Tag: women’s fiction

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: The Start of Something Wonderful by Jane Lambert

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The Start of Someting Wonderful Blog_Tour

I’m delighted to co-host today’s stop on the blog tour for The Start of Something Wonderful by Jane Lambert.  You can read an extract from the novel below, a heartwarming and uplifting story about starting over and following your dreams.

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The Start of Something WonderfulAbout the Book (previously published as Learning to Fly)

Forty-year-old air stewardess, Emily Forsyth, thought she had everything a woman could wish for: a glamorous, jet-set lifestyle, a designer wardrobe and a dishy pilot boyfriend. Until he breaks up with her…

Catapulted into a mid-life crisis she wishes she’d had earlier, she decides to turn her life upside-down, quitting her job and instead beginning to chase her long-held dreams of becoming an actress!

Leaving the skies behind her, Emily heads for the bright lights of London’s West End – but is it too late to reach for the stars?

Format: ebook (364 pp.)                   Publisher: HQ Digital
Published: 5th January 2018            Genre: Fiction

Purchase Links*
Amazon.co.uk  ǀ  Barnes & Noble ǀ iBooks ǀ Kobo
*links provided for convenience, not as part of any affiliate programme

Find The Start of Something Wonderful on Goodreads

Extract from The Start of Something Wonderful by Jane Lambert

I AM BEGINNING TO WORRY. There’s a dark side to my character emerging that I didn’t know was there.

Whilst I’m naturally over the moon and grateful for this understudy job, as the weeks go by, I’m becoming a teensy-weensy bit frustrated. I know the part now, and whilst I may not have starred in my own TV series or graced the cover of celebrity mags, dare I say it, I think I could play the role just as well. Does that sound conceited? Day after day, week after week, the waiting, the hoping …

Wishing someone to be struck down with laryngitis or a mild tummy bug is one thing, but willing someone’s foot to get trapped in a revolving set is something else entirely. Evil. I’m horrified that I’m capable of such a thought.

I breeze through the stage door, clutching the latest copy of Hello! and a bag of Jelly Babies.

‘Evening, Arthur. Dressing room ten, please.’

‘Reckon you’ll no’ be havin’ much time for readin’ the night, doll,’ he wheezes, glancing at my magazine as he hands me the key.

‘Mmm?’ I say, signing in, then checking my pigeonhole, mind elsewhere.

‘It’s no’ for me to say,’ he says, hoisting a shaggy eyebrow.

I slowly start to climb the spiral staircase, calling in at the greenroom on the way for a brew.

‘Company manager’s been looking for you,’ grunts one of the lighting guys from behind his Autocar magazine.

‘Right. Thanks,’ I say breezily, spilling milk everywhere, my stomach dropping ten floors. Surely not? I mean, I saw Sophie barely two hours ago. I watched her performance from the darkness of the stage-right wings and she was on fine form, giving her ‘I-love-you-but-we-must-part’ speech.

It was at that point that I’d decided to make a break for it. Technically, I’m not supposed to leave the building until the curtain comes down, but I’ve religiously watched and mouthed every performance from the wings of Brighton’s Theatre Royal, to this, our final fortnight at The Dukes in Edinburgh. With just five minutes of the matinée left, what could possibly happen to her?

Mistake no. 1: leaving theatre early

Mistake no. 2: gorging on all-you-can-eat buffet

Mistake no. 3: succumbing to large glass of house red

Mistake no. 4: ordering garlic bread

Mistake no. 5: forgetting to switch on mobile phone

Mistake no. 6: arriving five minutes late for ‘the half’

‘… so, the silly cow’s been whisked off to A&E to have it x-rayed. You know what this means?’ says Simon, our company manager, running his hand nervously through his mop of unruly hair.

An eerie sensation ripples through my body. I feel a stab of guilt. My visualisation powers have taken on a telekinetic life of their own, like in some Stephen King horror film. I hadn’t intended anything serious to happen – just a minor ailment, something to lay her low for a week, a cold perhaps, allowing my agent sufficient time to arrange invitations and tickets for casting directors and producers.

I swallow hard and force my lips into a weak smile. There is an expectant silence. This is the stuff of Hollywood musicals: the leading actress is taken ill, and the understudy has to take over at short notice.

I can do it. I’ve been practising for months, says the heroine, with an assured toss of her pretty head. Bravo! More! A star is born! This is the moment I have waited for, longed for all these weeks, these seventy-two performances, so why do I now have this overwhelming desire to flee the theatre and catch the first National Express coach out of town? Well, apart from my all-consuming guilt, the auditorium will be packed to the rafters with legions of excited fans waiting to see Sophie Butterfield and her co-star, Rick Romano, give their highly acclaimed, headline-grabbing performances as star-crossed lovers, Constance and Enrique.

The fact that their on-stage passion has spilled over into reality has fuelled the public’s imagination. The House-Full sign is now a permanent fixture on the pavement, while armies of eager punters camp outside in all weathers, hoping for returns.

Exquisite pairing!
The chemistry between Romano and Butterfield
is electric. Beg, steal or borrow a ticket!
~ The Billingham Gazette

This romantic duo sets the stage alight.
You’d be mad to miss it!
~ The Yorkshire Evening Post

‘You up for it?’ Simon asks, knowing full well it doesn’t matter whether I’m ‘up for it’ or not. Why else have I been travelling up and down the country, getting paid £500 per week plus touring allowance? So I may sit in my dressing room, stuffing my face with Hobnobs and tea whilst reading trashy magazines, or to be allowed to finally finish reading Doctor Zhivago, which I started back in 2010?

Nah – if it’s all the same to you, Simon, I’d rather give it a miss.

Jane LambertAbout the Author

Jane was born in Yorkshire and brought up on the west coast of Scotland. She studied French and German at Stirling University, taught English in Vienna and travelled the world as cabin crew before making the life-changing (and slightly mad) decision to become an actress in her mid-thirties. She has appeared in “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time”, “Calendar Girls” and “Deathtrap” in London’s West End.

While hanging around as an understudy in draughty theatre dressing rooms and grotty digs on tour, she wrote her first novel, The Start of Something Wonderful, and has now discovered her true path in life

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