Author Archives: Sophie

That Unfinished Book

e-reader stop micro-editingI’ve always imagined that most writers have that unfinished book in their files somewhere.

Often, I imagine, it would be one that came to a halt because of external circumstances. The day job gets frantic for three months and when you go back to the book you read the first chapter and think: who are these people? Yes, that happened to me.

Or you get ill. Or there is a sudden family crisis.

woman in grey blouse, long sleeves, hands on laptop keyboard

Image by Bartek Zakrzewski from Pixabay

Sometimes it is to do with the book itself — a publisher changes their mind, for instance. And yes, I have one or two of those. (One I was very glad to stop, to be honest. I’d really gone off the hero.)

I still have a 40K word file of a book I really liked. It was a sequel that the publisher decided, mid-creation, they didn’t want after all. Please could they have a romance  based on a (then) popular reality television show instead?

My reply was 1) ouch and 2) no.

Just Came to a Stop…

Dark walls with woman sitting on her heels and a single small lamp thinking the unfinished bookBut that unfinished book arose just as often because I came to a place in the story that I couldn’t get past. Sometimes several times and over many months. Even years.

Sadly, I have a whole cellar full of those.

Some were misconceived from the start. Mostly these are books I was trying to write to please an editor.

Nobody’s fault. In people-pleasing mode I would think, oh yes, that sounds fun. Then, when it was just me, the characters and the laptop, I couldn’t do it. The life had been breathed into them by the editor alone.

I’m really glad to leave those in the vault.

…but It Won’t Leave Me Alone

round dial showing the pressure in a section of machinery

Image by InspiredImages from Pixabay

And then there is that unfinished book that just won’t let go.

You can ignore its multiple files on your computer. You can bury the dog-eared, well-thumbed notebooks. and the box files of research. All that will do is increase the pressure on you to get it out and look at it again.

As many of my friends know, I’m editing one of those at the moment. I’m really glad to be doing it. Every treasured but unnecessary scene that I send to the cutting room floor, I cheer. I SO want the book off my desk and onto somebody else’s.

young woman in open necked shirt, with plait over right shoulder and crossed arms, looking annoyed

Image by Robin Higgins from Pixabay

But even so, my constant companion the evil Perfection Prefect keeps pulling me back. The closer I get to the end, the more I a) slow down and b) panic.

Fortunately I have friends urging me on. Constantly. Some of them have even threatened reprisals if I don’t damn well get it done this time. Bless their pointed little heads. I really believe they’re going to get me through it, this time

Is it Just Me?

Unfinished book, Jane Austen's portraitI’ve beaten myself up about this a lot. Even though I knew I wasn’t alone. Jane Austen had at least two books waiting to be finished when she died. But I did think my failure to finish set me pretty much out on my own.

Only then I read this piece by Jennifer Crusie, one of my all time favourite writers. She’s sharp, thoughtful, funny and warm – and she writes like a dream. Her Welcome To Temptation has stayed in my top 5 ever since I first read it, umpty-um years ago.

And yet here was Jenny Crusie owning up to exactly the same thing. And she has a brilliant solution. She’s co-written novels with Bob Mayer in the past. They do His and Hers chapters, turn and turnabout, and it works like a dream. So ‘in 2022 she turned to Bob Mayer and said, “For the love of God, get me to the end of a book.”’

The first book of that life-saving collaboration is Lavender’s BlueIt’s out now and on my Kindle.

At three chapters in, it’s a cracker.

And there are at least two more to come.

And my optimism about my own possible recovery has just doubled in strength. If you’ve ever suffered from the same thing, here’s hoping it does the same for you!

Sophie Weston AuthorSophie

Writer’s Loop and needing to break out

exploding ideas instead of writer's blockI’ve called this blog Writer’s Loop because that’s what I’ve been thinking about this week.

It’s a bit like being a mad inventor. You sort of know what you want to do, need to do, are desperate to have done and left behind…

But somehow you can’t stop tinkering. Try one more experiment, one more plot twist or character revelation. And a bit of you has started to believe you will never stop. Continue reading

Pen Names

Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about pen names. An aspiring writer (friend of a friend) sought my advice on whether she needed one. She knew that most of my books had been published under a pen name. Indeed, I use it on this website. Understandably, she asked why.

I could only answer part of the question. I’m Sophie Weston on this website because, after fiftyish novels and 11 million+ copies sold, mostly by Harlequin Mills & Boon, that is how readers know me.

Dirty Draft 1st bookBut taking a pen name was never my idea. And the only choice I got was to decide on a name.

I went for Sophie Weston mainly at my mother’s suggestion. We’d seen the movie of Tom Jones and she thought that Sophie, played by Susanna York, looked as a romantic novelist ought to look. Still makes me smile when I remember that conversation.

My agent told me that I had to have a pen name. She implied very strongly that the publisher required it.

Was she right? I can’t say, because I didn’t ask. Certainly most Mills and Boon authors about whom I know anything, including many friends, did and do have pen names.

Romance Author pen names

The late great Mary Burchell, President of the Romantic Novelists’ Association from 1966, was Ida Cook in real life. All the RNA’s papers of the time that I have seen use her pen name. When she died (in harness) very suddenly, there was an outpouring of genuine affection for her in the Newsletter. And every single one called her Mary. Continue reading

Popular Fiction of the Past

Edwardian man with stiff collar holding hands across a desk or table with Edwardian lady, leaning towards each other as if about to kiss.

Image by No-longer-here from Pixabay

Popular fiction of the past has fascinated me since I was a child.

This has certainly intensified since I helped put together the 50th Anniversary Memoir of the Romantic Novelists’ Association. And many of those I have read since have, indeed, been romantic.

But the itch to read over the shoulder of my forebears was already there. It covered just about every genre, too.

I had access to three sets of bookshelves when I was a child. My parents, marrying late, also united their reading matter.

Gone With The Wind First Edition coverMy father brought a complete set of Dickens, H G Wells and Wisden to the marriage; my mother a rather wider selection, including Gone With the Wind and golden age mysteries. The extended family offered encyclopaedias, a lot of household tips (which I loved) and gloomily improving childhood literature, like The Water Babies, which I detested. Continue reading

Daily Word Count

Successful writer, murder your darlingsI began taking a daily word count after I sold my first book and was working on its successor. It was – and is – one of the easiest ways to calculate my progress, especially if I’m writing with Word or Pages. Oh, the joy of hitting my target and then overshooting!

But it is also a bit of a blunt instrument. It’s all too easy to use it to beat yourself up. And there are other risks attached, too.

There is more to writing a novel than volume of wordage, after all. A book needs a beginning, a middle and an end. Above all it needs a point. If you lose sight of that, watching the words pile up gives you an entirely false picture of your progress.

Unexpected Risk of a Daily Word Count

Writing Energy exhaustedConfession time here. This is something I did myself, when I was in my first few years of writing for Harlequin Mills and Boon. I was on my fourth or fifth story and thought I’d got the process sussed. I’d recovered from the illness which set me off writing so hard in the first place and I had a full time job.

I had moved into a flat that was pretty much next door to St  James’s Park Underground Station. On a bad morning-after-the-night-before, it was pillow to desk in 35 minutes.

So there I was, writing my books in a regular early morning slot before I left for work. A standard contemporary Harlequin Mills and Boon was a maximum of 55,000 words. My plotting had improved immensely with editorial guidance, as my then agent had prophesied. I turned in Book No Whatever at 54,500 words on the nose and skipped along to meet my lovely editor, positive that I was on roll.

Um. No. Continue reading

Novelist, Ornithologist and War

This blog is about the unexpected confluence of three crucial strands of my life: a novelist, an ornithologist and War.

It is in one way, pure serendipity. In another it feels as if it has been waiting for me for a long time. It is sobering, yet at the same time it has brought me deep joy. The latter in particular is not at all easy, in this time of terrible news at home and abroad and I am sincerely grateful for it.

And to me it feels like a sign that I am, creatively speaking, in the right place and will find a good path.

See if you agree with me.

An Ornithologist Starts It

The triangle started to come together on 6th June. I was horrified by the wilful destruction of the Nova Kharkova Dam in Ukraine, a short sighted brutality that has caused not only great human suffering but is an ecological atrocity that will run and run.

To divert me, a friend I was visiting pointed out a robin visiting his garden. The bird seemed to have a twig in its beak.

So OK, I couldn’t just sit there for ever, radiating despair over the human condition. I aimed for a sensible question: wasn’t it a bit late for nest building?

robin

We began to talk robins. And pretty soon my host was bringing out a small, slightly worn hardback book. It had a plain parchment coloured cover with a crimson rectangle on the front bearing the title and author’s name: The Life of the Robin by David Lack. It was published in 1943 by H F and G Witherby and cost 7/6.

“It’s wonderful,” he said, patting the little book like an old friend. “Still stands up brilliantly. And it’s very readable, too. Fantastic that the publishers were allowed the paper to print it in wartime.”

I got the message. Civilisation will creep through the cracks, even in wartime. I really did begin to feel a little better. So who was he, this inspiriting author I’d never heard of? Continue reading

Joan Hessayon New Writers Award

reader chemistry by the fireThis time last year, my diary tells me, I was reading The Bookseller and saw the writers listed for the Joan Hessayon New Writers’ Award. It gave me a warm glow then. It still does, remembering.

That warm glow is one of those really solid jobs, like thinking about Christmas. It has a lot of history, some of it personal. Well, quite a lot of it personal, actually. And it includes people crying with happiness, a huge amount of generosity and some seriously good parties.

The list for this year’s Joan Hessayon contenders is due to be published on 20th June. So I thought I would try to share some of the history and a little of the glow this week.

RNA New Writers’ Scheme 1960 style

Continue reading

Chelsea and its Flower Show

Mary Poppins arriving with open umbrella and Gladstone bag constructed of dark blue flower heads, with a bush of pale orange and cream flowers filling the bag and almost the same size.Chelsea in Bloom 2023

Mary Poppins, Royal Avenue, Chelsea

Last week was the Chelsea Flower Show. I aIways beam at the enthusiastic visitors who pour down the King’s Road on their way to the Show. (Love a good enthusiast!) But somehow this year the excitement has seemed a bit muted.

Normally the Flower Show People — you can tell them by the floral outfits, exciting hats and sensible shoes for hours of walking — are a pretty cheery bunch, even in the pouring rain. This time, the worst excess of the weather has been no more than overcast. But too many of the visitors have looked harassed.

It made me really grateful for the display at the end of Royal Avenue: a Mary Poppins of indigo flowers, Gladstone bag in hand, flying in to save the Mr Banks in all of us. Her author, P L Travers (her blue plaque currently obscured by builder’s fencing), lived two streets away in Smith Street,

Chelsea in Bloom

Carousel ponies among flowers in the Mary Poppins floral display, Chelsea 2023Mary Poppins, together with her accompanying carousel ponies, are entries in a floral street art competition, supported by the Cadogan Estate, in conjunction with the Royal Horticultural Society. Since 2006, it has become a traditional companion celebration to the Chelsea Flower Show itself. Continue reading

Year of RomCom?

Rosie M Banks, sexual frankness2023 is turning out to be the year of the RomCom movie. This has come as a surprise to me. But I heard it on BBC Radio4, Woman’s Hourand it certainly sounds about right. Their researchers know of 36 new RomComs scheduled for release this year. (The clip starts 27 minutes in, if you’re as interested as I am.)

It started me thinking about romantic stories in general. And wondering — could the same be true of books? Continue reading

Romantic Fiction Rocks! But Respect?

Busy fizzRomantic fiction rocks, judging by the enthusiastic turn out at this year’s Romantic Novelists’ Association Awards. Roars of delight, from the home team (publishers, friends, fellow writers-in-the-genre) greeted every winner’s name. Celebration was definitely the key word of the night.

Romance even made it into The Economist last week, (11th March 2023, p23). Although I have a couple of issues with the piece, it’s mostly good news. They report that sales of romance and saga fiction in Britain have risen by 110% in three years, to £53mn annually, their highest figure for a decade, according to Nielsen BookData.

Regency reading woman

print courtesy of 2023 Award Winner Louise Allen

Publishers, they say, “are starting to take notice.”

Well, some of them were cheering their lungs out the Monday before this article was published (see above) so that’s fair enough far as it goes.

Only – call me picky if you will – but even in my experience, they’ve been doing that for a good twenty-five years before the pandemic shut down the RNA annual thrash. Started to take notice? Continue reading