Music and Lyrics

I've blogged about this before, but as I am feeling my way into the new book, I thought it might be interesting to revisit the way I use music when I'm writing. Plus sharing with you two of my current favourite songs.

It's been my experience, both when writing Strictly Love and it seems to be happening again now, that a character whom I wasn't expecting to have too much to do with has suddenly upped the ante and wants a much bigger part.

In Strictly Love that character is Rob, who starts the book as a serial commitment freak and who ends it... well I won't tell you how his story ends, you'll just have to read it and find out won't you...

But, when I started Strictly Love it was Mark's story I wanted to tell - he being the dentist hero who popped into my head first. Then I found my way to Katie, and then Emily. But Rob. Rob, was just supposed to be the happy-go-lucky best mate, who came along for the ride. Except he wouldn't let me do that to him. The more I wrote him, the more depths I found, which is a great experience for a writer.

I can't remember which way round it happened. Whether I heard this song on the radio first and had that YESSSSS!!! moment that told me this was HIS song, HIS theme..., or whether I started writing Rob and realised he needed a song all his own, doesn't really matter. At some point I found a song for Rob. And boy did it help me write his story.

The song in question is Feel by Robbie Williams and I share it with you now. I can't do a lot of clever high faluting music criticism because a) I am about as musical as a stone and b) I find a lot of music criticism quite pretentious.

But... for me, always when I'm drawing on songs, it's the depth of emotions that the song calls from me that helps me shape my stories and characters. And this song is so heart tugging and poignant, and makes me want to wrap poor little Robbie Wiliams up in my arms and say there, there (even THOUGH my head is saying, bad idea girl...), that is seems to sum up Rob's particular set of problems.

He starts the story as a bit of a jack the lad, a commitment phobe who enjoys women but who will never settle down. But behind the smile there is inevitably a great deal of pain. I've known blokes like that and enjoy their company. But I'd never want to marry one. I hope by the end of the book if you're a woman you might consider marrying Rob. And if you do, this song is why...



The current book is going to be a Christmas story. It is somewhat more ambitious in structure then anything I've attempted before. I'm using flashbacks. Yikes. And four characters in two locations. Double Yikes.

To start with I was going to go for three storylines, following the fortunes of Gabriel, a shepherd who starts the story as his wife leaves, and Marianne who moves to the country only to get dumped. Their strand of the story takes place in a fictional village I've based on the place where my mum lives in Shropshire, while the other strand is following the fortunes of Catherine who lives in London. Catherine and I have a deal in common, as we both have four children. But I hope that's where the resemblance is going to end. I gave her four children, mainly because for plot purposes she needs a great deal of chaos in her life, and believe you me four children do that to you.

Once again, Catherine's husband Noel was going to be an also ran, a necessary but secondary character. However, like Rob, he was having none of that (my characters certainly like bossing me about), and as soon as I started writing Chapter One he took over and said, hey what about me. As background material I watched It's A Wonderful Life for the first time. Inexplicably it was one of those films I'd always meant to see but never had (can't think why as I adore James Stewart), and when I did see it it blew me away entirely. And THEN I really got what Noel's story was going to be. In some ways it's at the heart of the story, and is going to pivot round a very important scene towards the end of the book (this also always happens to me when I'm writing - I have a scene in my head from the very beginning which occurs near the end, but has immense significance for the outcome of the story. I've never tried writing that scene first, though it's very tempting, but I think I need to live through the story myself before I get there).

And THEN... I heard Neil Diamond's new song Pretty Amazing Grace and it blew my mind, and I realised this song is at the heart of Noel's story. Like Feel it sends shivers up my spine and takes me into the soul of who I want Noel to be, and what his problems are. I'm not sure if I've explained that very coherently. But that's sort of the way it seems to work for me.

So here it is (along with Love on the Rocks, as an added bonus)

I defy you not to have the hairs on the back of your neck rise...

Squee! Squee!

Squeeing is another new word I've learnt recently, courtesy of all my blogging DrWho friends. I am definitely squeeing out loud about this.

The designers at Avon have done me proud once again and come up with this fantastic cover, of which I am inordinately fond. I have literally just recieved it and was so excited I had to put it up here straight away...

Squee. Squee.

I wish I could dance like they clearly can...

Cinderella goes to the ball

One of the characters in Strictly Love, Katie, frequently feels like Cinderella deprived from going to the ball. I know how she feels. It's rare for me to get out these days, and when I do I don't often stray too far from my own doorstep.

However, last night Cinderella got to go the ball in the shape of the Harper Collins annual summer bash at the V&A. Thanks to two splendid friends who looked after three of the children for me and an equally splendid husband who got home in time to take the oldest swimming before picking everyone else up, I was unusually able to go up to town.

To celebrate I put on my Cinderella type dancing shoes, which look a bit like this.

Or rather, I put them on in the girls' loos when I arrived. I don't think I'd have made it off the platform without breaking my neck if I hadn't. As it was, I gingerly made my way up the steps from the loos, and hobbled down a marble floored corridor hoping that I didn't look as much of a prize prat as I felt. Il faut suffre pour etre belle, must surely have been written by a man...

As I arrived I noticed rather a lot of photographers standing on the steps of the V&A. I was just about to cut through them when I realised this person was prancing about in the middle of them. Whoops!

So I scurried around the back of the pack. If you spot a woman in a red dress in the background of a picture of Gok in the next issue of Hello! That'll be me then.

As it happens, this year's party proved fine fodder for celeb spotting (I'd call them zedlebrities - a fine word I borrowed from Danuta Kean to use in Strictly Love, but none of them were really Zlisters, so that wouldn't be fair.)

Within minutes of hobbling my way into the crowded garden where the party was helped (the crowd gave me a good excuse to hobble looking slightly less of a prat), I spotted good old Tory Boy himself and his wife Ffion...

Actually, while I thought he was a pillock as Leader of the Tories, I did come to respect William Hague hugely after listening to him roundly trounce Teflon Tone several times at the Dispatch Box at PMQs, and his book on Pitt the Younger is brilliant. He's a very clever man, and methinks in years to come the Tories may well regard him as the Greatest Leader they never had.

William and Ffion were soon joined by this person

who was extremely glamorous in the flesh. I did wonder how well they knew each other - is there a kind of celeb club, where you are forced to talk to people you don't like but have to as ordinary joes like me are too embarrassed to speak to you?

Mind you, if that was the case, then this person would have been speaking to them too.

I can't quite see Hague and Baddiel doing fantasy football together....

Or this person either.

He was forced to talk to his agent all night long. My agent and I stood next to them for ages and she kept daring me to speak to him. I could possibly have wangled it when he was joined by Freya North, who I met earlier this year after she won the RNA award.

In the end though I decided it was more gracious and grown up not to bother celebrities, and just get on with the business of the day, namely drinking the plentiful champagne on offer, while chatting to lovely booky people in beautiful surroundings.

Cinderella not only went to the ball. She absolutely had one.

So my thanks go out to all those lovely people at Harper Collins for not only inviting me but making it all happen.

And to all the wonderful Avon team, who are so much fun.

I do wish my feet weren't aching quite so much though...

Dance like there's no tomorrow.

We went to a 40th birthday party on Saturday night, which as we approach our mid forties is becoming something of a rare event. Nothing makes you feel more middle aged then the comment a friend of ours made, What? You still know people young enough to be 40?

However, age isn't everything as I'm sure you'll agree. And you're only as old as the woman you feel or the man you dance with etc, so we went out to forget how old we were and to have a good time.

A good time in my husband's case normally means avoiding the dance floor at all costs, whereas to me that is the whole point of going out.

We have some very good friends who always lead the dancing on such occasions. In fact the reason I actually know the moves to the Macarena is entirely down to them. So when my other half declines to join me to strut his funky stuff, I usually end up dancing with them instead. I don't care if no one's looking...

As we had to factor in a ten year old's birthday party first (where they also did a lot of dancing - including the strangest version of Oopsupsideyourhead I've ever seen. Ok, ok, there's not much competition for that slot...), followed by the highlight of our week, for which no social occasion is important enough for us to miss - namely the family fest of hiding behind the sofa - we got to the party rather late, by which time my dancing buddy was rather the worse for wear.

Never mind, I joined her anyway, and had a huge laugh trying to escape the attentions of an unwanted beau. Now when I was twenty I would have been deeply offended by his charmless chat up lines (I believe he told me I was frigid at one point), but now I am middle aged I think it is hilarious that anyone other then my husband is interested in my charms such as they are. I did tell him at one point I was old enough to be his mother, but forebore from using my favourite putdown which is Married, Four Children, Do You Really Want to Know? Last time I used that one New Year when I was pregnant (but my potential hero hadn't spotted this as I was sitting down) I've never seen someone run so fast. I have a feeling Saturday's loverboy was so desperate that wouldn't actually have put him off.

But I digress. I managed to avoid shimmying up to LB, and eventually (having ascertained that my other half had drunk just enough to lose his inhbitions, but not so much he wasn't able to dance) got my husband to strut his funky stuff with me. The deeply annoying thing about my husband is that he could be a very very fine dancer, but he is far to English and self conscious. So it is only a combination of red wine and You Really Got Me by the Kinks which gets him dancing. Mind you, once he's up there, it is also very hard to get him away...

Eventually it had passed the witching hour and it really was time to drag ourselves home. We left to the sight of our hostess with the mostest being slam dunked against a wall, without a thought to what tomorrow would bring...

Tomorrow in fact brought a rather bad back.

But that's what being 40 does to you....

The Hills Are Alive....

Ouch. I seem to have left an inordinate amount of time since blogging my last, but life has been a tad busy. In the interim I have been dealing with the copyedited and now proof version of Strictly Love. I have just waved goodbye to the latter, and with something of a pang waved goodbye to characters with whom I've lived now for over a year.

Looking at page proofs of something you've written is a weird experience. The words don't look right. I frequently read something and think, Did I really write that? then go back and check and realise somehow I have. This time around I was hit by a huge wave of self doubt, so much so that I am tempted to believe the kind Amazon reviewer who pronounced Pastures New to be "dreadful drivel". At this stage of the process it is almost impossible to see the wood for the trees, and I know from my editing days it is perfectly possible to change something for the worse if you're not careful, so I have gritted my teeth and only changed the Huge Howlers (two characters inexplicably changed names halfway through) and the continuity errors I'd managed to introduce after some severe rewriting. I am hoping the end result is nowhere as bad as it feels right now. I have lost all sense of emotion attached to the book, which is wierd when you consider that I was so immersed in their story at one point I actually cried at a scene I'd written. But I guess, as Surallen would say, it's part of the process...

The one bit of the book though, that I do remain inordinately proud of is the dancing scenes. I think they do work, and writing them was an absolute blast.

In my real life we recently took the children to see the Sound of Music which was appropriate because Emily is a huge fan. I was labouring under the delusion that you can quote from songs in books without paying huge copyright fees if you have your characters quote from them, but helas, this has proved not to be the case. I have a scene where Mark comes back drunk having spent an evening with Emily, singing The Hills are Alive... but have had to paraphrase instead.

Watching the thing on stage I was actually quite struck how few songs there are in it, apart from Hills/ How do you solve a problem like Maria?/Doh a deer/Raindrops and roses/ I am sixteen, there isn't alot else. I was hoping for a bit more dancing too. Last year we went to see Mary Poppins and the dancing was stunning. The only bit of dancing in this is when Maria and the captain dance and fall in love. Which would have worked brilliantly except that I didn't believe there was an ounce of compatibility between them up to that point. The script though is wonderful, as they suddenly realise how they really feel about each other, and the dance itself was executed beautifully.

It wasn't quite as good as Mary Poppins, but we did enjoy it and Summer Strallen makes a worthy successor to Connie Fisher.

On which note I leave you with this, the hilarious trailer for How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria? which we never got round to watching (though we've followed Jodie's journey to being Nancy avidly).

Enjoy....

Come Dancing....

I am a big fan of the Kinks, but that was my least favourite song of theirs before going to see Ray Davies live last year (he was magic), and hearing him tell the story about writing it as a result of watching his sister going out dancing when he was growing up. It struck me then, that somewhere along the line with the advent of pop music and culture, we lost something with regards to dancing.

When I was eighteen my parents had their silver wedding anniversary. After a sit down dinner, my parents and their peers took to the floor to do a waltz. I remember watching my dad gliding my mum around the room in awe. I had had no idea they could do that, and was dead envious. But when I was growing up Come Dancing was a programme that was laughed out of touch. If you'd expressed an interest in learning how to do it, people would have thought you were bonkers.

So hats off to Strictly Come Dancing for reviving interest in ballroom dancing, and providing such brilliant research material too boot. Since I've been writing Strictly Love, I've watched dozens of the dances on You Tube to get a flavour of how the pros do it, and help me set the scene of the book. This samba from Mark Ramprakash and Kara Tointon for Sports Relief is one of my favourites. I do hope Kara gets to be in the next series of SCD on the back of it...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPXtiVR82E4

As well as watching a lot of videos on You Tube, I also watched some online dancing classes, and had several seriously odd moments when I was listening to a Texan called Hank describing how to do Cuban Motion and trying it out in my not exactly huge study. I also got the chance to meet Izabela Hannah, who is a pro from one of the early SCD series who helped me out enormously.

I have just finished the second rewrites on Strictly Love, and hope I have succeeded in making the dancing scenes credible. I did reread Katie and Rob's rumba while listening to Body Heat (the correct version this time), and I think it works...

Though I am done with the book, I am definitely not done with dancing, and will still be blogging about it. I also hope that given my inability to get to any dance classes conveniently I can persuade my reluctant husband to practise with the dvds I bought, also for research. On the other hand, the attempt I made to follow it with the children were fairly disastrous. So maybe not...

So now I have to get on with book three, provisionally titled Last Christmas, which among other things features a shepherd. Hmm. And I though the research for Strictly Love was challenging...

The Doctor Dances

I've been a bit busy of late, what with second round of rewrites for Strictly Love an absurd Easter holiday/Spring Break which meant the children stopped school for Easter, started again and have now been off a week. So blogging time has been severely limited. This state of affairs looks likely to continue till next week. So... As the new Dr Who season is upon us, I thought I'd post this to keep you entertained in my absence.

Enjoy....

I would also like to point out here that all my favourite Dr Who episodes (The EmptyChild/The Doctor Dances; The Girl in the Fireplace; Blink) have been written by one Stephen Moffat. And I ahem share his surname albeit with an extra t, and as I married a Williams I don't use the previous moniker quite so often... But we Moffatt/Moffats should stick together. And as my children would say. His episodes rock.