I asked fellow writer and author, Melanie Dent Lynchcliffe series, to do a guest post for the blog. you can find out more about her and her book later on in the post.
I started writing when I was quite young and my teachers always liked my style. I wrote poetry in my teens; teen angst and unrequited love sort of stuff. But I always wanted to write a book, I had several ideas over the years but nothing that captured my imagination enough to follow through with.
When my partner David died in 2008 I wrote a couple of poems trying to make sense of it.
I found myself thinking about cuckoos one day. The fact that a cuckoo chick is never raised by its own parents and thought about the number of kids who are raised by strangers because, for whatever reason their birth parents can't take care of them. The plot grew from there and the idea fitted a birth in the late Victorian era as childbirth related deaths were commonplace then.
I then developed the idea of a cross-class romance and the Titanic came to mind and that was it, I was off and I knew it would not fit in just one book as the series had potential.
I know it's a cliche but my characters have become good friends and I know them pretty well. I know why they are as they are, what makes them tick, what arouses or angers them and I share their triumphs, losses and disappointments.
I did not originally intend to write adult novels but they took an unexpected turn. I have no problem writing about sex. As I was dealing with adult themes such as rape, infidelity, illegitimacy and bereavement I thought I might as well take the adult angle. Lewis FRanklin is a man who falls passionately in love late in life. The whole series is essentially about love and passion.
I dedicated the first book to David's memory and I like to think he is proud of what I have achieved and how I have learnt to live without him.
Now 8 eBooks later I am planning to self-publish with Lulu and have approved 3 books for distribution. it's a case of watch this space from now on.
Links to her sites
http://lynchcliffe.wordpress.com/lynchcliffe-kindle-store/
http://lynchcliffe.wordpress.com/about/
http://www.facebook.com/pages/Lynchcliffe-Cuckoo-novels/310116522349057
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
My Reasons for Writing - Gerry McCullough
I asked my friend and fellow writer, Gerry McCullough, (author of her recent book Bellfast Girl, out now on Ebook and availible in paperback) to do a guest post. You can find out more about her and her books by clicking on the links at the end of this post.
I’ve been writing since I was 7 or 8. I’ve
always loved reading, and because of that, I’ve wanted to write the sort of
stuff I enjoy. So I began by copying my favourite writers, and did that for
years. It takes a while before your writing becomes actually original!
It’s hard to say what inspired me to write. I grew up in a home where everyone enjoyed reading – my mother, my father, and my three sisters. My older sister took to me to the library when I was 8, and arranged for me to join it. I became an ardent reader, and therefore a writer. At my primary school, it happened that I was put into a ‘house’ called Charlotte, after Charlotte Bronte, and the headmistress, in telling us about the various houses, said, ‘Not everyone in ‘Charlotte’ house will be a wonderful writer – but perhaps some of you will!’ That was a definite spark. I remember thinking, ‘Why shouldn’t I be one?’
I assumed, I suppose, that as soon as I had written a book, the first publisher I offered it to would snap it up. Wrong! I spent years being rejected – a very painful process, I have to say.
Then at last my book, Belfast Girls, was accepted and published by Night Publishing. I’ll always be grateful to Tim Roux for being the first publisher to accept me, after the long discouraging trek around all the major publishers which everyone from Charlotte Bronte to PG Wodehouse and JK Rowling has had. In addition, the group of writers I met through Night Publishing have supported me enormously. I value them highly –they are great people.
Currently I’ve just had my fourth book published – my third full-length novel. So far, there is Belfast Girls, published by Night Publishing, which I’m delighted to say has been doing really well, selling around 15,000 copies, and in the top 100 in overall ranking for over a month; followed by Danger Danger, another Irish romantic thriller, and an Irish short story collection, The Seanachie: Tales of Old Seamus. (Seanachie is the Irish for storyteller.)
When I had finished writing Danger Danger, my husband Raymond who was setting up his own publishing company, suggested that I give it to him to publish rather than to Tim Roux. Up until then, I had rejected the idea of self-publishing. I thought of it as vanity publishing, and needed the affirmation of being accepted by a ‘real’ publisher, a complete stranger.
However, times have changed. The coming of the eBook and Internet publishing has taken away the stigma from self-publishing. Moreover, I’d now been accepted by an actual publisher and my first book was doing well enough to reassure me. I decided to give Danger Danger to Raymond and since then his Publishing Company, Precious Oil Publications, has published and will publish all my books.
My fourth book is one I wrote years ago – the first I wrote when I myself was an adult. I’ve spent some time updating it for the modern world – it’s about a Belfast girl on holiday in Greece, and the things that happen to her – another Irish romantic thriller! The title is Angel in Flight. The heroine, Angel Murphy, is a feisty young Belfast girl who has been badly hurt and is getting her life back together, and proving to be strong, self-reliant and able to sort out the villains she comes across without waiting for a hero to help her.
21st century or what?
links for ebooks on Amazon.com and Amazon.uk (You can also get them in paperback.)
http://www.amazon.com/Belfast-Girls/dp/B008J4NISK
Danger
http://www.amazon.com/Danger-Gerry-McCullough/dp/0952578530
Seanachie Tales Old Seamus
http://www.amazon.com/Seanachie-Tales-Old-Seamus-ebook/dp/B006WVI37S
Angel Flight
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Angel-Flight-Murphy-thriller-ebook/dp/B0089PPV2K
http://www.amazon.com/Angel-Flight-Murphy-thriller-ebook/dp/B0089PPV2K
for more information about her:
www.gerrymccullough.com
http://www.facebook.com/gerrymcculloughirish
www.gerrysbooks.blogspot.com
Friday, July 13, 2012
What inspired you to start writing?
I had asked a few of my writer friends and fellow bloggers to give me a paragraph or two about what had inspired them to begin writing. Like always you'll get to see what inspired me to begin writing at the end of this post followed by an after thought.
Tricia Drammeh, The Claiming Words
Tricia Drammeh, The Claiming Words
My inspiration for writing comes from all around me: music, nature, a snippet of overheard conversation. But, I would have to say my biggest inspiration comes from other authors. I've read so many wonderful books over the years - books that made me laugh, cry, think, and dream. For years, I read everything I could get my hands on. The ingenuity and imagination these authors displayed never ceased to amaze me. The only thing more thrilling than holding a brand new book in my hands is the rush of joy I experience when I finish writing a novel, poem, or even a blog post.
Gerry McCullough, Belfast Girls (For the UK), Belfast Girls (For the US)
Why I started writing.
Do you know, I can’t even remember when I discovered that writing was something I loved to do? Since I first learned to read, I’ve tried to write as well. It just seems to have been a basic instinct, to try to do something which gave me such pleasure when others did it. I began by writing prose. I didn’t attempt to write poetry until I was in my teens, and then it was a very private process. But I wrote stories from early childhood, and made up plays for my friends and myself to act out as a regular game. At that time, I was happy to share what I’d written. Later I became very secretive about my prose writing, too, and would only show my stories to my close family. My poetry and my prose fulfill different creative needs. My poems come mainly from a desire to create beauty by putting words together. My stories exist because I have the urge to create characters and to write about their lives. But having said that, the distinction isn’t always so clear-cut. Some of my poems are about people; and I certainly want to use words to create effects in my prose as well as in my poetry.
Belfast Girls was my first full-length novel. I had written novels before – but this was the first published one, and it gave me a marvelous sense of achievement! Growing up, as I did, during the troubles, I was very aware that all over the world there was a very simplistic view of what was happening in Northern Ireland, i.e. people seemed to believe that all Catholics thought one thing, and all Protestants thought something else, and that all Catholics hated all Protestants and vice versa. I knew that wasn’t true. It was so much more complex than that. Many on both sides of the divide were horrified at what was happening and only wanted peace and reconciliation. I wanted to write something to show, without lecturing, that ordinary people in Northern Ireland had no problem with each other – it was just a small percentage who were fighting. By the time the book was finished, the troubles were over, so I rewrote it to reflect the same thing in the current climate. Of course, like any writer, I also just wanted to write a book, whatever it was about. And I wanted to create characters who had something of me in each of them, and write about them. Since then I’ve had two more books published and a collection of short stories.
Melanie Dent, http://lynchcliffe.wordpress.com/lynchcliffe-kindle-store/
I have been writing since childhood and had a few poems published over the years but I always wanted to write a novel.
The idea for the Lynchcliffe Cuckoo series came quite literally from nowhere and it is the first book idea I ever followed through on. I also used it to help me work through losing my partner, David, back in 2008. The series is dedicated to his memory.
Katrina Jack, Land of Midnight Days
What inspired me to write?
Believe it or not it wasn’t reading other authors work, but an old green covered diary. As a kid, I read all the usual children’s fiction available at the time, such as Enid Blyton, C .S Lewis and so forth. I always used to go to bed at night, my head filled with stories I’d made up. I would even enact some of them using my dolls and teddies. Then the fateful day arrived when I was inspired to put pen to paper for myself. I was about 14 at the time and someone gave me an old, leather bound diary, the type with blank pages. I didn’t have much of a social life at the time, so decided to put it to a different use and filled it with short stories and drawings. That was it, I was hooked and over the next few years graduated to full blown novels and I owe it all to that tatty old diary.
As for me, there was no set day or time that inspired me to start writing. Though there are times that gives me the inspiration to pick up my pen or in this case my computer and begin writing a book or short story. I'll get to this part later and as I have said there was never a set time or date that inspired me to start writing. I was sitting one day and I was terribly bored so I decided to pick up a pen and paper and started to write. I had no idea of what kind of plot I wanted or nothing, so i just began writing. This writing, I found, gave me something to do because it flowed easily and it seemed to take on a life of it's own. Thus began my writing of books and until recently, I did only as a hobby.
As for the times that give me the inspiration to write, they can be anywhere from going to bed to waking up in the morning. They also come to me when I'm watching a movie, reading a book, watching the news or just sitting and watching the leaves falling from a tree during the fall. It all depends on what I'm doing at the moment and they are few to many in between.
After thought: We've seen how each of us has come into writing. Whether it was for fun, started at an early age or for therapeutic reasons or just as a hobby. We all know one thing for sure, once we started writing, we found ourselves not being able to stop.
Happy writing everyone.
Gerry McCullough, Belfast Girls (For the UK), Belfast Girls (For the US)
Why I started writing.
Do you know, I can’t even remember when I discovered that writing was something I loved to do? Since I first learned to read, I’ve tried to write as well. It just seems to have been a basic instinct, to try to do something which gave me such pleasure when others did it. I began by writing prose. I didn’t attempt to write poetry until I was in my teens, and then it was a very private process. But I wrote stories from early childhood, and made up plays for my friends and myself to act out as a regular game. At that time, I was happy to share what I’d written. Later I became very secretive about my prose writing, too, and would only show my stories to my close family. My poetry and my prose fulfill different creative needs. My poems come mainly from a desire to create beauty by putting words together. My stories exist because I have the urge to create characters and to write about their lives. But having said that, the distinction isn’t always so clear-cut. Some of my poems are about people; and I certainly want to use words to create effects in my prose as well as in my poetry.
Belfast Girls was my first full-length novel. I had written novels before – but this was the first published one, and it gave me a marvelous sense of achievement! Growing up, as I did, during the troubles, I was very aware that all over the world there was a very simplistic view of what was happening in Northern Ireland, i.e. people seemed to believe that all Catholics thought one thing, and all Protestants thought something else, and that all Catholics hated all Protestants and vice versa. I knew that wasn’t true. It was so much more complex than that. Many on both sides of the divide were horrified at what was happening and only wanted peace and reconciliation. I wanted to write something to show, without lecturing, that ordinary people in Northern Ireland had no problem with each other – it was just a small percentage who were fighting. By the time the book was finished, the troubles were over, so I rewrote it to reflect the same thing in the current climate. Of course, like any writer, I also just wanted to write a book, whatever it was about. And I wanted to create characters who had something of me in each of them, and write about them. Since then I’ve had two more books published and a collection of short stories.
Melanie Dent, http://lynchcliffe.wordpress.com/lynchcliffe-kindle-store/
I have been writing since childhood and had a few poems published over the years but I always wanted to write a novel.
The idea for the Lynchcliffe Cuckoo series came quite literally from nowhere and it is the first book idea I ever followed through on. I also used it to help me work through losing my partner, David, back in 2008. The series is dedicated to his memory.
Katrina Jack, Land of Midnight Days
What inspired me to write?
Believe it or not it wasn’t reading other authors work, but an old green covered diary. As a kid, I read all the usual children’s fiction available at the time, such as Enid Blyton, C .S Lewis and so forth. I always used to go to bed at night, my head filled with stories I’d made up. I would even enact some of them using my dolls and teddies. Then the fateful day arrived when I was inspired to put pen to paper for myself. I was about 14 at the time and someone gave me an old, leather bound diary, the type with blank pages. I didn’t have much of a social life at the time, so decided to put it to a different use and filled it with short stories and drawings. That was it, I was hooked and over the next few years graduated to full blown novels and I owe it all to that tatty old diary.
As for me, there was no set day or time that inspired me to start writing. Though there are times that gives me the inspiration to pick up my pen or in this case my computer and begin writing a book or short story. I'll get to this part later and as I have said there was never a set time or date that inspired me to start writing. I was sitting one day and I was terribly bored so I decided to pick up a pen and paper and started to write. I had no idea of what kind of plot I wanted or nothing, so i just began writing. This writing, I found, gave me something to do because it flowed easily and it seemed to take on a life of it's own. Thus began my writing of books and until recently, I did only as a hobby.
As for the times that give me the inspiration to write, they can be anywhere from going to bed to waking up in the morning. They also come to me when I'm watching a movie, reading a book, watching the news or just sitting and watching the leaves falling from a tree during the fall. It all depends on what I'm doing at the moment and they are few to many in between.
After thought: We've seen how each of us has come into writing. Whether it was for fun, started at an early age or for therapeutic reasons or just as a hobby. We all know one thing for sure, once we started writing, we found ourselves not being able to stop.
Happy writing everyone.
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