Tag: guest post

Blog Tour/Guest Post: Coming Home to Holly Close Farm by Julie Houston

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I’m delighted to be co-hosting today’s stop on the blog tour for Coming Home to Holly Close Farm by Julie Houston, alongside my tour buddy, Rachel at Rachel Bustin. Coming Home to Holly Close Farm was published by Aria on 5th February 2019 and is described as ‘addictive, heart-warming and laugh-out-loud funny’ and perfect for fans of Katie Fforde and Jill Mansell.

If you’ve ever wondered about how authors go about creating characters, then Julie’s guest post entitled ‘Creating, moulding and watching your characters grow’ will tell you everything you need to know.

Check out the tour poster at the bottom of this post to see the other fabulous book bloggers taking part in the tour who will be posting reviews and extracts from Coming Home to Holly Close Farm as well as interviews with Julie and other guest posts.

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coming home to holly close farmAbout the Book

Charlie Maddison loves being an architect in London, but when she finds out her boyfriend, Dominic is actually married, she runs back to the beautiful countryside of Westenbury and her parents. Charlie’s sister Daisy, a landscape gardener, is also back home in desperate need of company and some fun.

Their great-grandmother, Madge – now in her early nineties – reveals she has a house, Holly Close Farm, mysteriously abandoned over sixty years ago, and persuades the girls to project manage its renovation.

As work gets underway, the sisters start uncovering their family’s history, and the dark secrets that are hidden at the Farm. A heart-breaking tale of wartime romance, jealousy and betrayal slowly emerges, but with a moral at its end: true love can withstand any obstacle, and, before long, Charlie dares to believe in love again too…

Format: ebook (pp.)    Publisher: Aria
Published: 5th February 2019 Genre: Women’s Fiction, Romance

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Coming Home to Holly Close Farm on Goodreads

Guest Post: ‘Creating, moulding and watching your characters grow’

For me, one of the best things about being a writer has to be that I have free reign to create characters completely at will. I would probably argue that all my novels are very much character-driven and the great thing is, I can name these people how I want – within reason, of course: how many times, as a teacher, have I persuaded ten-year-olds not to call their Tudor kitchen-maids Kylie, Chelsea or Tracy? – and have my characters say and do things I probably wouldn’t say or do myself. It really is quite liberating.

I always become very attached to my characters and find it quite hard to let them go. I remember, as a little girl, reading all the Enid Blyton stuff and being delighted when the boy in her Circus stories made a cameo appearance in one of the Naughtiest Girl at School books. There’s something comforting about the reappearance of a character we know and love: Jilly Cooper certainly recognised this when she regularly brought Rupert Campbell-Black back into her fabulous Rutshire Chronical novels. Similarly, Harriet, Grace and Mandy, the main characters in Goodness, Grace and Me and The One Saving Grace have managed to make cameo roles in all my subsequent books. It would appear I have no control over them whatsoever!

While I think, in the main, a writer has to really like her characters, that might not be the case right from the start of the story. We might create someone who isn’t really our favourite, someone we wouldn’t particularly want to spend time with and with whom we may not totally empathise at the beginning. But a good writer should enable a flawed character to grow and develop so that not only does the reader come round to liking her, but is actively gunning for her by the final chapters. In An Off-Piste Christmas I created Vienna who really was quite wonderfully dreadful, but I had great fun with her dialogue and I actually grew quite fond of her by the end of the story.

It was very different with Charlie Madison in Coming Home to Holly Close Farm. I liked her from the start, but she did need to grow and develop and learn something, and by the final chapters I found I really loved her.  Although it’s been pointed out to me that Charlie can’t have been very nice, that she was living with a married man and she should have known better, in Charlie’s defence, I will repeat, she had no idea he was married. She’d been taken in, duped, totally made a fool of. The way that she coped with this bombshell and in having to trail back home North to her parents was by putting barriers up, being a crosspatch and appearing arrogant and full of herself.  Even Daisy, her sister, takes her to task when Charlie comes over as arrogant and condescending.

‘What is your problem?’ Daisy was cross. ‘Those two are lovely, and you came over as an arrogant, supercilious know-it-all. You’ve been offered this wonderful opportunity to develop the most heavenly house I’ve ever seen,’ Daisy stomped towards reception and I had to hurry to keep up, ‘and yet you were bad tempered, miserable, inflated with your own importance.’

‘Anything else?’ I snapped back. ‘Anything else you’d like to add?’

‘Oh, how about condescending, distant, patronizing…?’

We see Charlie beginning to grow and develop as a character.

‘I was feeling guilty. Recognised what a total pillock I’d been. As we walked in stony silence along the corridor towards Granny Madge’s room, I tried to work out why I’d been so awful.

‘I was jealous,’ I muttered to Daisy’s back.

‘Sorry?’

‘I was jealous. I’m sorry.’

By the end of the novel, particularly having learned much about real love, real unselfish love, from her great-grandmother, Madge, Charlie has, I do hope, really grown and developed as a character. As such, I’m not sure we can, or should be, asking a great deal more from the characters we create.

And, I shall, one day I’m sure, give her the biggest compliment of all: resurrecting her character by giving her a place and a part in a future novel!      © Julie Houston, 2019

julie houstonAbout the Author

Julie Houston is the author of The One Saving Grace, Goodness, Grace and Me and Looking for Lucy, a Kindle top 100 general bestseller and a Kindle #1 bestseller.

She is married, with two teenage children and a mad cockerpoo and, like her heroine, lives in a West Yorkshire village. She is also a teacher and a magistrate.

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Blog Tour/Book Review/Guest Post: Smart Moves by Adrian Magson

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Smart Moves Blog Tour

My grateful thanks to Emily at The Dome Press for my advance review copy and for inviting me to join the blog tour to celebrate the publication of Adrian Magson’s latest book, Smart Moves.  I have a two-for-one deal for you today – a guest post from Adrian all about why he decided to write a standalone book, and my review of Smart Moves.

If you want to make your own ‘smart move’ – and why wouldn’t you? – you can find purchase links below.

Smart MovesAbout the Book

International troubleshooter Jake Foreman loses his job, house and wife all in one day. And when an impulsive move lands him in even deeper water – the kind that could lose him his life – he decides it’s time to make some smart decisions.

The trouble is, knowing the right moves and making them is a whole different game. And Jake, who has been happily rubbing along things he always suspected were just a shade away from being dodgy, finds it all too easy to go with the flow.

Now he’s got to start learning new tricks. If he doesn’t, he could end up dead.

Format: Paperback, ebook (288 pp.)    Publisher: The Dome Press
Published: 16th August 2018         Genre: Thriller, adventure, crime

Purchase Links*
Publisher (buy direct for 30% off & free postage) | Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Amazon.com  ǀ Hive.co.uk (supporting UK bookshops)
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find Smart Moves on Goodreads

Guest Post by Adrian Magson: Why A Standalone?

After 22 books and being asked, ‘Is this a series?’, I finally got the urge to say, ‘No – it’s a standalone. And it’s going to be light-hearted.’

At the time I had five series behind me, with lead characters like Riley Gavin, a tough female crime reporter; Harry Tate, a former MI5 officer; Marc Portman, a spy’s best friend in tight situations; Ruth Gonzales, a private security company investigator; and Inspector Lucas Rocco, a French detective in 1960s rural Picardie. Every one serious in tone, albeit with hints of humour here and there. But light-hearted? No.

Was I biting off more than I could chew?

Writing a series was what I liked doing; after each book I could switch to one of the other series or write the next in line. It was familiar writing territory. It didn’t necessarily make the physical task any easier, but I knew what I was dealing with. All I had to do was switch character hats.

But a standalone?  Write a story where there wasn’t going to be a sequel? Moreover, could I write one which was more humorous than my other books?

What the heck, of course I could. It’s what I do. And Smart Moves was what I had in mind.

Most of my main characters are in tough professions – fighting crime or in the spying game – where knowing what they’re doing is essential for survival. Cops and reporters have to tread a fine path between good and bad, while spies and their helpers can’t relax for a moment because there’s always someone watching, and danger is never far away.

But how about a character who wasn’t so controlled, whose job as an international corporate trouble-shooter, rather than the gun-carrying kind, had allowed things to slip out of his grasp, until he suddenly had nothing – no wife, no house, no job… and not much of a glimmer about how it had happened?

Jake Foreman isn’t inept or uncaring; he’s just become so focussed on work that essential things like life, love and smelling the coffee have eased into the background, leaving him adrift.

I thoroughly enjoyed writing Jake’s story. No need to think about a follow-on; tying up ends loosely or otherwise; and having a laugh along the way, instead of keeping it serious.

I hope readers like the change. If they do, who knows, I might try another one someday.
© Adrian Magson

My Review

The title of the book, Smart Moves, is ironic, intentionally so, as initially Jake seems to make nothing but unsmart moves that put him in the bad books of some pretty nasty characters.  His self-confessed ‘three wise monkeys’ approach of asking no questions has, up until now, seen him successfully through a career as a troubleshooter in some distinctly unsavoury situations.  But is it quite so wise in the position in which he finds himself now?

When he finds himself thrown out of his house by his wife, he turns to brother, Marcus, and old friend, Hugo.  Unfortunately, their best-intentioned advice and introductions only land Jake in more hot water.  And soon it’s getting hotter by the minute.    Luckily, he finally encounters someone made of ‘sterner stuff’, someone able – and willing – to help him out.  Together, it turns out they might make a great partnership.

Smart Moves is a lot of fun, largely because Jake is a thoroughly likeable and engaging character with a nice line in self-deprecating humour.  In fact, sardonic humour is a key feature of the book.  A couple of my favourites:

[Jake, encountering his nosy neighbour, Mrs Tree, outside his now empty house] ‘Seeing her reminded me of driving across a patch of the Namib desert and spotting vultures circling over the remains of a dead zebra.  I knew how the zebra must have felt.’

[Jake, on his wife, Susan] ‘One thing I’d learned very early in our relationship was that Susan didn’t do rough. Her idea of an adventure holiday was having to switch on the air con herself.’

The author is clearly a skilled writer because he keeps the story moving along nicely, increasing the pace in the final third of the book to keep the reader turning the pages. He also has a deft touch when it comes to great opening and closing lines of chapters.

Smart Moves has all the characteristics of a great crime caper movie: likeable hero, witty dialogue, well-paced story, a few narrow escapes from the bad guys, a bit of fisticuffs and the occasional romantic encounter for our leading man.   I thoroughly enjoyed it. Given the ending of the book and, despite the declarations to the contrary by Adrian in his guest post above, he has cleverly left things sufficiently open so there could be another outing for Jake Foreman if he so desired…  I think there may be many readers of Smart Moves who will positively demand it.

I received a review copy courtesy of publishers, The Dome Press, in return for an honest and unbiased review.

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In three words: Pacy, witty, adventure

Try something similar…Poor Boy Road by James L. Weaver (read my review here)

Adrian MagsonAbout the Author

Adrian Magson – ‘a classic crime star in the making’ (Daily Mail) – is the author of 22 crime and spy thrillers, a ghost novel and Write On! – a writers’ help book. His latest novels are Rocco and the Nightingale (Oct 2017), the fifth in the Inspector Lucas Rocco series set in 1960s France, and Smart Moves (Aug 2018), a standalone novel. Both are published by The Dome Press. When not writing books, he’s a reviewer for Shots Magazine and writes the ‘Beginners’ and ‘New Author’ pages for Writing Magazine (UK).

Adrian lives in the Forest of Dean and rumours that he is building a nuclear bunker are unfounded. It’s a bird’s table.

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