The Power of Love by Ali Harris

I have a confession to make. No, it’s not that I’ve spent the past month watching the John Lewis Christmas ad on a loop (I have) or that I’m a closet fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals (I am). It’s a far more serious affliction – and one that I can’t be cured of. Oh go on then. I may as well tell you now I’m here. My name is Ali Harris and I’m shamelessly, incurably addicted to love.

I love the idea of love so much that I can’t get enough of it. I need it every day. I fantasise about falling in it, I can’t imagine life without it. Luckily for me (and my marriage) I get to experience falling in love every time I write a book. Last year it was with Molly and Ryan, my main characters in The First Last Kiss. The book focuses on their relationship from teen crush to enduring love. And it does this by specifically focusing on their most sweet, sensual and tender exchanges of affection: their kisses.

Kissing; it sounds so old fashioned doesn’t it? Kind of sweetly asexual compared to what we’ve been reading about for the past year (thank you Fifty Shades of Grey). And yet I believe a kiss is infinitely more intimate and sensual than sex. More life-affirming. More love-affirming. A kiss holds the key to everything, our hearts and souls, hopes and fears. Kisses have the power to heal, inspire and strengthen. They convey affection, understanding, pain, pleasure, love, and loss. Kisses are precious, and yet they are so easily thrown away. How many times have you kissed your partner and barely registered it? Turned your cheek or brushed one away? I came up with the idea for The First Last Kiss when I wondered - what if you knew you only had a finite number of kisses left with the person you love? Would you do everything you could to savour every single one? Or would you try desperately to recall all the ones that had gone before?

Writing this book has taught me more than I ever expected about the everlasting strength and power of true love. From it I’ve learned to never take a kiss, or love, for granted again.  Love may not be as fashionable as sex right now, but as I’m concerned its power will live on long after the shades of grey have faded - and those John Lewis snowmen have melted away.

The First Last Kiss by Ali Harris is out in paperback and eBook on January 17th 2013.

Colette Caddle

Every Time I Say Goodbye....

For me, getting to know the characters in my story is a bit like falling in love.

The first meeting: 

When I first came up with the characters for Every Time We Say Goodbye I had a loose idea of what they would be like but at that stage they were flat and two-dimensional and if you asked me to describe them you would have got a blank look.

The first time you feel the ‘spark’:

You know that moment! You get talking and suddenly you start to notice things: He has a lovely laugh, everything he says is interesting, or funny, or clever.  His smile gives you goose-bumps and you realise you want to know more about this man. Well, that’s the way I feel the moment I’m able to ‘see’ my characters, the moment they seem real to me. There’s nothing quite like it.

The first date:

These can often be disastrous but sometimes, just sometimes you look across at someone and think he could be ‘the one’. As the characters take shape and personalities develop I feel that same sense of wonder and excitement. Full of enthusiasm and on an absolute high, I can’t wait to open my laptop in the morning, dying to find out more about these people, longing to spend time with them.

Going steady:

Those first few weeks or months, you want your new love to think you’re perfect. You wouldn’t dream of going out without washing your hair, or being seen wearing a face. But as you grow more comfortable with each other and real life intervenes, the guards come down. This is when it’s easy to fall into a boring routine and stop appreciating each other and it’s the same for me when I’m writing. The ‘going steady’ stage is the hardest and most dangerous. I’ve set the scene, introduced my readers to all the characters and it’s all too easy to slip into a rut or lose interest. It’s especially worrying if doing household chores is more appealing than sitting down to write. At times like this I become disillusioned and that’s when it’s important to stay focussed or my story, my love, will suffer.

The doubts:

Everyone’s been there. The day you say to yourself ‘Is this really what I want? Is it going anywhere? Do I want it to? Does he?’ I ask myself similar questions every time I write a book. Is it any good? Should I give up and start again? Should I throw in the towel completely and take up knitting instead? It’s soul-destroying but that’s when you need a firm but kindly friend to remind you that you suffer the same doubts with every book and just…get on with it!  

The happy ending:

By the time I’ve written 100,000 words it’s fair to say that I’m immersed in my characters’ lives and, good or bad, I love them all. I get quite emotional when I have to say goodbye but if I’m lucky, really lucky, there is usually a new cast waiting in the wings and it’s time to start all over again...

Rebecca Chance

 

50 Shades/9½  Weeks: what do women really fantasise about?

By Rebecca Chance

What's your ultimate fantasy? What  do you want - really, really want, as the Spice Girls would put it? To be tied up? Spanked? Have someone yell at you because you dared to sunbathe topless, and whacking you across the boobs in punishment?

Hmm. Or, would your ultimate fantasy be something much more long-term and seductive? What if I whispered in your ear that you would never, ever, have to do housework again? No cooking, washing up, ironing, hoovering, laundry folding, stain removal, supermarket shopping, dry cleaner visiting, any more. Not only that: you wouldn't have to organise anything any more. No travel arrangements, no renewing your driver's licence and passport, no parking vouchers or council tax payments or home and contents and building and travel and life assurance, no - well, you get the idea. Someone else will do all of this for you. All you need to do is relax, surrender completely, and have a lot of fantastic sex to boot.

That does sound lovely, doesn't it? Like falling into a big, warm, luxurious bed. Or a Jacuzzi, bubbling deliciously, its water scented with very expensive oil. It’s the fantasy that, 34 years ago, made the book Nine and A Half Weeks by Elizabeth McNeill a cause celebre and a huge bestseller. Having met and moved in with the hero, the heroine lists the tasks that he does around the house. All of the above and more. He runs the bath for her, he dresses her, he feeds her from his plate as she sits happily on the carpet at his feet, tied to the table leg. He not only makes every single decision in the home, but does all the work that goes along with it. After listing everything he does, the heroine writes:

"What did I do? Nothing."

Nothing! Nothing! I can't even imagine doing nothing when I get home, and I bet you can't either. Do note, the heroine goes out every day to work: the book is allegedly a memoir of a period in her life when she was working in Manhattan as an executive for a large corporation. So she wasn't bored and aimless all day; she had to struggle in through the New York crowds to her office, put in a full day's work, struggle home again, walk through the door, take all her clothes off and then do absolutely bugger all for every single evening and weekend. Oh yes, apart from having increasingly kinky sex.

When I first read Nine and A Half Weeks, in my early twenties, as a footloose and fancy-free girl who was out partying all the time, all I focused on was the kinky sex. Naturally. There are some really hot scenes. But recently, now that 50 Shades Of Grey has been such a success, I pulled Nine and A Half Weeks off my shelves and re-read it. It's brilliant. In a mere 144 pages, it does what 50 Shades doesn't manage in over three times that amount. But what really struck me, now that I'm no longer a girl, or in my twenties, or partying all the time, was that the fantasy of not having to do any housework was just as compelling as a jolly good spanking. Honestly, it might be even more so…

I loathe the term 'mummy porn': it's sexist, patronizing and it excludes those of us who don't have kids. But, having said that, women with kids work even harder than I do at running their households. Every single survey since the dawn of time has shown that women do way more housework than men, even when they're both employed outside the home. I know I do much more than my husband, and he's really very good about it. The heroine of Nine and A Half Weeks earns her own money, is economically independent outside the home, and a happy slave inside it (at least at first). A slave with no duties, one who's free to leave at any time. Bliss!

Ana, in 50 Shades, is unfortunately much less feminist. She's a virgin at 22, waiting for a billionaire to pop her cherry, tell her what to do, and fund her lifestyle. But still… she doesn't have to do any housework either. Clever Ana. Isn't that the whole point of these books, the ultimate female fantasy? The longest-lasting one?

Hot sex, after all, only lasts a couple of years before it starts to burn out and transform into the more familiar, domesticated version. But not having to do housework? That could last forever. And it's priceless.

'Getting Emotionally Attached to My Characters' by Milly Johnson

When you find a scribbled note on your manuscript from your editor to say that ‘this section made me cry’ it’s incredibly hard not to chalk one up in the air. In fact, it’s impossible. Especially if it is the part of the story where even I had to break off and get a coffee because I was sobbing as I wrote it.

Author Milly Johnson

One of the questions I’ve been asked more than once is, ‘Do you laugh or cry when you’re writing?’ And the answer is a big fat yes. I can be found chuckling at my own jokes – which isn’t as big-headed as it sounds because often when they appear on the page, it’s the first time I’ve seen them. You’ll have watched comedians crack up at their own material and use the excuse, ‘Sorry, I haven’t heard that one before’ – and I know exactly what they mean. It’s as if someone else has made up the joke and used you as a conduit. And when I write about sad events, I am in the middle of the action feeling it all. In The Yorkshire Pudding Club, I felt very claustrophobic writing about Elizabeth running away from her father; in A Spring Affair, when Lou is clearing out her attic and breaking her heart, I was breaking mine; I was giggling to myself writing about the very fat dressmaker in A Summer Fling and in White Wedding I felt so desperately sad for Glyn’s parents, I had to stop myself trying to rescue them. And in my new book, A Winter Flame, the chapter that so affected my editor crippled me to write because (no spoilers) I didn’t want it to happen, but it had to – and I felt as guilty as a murderer. That’s the trouble with characters – they become too real and authors grow attached. And if you feel sad when someone you like dies in life, you feel a loss too when you have to ‘kill your darlings’. But I know that if my writing doesn’t move me, it isn’t going to move anyone else.

It’s not just laughter and tears I feel. I’ve had the vapours a couple of times writing a bit of a saucy scene. Gratuitous sex doesn’t fit into my novels, but my heroes and heroines are full-blooded people and occasionally it is necessary to have them indulge in some passion. I can come over quite melty because of some of the nice things that happen to my heroines, and feel hurt for them too. Sometimes I can do that by conjuring up old stored feelings of rejection and betrayal, sometimes I have to call on my imagination. If I didn’t have the capacity to imagine, I’d never have been able to write a book about a snow-filled Christmas theme park whilst sitting on the balcony of a ship cruising through near-tropical Mediterranean air. But then, I’ve had a career in writing greetings card jokes for years and it always happened that I was writing jokes about Santa sunbathing in the garden (that’s me sunbathing, not Santa) and composing gentle springy Easter cards in the middle of winter.

Sometimes you have to do a bit of research, of course. I can imagine a semblance of what it must feel like to be widowed young or to have won the lottery, but it hasn’t happened to me so I need to do some work on getting that right. Then again, people react differently to joy and crisis so at least you get some leeway. But knowing your characters well will give you an indication of how they would meet with any life-changing events. I like to get inside my ‘people’ and wear them like an overcoat, walk in their shoes. It sounds daft, crazy because it is. Writers are artists – total nutters – but perfectionist nutters. All we can do is accept that fact and carry on.