Monday, January 7, 2013

I'm back!

Happy 2013 y'all!  Blimey! I hope you weren't holding your breath for instalment number two. If you were...breathe in, now, quickly.

Well, what did happen next? What happened next was that I sent off my completed 22 chapters to Summersdale who commissioned the book. God, I hope they like the rest of it as much.  It's actually quite daunting being commissioned on the basis of an incomplete book (yes, I know that sounds horribly patronising when so many people are flogging themselves half to death to get published) because there is always the worry that they'll read the rest and thing, 'well, that's a load of crap.' Then what? Hopefully that's not going to happen but I'll be very pleased to get it back for the next edit.

People that have followed the incredibly journey of this story from my old French blog will know that I had an agent a few years back who wanted me to write a counter-intuitive book about life in France. However, from my experiences with the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph, I had discovered that, whatever we might like to believe, in general people don't like to think you are writing about them, even if you aren't, and I wasn't, so I had a major problem writing the sort of book the agent wanted. In the end we agreed to part company for a while so I could work out how best I was happy to write the book.

In the end, I wrote a book that was part real life, part fiction. The people that feature in it aren't real people, they are amalgamations of many people I met, both in France and elsewhere. No doubt, there will be those who will scrutinise every single word looking for themselves in the book but I'm afraid they are in for a disappointment.

In some ways, the book has gone full circle now as it's being published as a fictionalised travel memoir. Some of it happened, some of it happened but not exactly in the way that I've written it and some of it didn't happen at all. The reader can decide - and they may well be surprised. As a travel memoir, I've now become the central character although it's not the me of today, rather it's elements of the me of my twenties, who was far more fun. That led to some other problems, for me at least. The mother in the book was a put-upon 1950s wife, who had given up everything for her husband and his career, only to have him leave her for a younger woman. That couldn't be further from the truth for my parents, who have been happily married for over fifty years and my mother is one of the most inspirational people I've ever met; a woman who challenged the constrictions of the time and refused to accept that a woman's place is in the home.

And then there was the sex.  I doubt that E L James's teenage sons whooped with joy when their mother wrote a soft porn novel and likewise, my own children would be far from amused at reading bedroom antics with their mother as the central character. So I toned it down. I didn't remove it completely, it's two thirds love story apart from anything else, but I made it more acceptable to my teenage kids.

And then there was the title.  I'd chosen not only the title of a book that already existed, but one that the same publisher had brought out a few years ago, so that clearly wouldn't do. I had a poll among my Facebook friends and it became, briefly, Everything's Coming Up Rosé before we finally settled on 'L'Amour Actually,' thought up by my friend Victoria, who will not get a thank you in the acknowledgements.  I've now seen proofs of the book cover, which is fab, and we've been hard at work producing marketing material for Waterstones, which was needed much earlier than originally thought.

So, for the past two months I've been on a writing marathon with little time for anything else - and the perfect excuse to avoid doing the ironing. It's not a healthy occupation, this writing though, sitting on your backside eating biscuits instead of healthy meals and delegating all physical activity to other members of the family. The end result is I have a fine case of  Writer's Arse, characterised by a strange increase in the size of the derriere due to inactivity. Now that the final manuscript is in, it's time to try and shed the stone I've put one while I've been writing it. Yes, one whole stone! Shocking.  I have a family wedding in 18 weeks and if I'm not going to look like a giant citrus fruit in my lime green dress, I must take myself in hand and get fighting the Writing Flab. Wish me luck.

I'll be back soon to have a little chat about negotiating contracts.



I'm doomed......!

3 comments:

  1. I'm doomed too. I sit at a computer all day at work.

    Good to hear the book is progressing well. Happy New Year!

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  2. Crikey, no wonder you've been silent! Everything seems to be progressing very excitingly. Do you have a publication date yet?

    I'm doomed too. Since I started blogging I've put back on a stone of the two I so laboriously lost when i retired. Sigh...

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  3. Sounds like giving birth to a book has the same affect on the body as childbirth.

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