around Africa etc. It seemed unexpected that piracy was actually so common in the 21st century but the more I researched it, the more I realised that it was happening a lot. And that was pretty scary. |
| Romy: | Who or what has been your inspiration along the way? |
| Kate: | Well, I’ve talked about my mother’s friend Marguerite Lees. She was someone who showed me that earning your living as a writer could be done. My mother was always an inspiration because she brought up five daughters as a single mother and went back to college as a mature student, earned her teaching qualifications and then held down a headmistress job a degree while coping with everything else. |
| Romy: | What advice do you have for aspiring writers? (Okay, I know the answer to this one: read the 12 Point Guide!) |
| Kate: | Treat the romance genre seriously – many authors (some of them very well known) have tried to write romance cynically to make a fast buck and that always shows. Romance needs to be written from the heart. And finally, my advice to anyone who wants to be published anywhere – read, read, read . . . read the current output of any publisher you want to aim your book at, see the sort of thing they are currently publishing and then try to bring your own particular voice, your own twist to the tried and tested. You will find it really, perhaps impossible, to be truly original but you can be true to yourself and so truly authentic. |
| Romy: | What's next for you? |
| Kate: | Writing – I have a book that I’m writing as part of another mini series – this time Modernising some classics of English Literature. My book is based on Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte. And then . . . another book – but at the moment I have no idea what! And there’s a reprint of the 12 Point Guide coming up in autumn. |