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Text of the page (random words):
out the trouble with teens then the complications of looking after small children however part of the inspiration for it s a wonderful life derives from a reaction to those years slogging away at the coalface of motherhood i have often joked particularly on family holidays when as one of my children so eloquently put it once the trouble with family holidays is too much family that i would love to run away from home when you are always having to be the responsible one the one in charge it is extremely seductive to dream about chucking it all away and going and doing what you want for a change and that was where the idea for the new book came from my heroine beth has a successful career as a picture book artist but with her children growing older and away from her and feeling stifled by her daily routine she starts indulging in a what if daydream made ever so slightly more dangerous by her meeting up again with an old flame who broke her heart back in the day she s daydreamed about him on and off over the years but never expected to meet him again if you had a secret fantasy and come on don t we all i do but i m never telling in a million years and he she turned up out of the blue what would you do particularly when this happens my heart is thumping as he comes over to me looking gorgeous as usual this is horrific at a moment when i should be concentrating on my family and my husband my secret crush is standing before me fantasies should stay fantasies not walk into your kitchen looking hot as hell the other inspiration i had for this story was thinking about family christmases and what happens when they go disastrously wrong i can remember one spectacular one in my family where my dad and his brother argued violently and swore never to see each other again so my story starts with beth s family gathering for christmas as usual only for her parents to drop a huge bombshell which will impact on everyone for the whole of the next year throw in beth s husband daniel dealing with his estranged father two grumpy teenagers and beth s sister lou reeling from being rejected again by her latest girlfriend and i hope i ve managed to create a story about love loss wasted chances and the ties that bind i had a great time writing it so i really hope you enjoy reading it and thanks to all my readers new and old who have bought my books over the last ten years there s no point being a writer beavering away at their computer if no one actually picks up what you ve written so i am immensely grateful and i hope you continue to keep reading posted by jane henry at 11 35 am 7 comments wednesday march 30 2016 the way i write following on from my previous post about writing sisters i thought i d give a few insights into the way i write as opposed to the way virginia does it like i said we re very different in my early days of writing and after realising with my first unpublished novel that i really badly need to plot i started the process off with a longish synopsis of up to four pages and a more blurby type thing both of which i gave to my then editor initially i started planning individual chapters but i found that too stifling so now my synopses tend to be divided into two or three parts and i give each a rough story arc so i know where i want to be by the end of each part and then flesh it out basically i get too impatient planning and the writing starts to escape with me so much so that sometimes things i ve planned not to happen till part 3 turn up in part 1 which can be a bugger i can tell you i am allright with a basic skeleton but anything more detailed and i am dead in the water by trial and error i ve also discovered that my early attempts which would involve writing rewriting and fiercely editing the first few chapters made me want to slit my wrists and leave me incapable of finishing the damned thing so now i throw caution to the winds and just write till the story is out even if it s shit i ve got something down which is a lot more satisfying than staring at a blank screen i can tell you i had always typed my first drafts up till i was on holiday a few years ago and discovered that actually writing by hand is much more productive for me for some reason i find it easier to get the basic story down the typing up and faffing about when i realise things don t fit together very well is a damned nuisance but i actually think i get a first draft out quicker that way as a notorious procrastinator i can waste hours of my life on twitter and facebook while i m supposed to be writing this way i take myself off to cafes and libraries to concentrate solidly for several hours at a time on my best days i can get through at least three chapters on my worst one and if anyone has been following me on fb recently they might have noticed i ve been doing a lot of cafe writing as i was working insanely hard to hit a tight deadline one of the things i love about writing by hand is that so long as i have a pad with me i can do it anywhere i know i could with a laptop but i find the hassle of lugging one around a bit of a pain and over the years as i ve been sitting waiting for various children to finish various activities i find it s a great way to maximise moments i didn t know i had thus in january i found myself sitting in a cafe in hammersmith waiting for inspiration a blank page can be intimidating too but when you are stuck somewhere for three hours and you don t have access to the internet and you have nothing else to do it is amazing how words do come out even if you have to force yourself to put pen to paper some days i visit more than one cafe after about an hour i get bored so a change of scenery works for me though i have to fight with the temptation to run home and go and lie down writing frequently makes me want to lie down and go back to sleep i try to resist the urge i find this can be helpful to the creative process too as if i am stuck and can t think where to go next invariably by the time i get to my next location i have found a solution of sorts to my problem even as if frequently when i come to rewrite it s not the right solution so long as it s enough to move me on that is good enough for me by the time i am at the end i am quite demented scribbling notes in the column as i ve done in the pic below to remind myself of where i m going with the damned thing but oh the relief when i finally get to the end i actually never type the end which is a hangover from my editing days as i know it always gets edited out so i don t see the point but nonetheless there s a great sense of satisfaction when i do get there the end though isn t really the end it s the beginning particularly when you are mad enough to write by hand my next stage is typing up i always try to type up as a i go and then get into the writing and that all goes for a burton suffice to say i had ten days in which to type up my first draft and get it knocked into a good enough shape to send to my editor this time and pray what did i do with all that time oh yes i procrastinated hugely for which i was kicking myself last tuesday when i realised i had left myself very little time to edit although to be fair i edit as i type so the first printed draft is in effect a second draft and by the time i m done i usually have a very stiff neck and my wrists fill like they re going to fall off at this point in the process i usually hate the book with a passionate loathing especially when i read it through and think all the things all writers do like it s shit why would anyone buy this read this why do i bother this dear reader is part of the process and has to be got through it is just as illusory as the other reaction you go through when you re thinking this is it i am on fire this is the best thing i ve ever written etc what then usually happens is a far more sensible response i scribble notes on the second draft and go through it one more time by the end of which i can see further tweaks which need sorting and i am far more likely to be of the mind that it s ok i have written a story which needs lots of work but i m heading in the right direction this is my fourth draft and this is the one i send my editor at this point i do breathe a sigh of relief because now it s out of my hair for a bit although the writer who told me many years ago sending of an ms to an editor is a bit like sending off a job application wasn t far off the mark there s always the worry your editor agent will hate it but you have to hope it won t come to that and while i am waiting i can spend a bit of time researching more information for the book which i didn t have time to do in the writing process and selecting songs for my playlist i always have a soundrack to my books i shall post the latest one when i ve worked it up more and pay a little attention to sorting my domestic life out in two weeks time my edits will come in and everything else will go for a burton so i have to make hay while the sun shines if you want to know more about the way i write and meet me in person talking to my twin sister virginia moffatt about the way she does check this out virginia is crowdfunding to publish her amazing book echo hall with unbound co uk here here you can help her do it by pledging to join us for tea or if you can t do that there are other pledges you can make and if that s not your bag either please do feel free to share on fb and twitter many thanks posted by jane henry at 12 35 pm 27 comments friday march 04 2016 scribbling sisters i come from a very literary family my father was an english teacher and writer manque he wrote us amazing plays when we were little we recently discovered my grandmother jane henry after whom this blog was named had written but not published short stories and her mother was a poet among my siblings i have a poet translator and a philosopher then there s me and my twin i have been writing now for eighteen years and published for nine this year unbelievably i am having my tenth book published it took me eight years to get that first deal but i was able to write when the children were small because i went freelance and was able to carve out some time my lovely twin virginia moffatt has not had that option she has been writing a novel for ten years while bringing up three children and having a full time job quite frankly i don t know how she has done it but she has worked away steadily attending writing conferences and courses and crafting and recrafting her story so it is good as it can be she has worked very hard and stayed true to the vision of her story and i m delighted that she now has the opportunity to get it published by the amazing team at https unbound co uk but dear reader she needs help if you don t know how unbound works it s a brilliant way of helping bringing books to market through crowdfunding authors pitch their ideas on the unbound website and if one takes your fancy you can pledge money to help get the book published here is virginia talking about her book echo hall part ghost story part historical part antiwar it s a brilliant book for our times and one that will stay with you long after you have read it https unbound co uk books echo hall pledges go from getting your name in the back of the digital edition to a bespoke literary tour of oxford with virginia as your guide ginia has always supported my writing so it is with great pleasure i can now return the favour by offering a tea with twins in london in which we will talk about our writing and being twins and how the two things are interconnected with that in mind i thought i d share some thoughts on twinniness ginia and i had very similar experiences growing up but you know that nature nurture debate i would say 100 nature every time why because from the off while we look similar and sound similar and share many similar views and thoughts and characteristics we also have very different personalities i sometimes wonder if at some point in the womb we made a mutual decision to say ok i ll do that bit you do the other because despite our older brother spending our childhood teasing us that we were one person we really really aren t as various wannabe boyfriends found out to their cost choosing one twin thinking we were exactly alike and then finding out the bitter truth so from an early age i was the conventional goody two shoes one and virginia was the daring one more likely to get into trouble at school the main reason she was in trouble was because she had and has a very strong sense of justice and couldn t resist pointing out to teachers where they d been unfair which they frequently were which invariably led to her being sent to the head s office i swear she spent a whole term sitting outside the head s office aged 9 i on the other hand would be equally cross but took the more pragmatic approach of keeping my mouth shut and head down i always admired virginia s courage though as i was a massive coward and hated getting into trouble at school we were very similar academically but i learnt a harsh lesson aged 5 when virginia overtook me by miles in the reading scheme we were following and i never quite caught up with her after that she always had the edge on me in everything particularly maths which i found baffling but she could manage with ease on the other hand though neither of us were particularly sporty i was the one who played tennis obsessively and would go swimming when virginia would rather read a good book at a level we started off sharing two subjects english and biology but i later swapped the latter for history being the sciencey twin virginia chose chemistry to my french yet i have always had a yen to understand science better and virginia has never stopped loving history evidenced by the fact that she has written such a good historical novel we have both always shared a love of stories but when we were growing up writing for a living didn t seem a thing you could actually do so it wasn t on our radars as a possible career our dad was horrified when i said i wanted to go into publshing which he thought was an unstable career while virginia s choice of going into social care was even worse during our twenties then when we were establishing our careers writing was the farthest thing from our minds although i always scribbled away at things and i suspect she did too then i started publishing teen romance and discovered a hitherto unknown love of the genre my company generously allowed me to publish a couple of short stories with them and i was hooked when i went on maternity leave in 1998 it was a complete no brainer to use it as an opportunity to start writing virginia came to the same conclusion a bit later than me probably starting her writing journey around the time i was first published during that time she has been my most enthusiastic cheerleader encouraging me with all my endeavours even though romance isn t a genre she particularly likes and herein lies another significant difference be...