Ideas and Family Feuds (no, not mine – my characters’!)

By Anna Sugden

I'm delighted to welcome back a Lair favourite, my dear friend, the fabulous Kate Walker. As always, Kate will give us a peek at her latest wonderful release and share some great news too.

So, without further ado, I'll hand you over to Kate.

It’s great to be back here with the lovely tony margareth. I’ve had such a wonderful time on my previous visits so I’m always happy to be back here. It’s funny, Anna S and I tried so hard to make this happen for over a year – but emails kept going missing and then Anna was moving from one country to another. But when we finally got it together it’s been so easy ever since. And here I am back again just looking forward to that wonderful Bandita welcome.

And I’m pretty excited about the reason for my being here. I don’t know any author who isn’t thrilled to know that she has a new book out. Even if this is my – hang –count them . . .56th title, it’s still a wonderful moment to know that the latest story is published and on the bookshop shelves and that people are actually buying it. (Well - fingers crossed that they are!)

But this book – The Konstantos Marriage Demand (Presents Extra out March 16th) - is extra special for me. That’s because I just discovered that Romantic Times has given this particular book 4.5 stars and has chosen it as one of their Top Picks for March. Can I say – I’m celebrating! Double celebrating. As I mentioned when I was first guest-blogging here with you all, this year I’m celebrating 25 years of being published. And when I started out – and all through most of those 25 years, it was my ambition, my dream, to win the accolade of my book being a Romantic Times Top Pick. I finally achieved it with my 2008 book Bedded By the Greek Billionaire and that made my day (my year!) Now I’ve managed it a second time with The Konstantos Marriage Demand and I’ve every bit as excited as the first time. It’s funny though – these Top Picks seem to be like buses. You know what they say – you wait for ever and then two come along at once! Anyway, as most people know, when I’m celebrating I like to have others celebrate with me. And this time is no different. So at the end of this post, there’s a chance for you to join me in my celebrations.

But first –the real blog I was going to write was going to be something of a response to the question that I get asked all the time. You know the one. The ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ question.

This is what everyone seems to want to know and it’s really such a very hard question to answer. I usually fudge my answer by saying ‘well I have a very vivid imagination.’ Or ‘ Where do I get my ideas from? From life.’ And it’s true, ideas are all around you if you just know where to look. They’re in the newspapers, the magazines, on TV. In conversations overheard in coffee shops . . . I once told my accountant that really life was a ‘viable expense’ that I could claim for because everything was ‘research’ for an author but he wasn’t having that.

The truth is that you only really need a tiny ‘seed’ that sparks off all sorts of questions and ideas and then I start asking the question ‘Why. . .?’ and I end up with a story.

And that’s how it was with The Konstantos Marriage Demand. A long time ago, in my ideas notebook, I wrote down ‘family feud – Eastenders’. I was watching the UK ‘soap’ Eastenders at the time and there was a storyline running through the episode about a family feud. I just noted the idea and never used it. Then last year on one of my courses I was teaching about conflict – internal and external conflict and illustrating external conflict with the story of Romeo and Juliet. And there was that word again ‘feud’. The feud between the Montagues and the Capulets.

And that started me thinking . . . How could a feud come about in the 21st century? What effect would it have on my hero and heroine . . .

So that’s how the book that turned into The Konstantos Marriage Demand got started. I loved working in the ‘feud’ part of the story – it gave an added edge to the whole plot. And when I thought out a reason why the feud had really become so bad as to tear Nikos and Sadie apart, I felt I had a something that gave it al the emotional punch I had been looking for. And it seems that the Romantic Times reviewer agreed when she wrote : Misunderstandings and family betrayals propel this terrifically well-paced and fiery romance to its very rewarding conclusion.

So now as I said, I’m going to share the celebrations. Seeing as two of my books have won that coveted RT Top Pick accolade, I’m going to give away a set of the two winning books – Bedded By The Greek Billionaire and The Konstantos Marriage Demand – to someone who leaves a comment. (Well – you know me – I’ll get Sid the Cat on the job and have him pick out the winner for me.)

So you know what I’m celebrating – what are you celebrating this year? Big or small – a new home, a new job, getting over the flu, the fact that the sun’s come out again? Let’s cheer up the cold days of March and look at the good things in life. Tell me something you’ll celebrate and I’ll put your name out with a cat treat on it for Sid to pick a winner. Source URL: http://plasticsurgerycelebrities.blogspot.com/search/label/ideas
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Into the Melting Pot

by Christine Wells

Kill me now.

Someone just stole the most fantastic story idea I had for my next book--a series, actually. Well, OK, she didn't steal it. It was just one of those serendipitous things where two people in different parts of the world who don't know each other came up with the same idea at roughly the same time. Unfortunately, this New York Times bestselling author has already converted the idea (did I mention it was fantastic?) to print and now I have to come up with something equally brilliant. Or at least something that will convince my editor to give me another contract.*g*

Story ideas aren't often a problem for writers. We usually have too many ideas rather than too few. However, the process by which the germ of a notion gradually evolves into a concrete springboard for a one hundred thousand word novel differs from writer to writer, so I can only tell you about mine. The closest I can come to describing my so-called process is similar to the way Lady Malmerstoke described (perhaps not entirely accurately) to our hero the way women think in Georgette Heyer's POWDER AND PATCH.

"They jump, you see...From one thing to another. You'll arrive at a new thought by degrees and you'll know how you got there. Women don't think like that."

So here, as near as I can remember, is the leap-frog thought process by which I reached the premise for THE DANGEROUS DUKE.

*I read about the courtesan Harriette Wilson's threat to expose prominent clients if they didn't pay her to keep their name out of her memoirs.

*I thought about power and how a woman in the nineteenth century could seize her own power and wield it to get what she wanted. She might not be able to vote, but she might still play a part in world affairs.

*I watched 5 straight seasons of UK spy series "Spooks" and absorbed the continuing question in that wonderful drama--does the end always justify the means? I asked myself, how does a spy live with what he does? How does he leave it all behind and live happily ever after?

*At the same time, I took an interest in a debate about whether heroines were simply place-holders in romance. The theory goes that the reader doesn't care too much about the heroine's qualities, she wants to step into the heroine's shoes and fall in love with the hero.

*And finally, I thought about the difference between fantasy and reality and whether we really want our fantasies to come true. Could you really live with a hero like Dain in Lord of Scoundrels?

*Oh, and somewhere along the way, I found pictures of my hero and heroine. These were the people I wanted to write about.

After a lot of leaping about, all those snippets went into the melting pot. Then came dithering, writing, rewriting, sweat and tears but no blood, thank goodness, after which there emerged a story that went something like this (with thanks to Publishers Weekly for putting it more concisely than I could):

Maxwell Brooke, a dangerous operative for the Home Office, has unexpectedly become a duke, thanks to an arson that killed the four heirs ahead of him. Determined to bring the suspected perpetrators to justice, he has jailed Reverend Stephen Holt, who may know their whereabouts. Outraged, Holt's sister, widowed Lady Kate Fairchild, threatens to publish a diary that could embarrass high figures in government unless her brother is freed. Although the scandals are real, she hasn't actually written the book yet, and the handwritten volume Max steals from her home contains only Kate's sexual fantasies. He kidnaps her (on the thinnest of pretexts) and begins to make her dreams come true...

Simple, huh?

Where and when do you get great ideas? Have you ever tracked your thought processes? Do you believe women think differently from men? Are writers simply crazy?

One lucky commentor will win the sum total of all my crazy thought processes in the last year, THE DANGEROUS DUKE!Source URL: http://plasticsurgerycelebrities.blogspot.com/search/label/ideas
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