josephinetalepeddler – Tale Peddler - Josephine Pennicott

Bluebells, Stone Circles and Haunted Woods

josephinetalepeddlerMay 2, 2017 5 Comments

We have spent Easter taking our twelve-year-old daughter to England for the first time. I’ve returned with bluebell fields, stone circles, wishing trees, blue skies, gorse and spring flowers bursting within me. And, an idea for another book, which hopefully I’ll be able to start soon.

London Called & we Answered

England always feels as if I’m returning home. My ancestor Adam Pennicott was sent to Tasmania as a convict (after time served at dreaded Bermuda penal colony). I always feel emotional returning to England. Apart from the fact that the country is part of my DNA, I grew up on a steady diet of English culture from Thames TV shows and many English books and magazines, in particular, Enid Blyton books, and so England always does feel (as a fellow writer, also on holidays in England, said) like the ‘Mother Country’. I had to to drag my daughter (a product of a more American-influenced childhood) home. She was just as emotional about having to leave as her Anglophile mother.

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This trip was especially magical. Daisy is a huge Harry Potter fan, and we toured the Warner Bros studio, spending seven hours marvelling over the talent behind the scenes of the HP movies.

I also managed to procure tickets to The Cursed Child parts One and Two, which is booked out until 2018. I just rocked up to the box office and asked the magical-looking ticket-seller if there was any chance of tickets (I feel forever grateful to this man; in my mind, he will be forever magical). By some synchronistic timing – read MIRACLE – someone had returned three tickets (for both parts, and on the only day we could attend) MOMENTS beforehand. Normally people queue in anticipation of any returned tickets on the day or vie for them online. The expression on my daughter’ s face when I walked out saying I had tickets for both shows was unforgettable.

TICKETS TO CURSED CHILD

I’d been working on manifesting that one from Australia for awhile. It was one of those Charlie wins the ticket to the Chocolate Factory moments.

THE CURSED CHILD

I’ve vowed to #keepthesecrets but the show itself is incredible.

KEEP THE SECRETS

The audience were all on their feet, cheering at the end to give a well-deserved standing ovation to the cast. My friend at the box-office said the show will be around for a very long time, so if you’re planning a trip to the UK, try to see it!

LOST GARDENS OF HELIGAN

Equally as magical was The Lost Gardens of Heligan. I’ve always longed to tiptoe past the Sleeping Giants and see the walled gardens of this secret garden. Seeing it in Spring was beautiful but I suspect Winter or any of the seasons would be perfect.

BOSCASTLE

We returned to Boscastle in Cornwall and I spent many happy hours in The Witchcraft Museum. I love this unique Museum for its vast, informative collection of British Esoteric objects and Folklore.

cornwall boscastle

Boscastle is my spiritual home in England. I feel a deep affinity to the Cornish sea and landscape and there is something enchanted about that village! We’ve had mystical experiences with toads and people in its twisted, narrow laneways. It’s the sort of village where celebrities like Johnny Depp visit the Witchcraft Museum, without fuss and everybody is treated equally. It was in Boscastle that I heard the strong siren-call of another book. This one is a mythical fantasy which should please the readers who still ask if I ever intend to do another fantasy book. I’ve always believed that fantastical books call you when the time is right, and an idea has been nagging at me since Cornwall, although an early idea had come to me in London as well.

wistman's woods

But I also love the moors and I really enjoyed visiting Dartmoor for the first time, to make a pilgrimage to mysterious Wistman’s Wood, a prehistoric woodland, one of Britain’s oldest oak groves, where Druids hold sacred rituals and there are legends about hounds haunting the moors and other eerie tales. Despite its reputation of being one of Dartmoor’s most haunted places, I found Wistman’s Woods a peaceful place and I even did my Transcendental Meditation on a large rock in the middle of the grove. Being amongst the gnarled, dwarf oak trees and large stones was atmospheric. I loved our long walk across the moors with the bright gorse. It reminded me of my childhood in the midlands of Tasmania with the spectacular views. I could hear Emily Bronte in my mind.

MOORS WALK

No Coward Soul Is Mine

BY EMILY BRONTË

No coward soul is mine

No trembler in the world’s storm-troubled sphere

I see Heaven’s glories shine

And Faith shines equal arming me from Fear

O God within my breast

Almighty ever-present Deity

Life, that in me hast rest,

As I Undying Life, have power in Thee

Vain are the thousand creeds

That move men’s hearts, unutterably vain,

Worthless as withered weeds

Or idlest froth amid the boundless main

To waken doubt in one

Holding so fast by thy infinity,

So surely anchored on

The steadfast rock of Immortality.

With wide-embracing love

Thy spirit animates eternal years

Pervades and broods above,

Changes, sustains, dissolves, creates and rears

Though earth and moon were gone

And suns and universes ceased to be

And Thou wert left alone

Every Existence would exist in thee

There is not room for Death

Nor atom that his might could render void

Since thou art Being and Breath

And what thou art may never be destroyed.

Two weeks felt like two months as we experienced so much. I shall upload a few albums on my personal page on Facebook of some the places we visited and I hope to write here about some of the highlights relating to my work, including a special day at Agatha Christie’s holiday home in Greenway. I’ve posted a handful of photos on my Instagram and I shall also be uploading albums to my personal Facebook page. So please connect with me, or friend me there, if you’re interested.

TOURIST SHOT

There’s only one cure for my sadness about such a special holiday being over and that’s to throw myself back into my writing. And begin manifesting the next.

With friends in Avebury on our last day

Boscastle, and ancient Wishing Tree in Avebury, I hope it won’t be too long before the path reunites us.

Don’t forget to sign up for my newsletter if you are interested in my New Moon musings. I haven’t been sending a lot lately as with this Taurus New Moon, I’ve been recovering from all the excitement of my trip. And so I won’t be flooding your inbox, but I do plan to send out my New Moon musings once I settle back in.

Love from Above the Clouds,

Josephine xx

The Locksmith’s Daughter by Karen Brooks

josephinetalepeddlerMarch 24, 2017 0 Comments

Secrets, Lies and Deceptions in Elizabethan England.

Secrets, Lies and Deceptions

‘And if dreams were locks, we’d all possess keys.’

I loved Karen’s The Brewer’s Tale (Harlequin Australia, 2014) so I was looking forward to reading The Locksmith’s Daughter (2016, Harlequin) and it didn’t disappoint.

SEE AND KEEP SILENT

The Locksmith's Daughter

The Plot:

The Locksmith’s Daughter is set in the Elizabethan era, when locks were handmade, not picked up from your local Coles. Mallory Bright, only daughter of Gideon Bright, a locksmith in London, becomes a master locksmith under her father’s tutorage.

SIR FRANCIS WALSINGHAM AND QUEEN ELIZABETH 1

After she runs off with a total cad, Mallory has become a disgraced woman and feels rejected by her emotionally distant mother. Francis Walsingham, protector of Queen Elizabeth 1 (one of the true figures from history that Karen intertwines her fictional novel around) enlists Mallory to engage in spying for him. After Mallory is witness to a public execution of Jesuit priests, she finds herself questioning the work she has been engaged to do. She realises she is entangled into a violent and sinister world, where people she previously trusted, like Sir Francis, may prove to become fatal enemies.

Karen evokes setting so well. You’re transported into Elizabethan London, a world of suspicion and fear ruled by political and religious biases.

This from a scene where The Locksmith’s daughter has just left the fabulously named Seething Lane (a true London lane that Karen visited on her research trip), on an early spying assignment with one of the servants, Casey:

The smell from the butcher’s stalls lining Cheapside was pungent. Blood, offal and all manner of refuse flowed from the tables where freshly slaughtered carcasses were hung on huge hooks to drain or flung upon blocks to be dismembered. The dull thuds of blades hewing through bone and gristle were percussive, interrupted by the loud conversation of the men, their calls to attract custom, the clink of coins and the banter of buyers. In the dark alleyways and ginnels, the plaintive bleats of animals could be heard, as if they knew what was in store. I maintained a stoic expression and forged ahead, as if it were my practice to pound these streets each day, seek out fare for my household and barter with a ruddy-faced and grime-covered butcher.

I was glad when we reached the conduit and turned into Walbrook Street. Casey steered me into the smaller lanes, away from the press of bodices, carts and horsemen, taking us past St Pancreas. Vendors stood beside stalls or outside shops crying out their wares; women lifted ripe fruit from laden baskets, tempting passerbys with cries of ‘oranges and lemons’, ‘apples for sale’; strings of onions dangled, plump radishes, grey oysters, drooping coneys and pigeons by the brace. Still others sold ribbons, lace, cloth, iron nails and candles.’

Character descriptions of people, both fictional and historical are also deftly done. Consider here this portrayal of the Queen:

Her Majesty was nothing but a grotesque parody of womanhood. Wrinkled like a beldame, she was stick thin, her flesh capturing the power and creams in which she was liberally doused. Her whitened cheeks were sunken, her dark eyes were cold and lifeless stones that scoured the people at her feet but didn’t see them. The brows arched above her deep-set eyes were almost non-existent. God forgive me, but the men who set such store by my Queen’s grace and beauty were either bewitched or engaged in gross falsehoods.

Only her hands, one clasping an elegant fan, the other raising the pomander to her nose, suggested something of these lyrical descriptions. They were long-fingered, creamy, be-ringed and elegant.

Warning! – there are some very graphic stomach-turning scenes. One was when Mallory drags her friend Caleb to witness the execution of the priest Campion and his conspirators who are executed publicly with evisceration. This scene is really shocking as Brooks doesn’t hold back on any of the gruesome details. Karen, really makes you feel as if you’re witnessing the execution.

Karen writes about the effect of the execution on Mallory:

I’d seen death before, many times. Mamma’s wee babes, precious little scraps of bloody flesh that never breathed. When Goody Kat next door died, I helped prepare her body. Oft-times, the poor passed where they slept, propped against a house or church only to be found once their skin was cold, their eyes opaque, the following morning. The streets were littered with dead animals: cats, dogs, butcher’s refuse, rats, their corpses pecked by hungry birds. Then there were the plague carts rumbling through the lanes, the white-blue limbs of the dead jutting from beneath the cloths thrown over their indignity. Aye, death haunted the sky and our lives the way the mist did the winter morns.

Equally disturbing are the scenes where Mallory is tortured in the Tower of London by sexual sadist, Richard Topcliffe. Having visited the Tower of London, it’s too easy to imagine the cruelty that people endured within its stone walls. Topcliffe was, horrifyingly, a real person and claimed a friendship with Queen Elizabeth, even boasting the Monarch allowed him to touch her breasts. The mention of his name evoked terror, but he was protected and even given his own torture chamber in his house to ply his trade. He was described as a ‘cruel creature, who thirsted for the blood of Catholics’. Chillingly enough, Karen says in her detailed Author notes, that the descriptions of Mallory’s encounter with the sadist can’t match the real reports on some of the depravities he inflicted upon women.

Seething Lane Skulls

All of the characters are complex, with shades of shadow and light. The anti-hero, Nathaniel is a pirate figure and a very endearing rogue. Mallory isn’t some unblemished maiden but is a fully fleshed out woman with a murky past.

Karen writes a detailed Author’s Note at the end describing how she combined fictional and factual characters. Her inspirations and very thorough research make for fascinating reading. I loved discovering more about the locks themselves in the story and the often deadly poisons and traps within the locks used in the Elizabethan era. The spying trips that Mallory embarks on, are also suspense-filled.

A really engrossing historical read containing meticulous attention to research but is also a page-turning story to lose yourself in.

The website of Karen Brooks HERE

Happy New Year 2016

josephinetalepeddlerDecember 31, 2016 0 Comments

Hello, I’ve just finished a yearly tarot reading on my deck on New Year’s Eve and the Magician card made a welcome reappearance and also the Hermit card is the year’s overall theme card. I’m feeling good about 2017 after the Beast of 2016.

tarot-reading-for-new-years-eve

happy-new-year-two

Wishing you and your loved ones, a Happy New Year. If you’ve been doing it tough in 2016, I raise a glass to you tonight. Thank you for your support of my writing this year. May a thousand Bluebirds of Joy bring you happiness in 2017.

happy-new-year-four

Love, Light and Moonshine

Josephine xx

Magicians and Hermits

josephinetalepeddlerDecember 30, 2016 2 Comments

Hello,

Thank you for your support of my online journal this year and also to those who signed up to my newsletter. Hopefully in 2017, I’ll actually send out a ‘proper’ newsletter. I also aim to return to my Rhino interview series, and review more books online that I read, but I’m the mother of an eleven-year-old girl with limited time and I’ll always prefer to put my energy into creating my tales.

It has been a beast of a year for so many, including my family, but I’ve continued writing throughout all the chaos. I finished The Secret Echoes, my mystery novel set in Tasmania.

This book is set between three time periods of 1800s, 1920s and 1950s and shows the impact on a Tasmanian riverside village in 1949, when the town’s most beautiful girl is murdered. I also am halfway through a psychological thriller which is an idea I’ve nursed for several years. This book has been coming out very quickly and I’m trying to let that process happen. Here’s a tarot reading I did one morning in a query to my current work. I loved its potent accuracy – the Magician and the Hermit.

My daughter is starting high school next year and we have a couple of holidays planned. We will return to our much loved Heron Island and we’re also heading to London for a family short break, which I’m excited about.

If 1916 was also a painful and tumultuous year for you, take heart from the J.K Rowling’s Twitter feed who posted a series of twelve tweets in response to followers who were experiencing really tough times: “At this time of year, we’re bombarded with images of perfect lives, which bear as little relation to reality as tinsel does to gold. If you’re lucky enough to be with the people you love, warm and safe with enough to eat, I’m sure you feel as blessed as I do. But if your life is currently full of difficulties; if you aren’t where you want to be, either literally or figuratively, remember that extraordinary transformations are possible. Everything changes. Nothing is forever. Thinking back to my worst Christmas, I found it hard to believe that my unhappiness would pass. I was truly afraid of the future. You never know what the future holds. Astonishing reversals of fortune happen every minute. So if you’re sad, or lonely, or bereaved, or ill, separated from your loved ones or in any other way suffering this Christmas, I send you love and wish luck and better times. Millions of us have been where you are now.”

J.K Rowling

I’ve included several photos from the night I did a reading at the atmospheric pop-up venue in Sydney, Stoneleigh 50.

I loved this night and the chance to read from my gothic novel in a setting that looked like Miss Havisham’s attic.

Thank you to everyone who attended and listened so avidly to the readings. Also, to Better Read than Dead bookshop for the invitation and for all they do for Australian authors. It was great to connect with the audience and also fellow authors Sulari Gentill, Anna Westbrook and Alexandra Joel. I am seated next to the wonderful Stephanie Beck, Events and Marketing Manager from Better Read than Dead Bookshop.

It was an enchanted night of mystery, intrigue, plants, wine and storytelling.

There are only a few things I miss about life in Sydney – Better Read than Dead bookshop, my women’s circle at Dickson Street, and the smell of the sea in the air.

One thing that has been positive about 2016 was I’ve never regretted moving to the country. We love our life above the clouds with the silence, birdlife, mists over the valleys, dramatic storms and sparkling mountain air.

My husband took this photo from Govett’s Leap and I posted it on the Solstice. Wishing you on this Capricorn New Moon, all peace, joy and positive vibes for 2017. I think Liz Taylor, as always, provided the inspiration I really needed this year.

15078578_10154034795867621_8973737867959477484_n

Love, Light and Capricorn Moonshine,

Josephine

Dark Places

josephinetalepeddlerDecember 29, 2016 0 Comments

The Days were a clan that mighta lived long

But Ben Day’s head got screwed on wrong

That boy craved dark Satan’s power

So he killed his family in one nasty hour

Little Michelle he strangled in the night

Then chopped up Debby: a bloody sight

Mother Patty he saved for last

Blew off her head with a shotgun blast

Baby Libby somehow survived

But to live through that ain’t much a life

– schoolyard rhyme, circa 1985 from Dark Places

I’m not easily scared by books, but Dark Places had me so terrified by the time I reached the final twist I couldn’t sleep and had to leave lights on.

My heart pounded so hard as I neared the end I thought I was going to have a heart attack. It didn’t help that I read the book late at night, with everyone asleep, on Boxing Day Night.

By the end of the story, I felt my brain needed to take a bath to rid itself of some of the more disturbing images planted by Gillian Flynn. In a lesser writer, Dark Places would have been a grisly story like some 80s slasher film, but Flynn elevates the material she is working with to a book that is gripping, disturbing and heartbreakingly poignant.

The story is narrated in multiple viewpoints alternating between Libby Day in the present day , the survivor of the grisly murder of her mother and two sisters in 1985. Michelle Day, the eldest girl, is strangled. Nine-year-old Debby is killed with an axe and Patty Day, the matriarch is stabbed, hacked and shot as she tries to protect her children. Patty and Ben, Libby’s older brother, relate their points of view in the back story from the time leading up to the Day Family Massacre.

The family’s farm in Kinnakee, Kansas, has been going under along with several others. Patty Day, suffering from depression can barely function or care for her children. Ben, 15, a moody, devil-worshipping, heavy-metal listening misfit, is involved with the wealthy, bad-arse kids at his school. Ben is accused of the murders and seven-year-old Libby’s testimony puts him in gaol.

In the present day thread, twenty-five years later, Libby, in need of money, is contacted by The Kill Club, a group of obsessives who specialise in killings and crimes they wish to solve and role-play. When she first meets with the creepy secret society, Libby rejects the idea that Ben could be innocent. But as she investigates further, she begins to doubt her own statements from the time. She meets several key players from the 80s, who were all involved directly or indirectly with the Day massacres. She travels from strip clubs to abandoned tourist towns in her quest to discover if her brother Ben was really innocent.

This is a book about poverty and how it bankrupts you on all levels. My heart was breaking for Patty, the mother, as she struggled to keep her farm afloat and bring up four children as a single mother. And also her neglected children who have to suffer a myriad of humiliations daily from other children. It also deals with themes of drug use, Satanism, heavy-metal music, farming and under-age sex. The violence is depicted so graphically that I couldn’t read some of the animal torture scenes. It was hard enough to read about a child being axed to pieces while her mother fought to try to save her children with her own fatal injuries.

The tone of the book draws you in. Flynn is a great storyteller and her language is powerful. Her characters are repulsive and dysfunctional but also realistic. There are few likeable characters with most of the children playing dark roles in the tragedy that follows. The only part that fell down for me slightly was when Libby in the present day visits Diondra. I’m still undecided if the book really needed that scene. I found my credibility stretched here as this scene dipped into horror genre territory, but I still awarded Dark Places five stars.

Gillian Flynn on right with Charlize Theron.

Dark Places will haunt you. It’s not a book that you’ll put away and forget, even if you wish you could. I loved it more than Gillian Flynn’s first book Sharp Objects (which I also really enjoyed) and I also preferred it to the more commercially successful Gone Girl. Try to read it in sunshine on a crowded beach so you don’t suffer the same experience I put myself through. But I do think I have to re-enter the Darkspace of Dark Places to examine how devious, dark and twisty Flynn managed to pull it all off.

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood.” Libby Day

Mystery, Intrigue, Wine, Plants and Storytelling

josephinetalepeddlerNovember 15, 2016 0 Comments

Hello, if you enjoy mystery, intrigue, wine, plants and storytelling, I am appearing next Tuesday
evening, 22nd November, (along with fellow writers Anna Westbrook, Alexandra Joel and Sulari Gentill) at the incredibly atmospheric Stoneleigh 50 (Chippendale, near Central Station, Sydney).

The Pinot Noir Study Room at Stoneleigh 50

Presented by Better Read Than Dead bookshop, this special event combines wine-tasting with authors reading from their own works – I’ll be doing an excerpt from Currawong Manor.

Really looking forward to being part of such a special evening. Places are limited – so if this sounds like something you would enjoy, please come along. Tickets can be booked here:

Swans, Secrets and Shadows

josephinetalepeddlerOctober 7, 2016 2 Comments

It is the school holidays. I’m the first awake as my family were all up late last night. My eleven-year-old girl read The Cursed Child in bed with a torch till past midnight. She has re-read this book over ten times since we bought it for her. J.K Rowling’s world has meant to much to her over the years, just as Enid Blyton formed my childhood joy and provided solace in tough times.

Outside, the weather is bleak and a wind blows hard, making the trees shake around the house. We are hoping for snow to fall in the Blue Mountains, despite the fact we are now in October. Snowfalls are still possible in early Spring when you live above the clouds.

It was vastly different weather conditions in January, 2014, when I sat by the river in Richmond, Tasmania, on a family holiday watching the golden sunlight and the shadows dapple and form patterns on the water.

As with several of my books, an image came to me as swans glided past. I was luxuriating in the peace of the convict-built bridge and village – a place so seemingly tranquil, but which contained shadows.

The scene that came to me was of a young man sitting by the river writing a note, confessing to a crime he believes he is guilty of. Two girls rowing a boat on the water sing ‘Buttons and Bows’ and suddenly the serenity of the sleepy Tasmanian hamlet is shattered when one of the girl’s oars snags on a floating body.

This was the beginning of The Secret Echoes, which I just finished this week. From the very start, I knew it would contain certain elements: the golden Tasmanian sunshine and mellow light, a bridge that harboured secrets, a supposed ghost that haunted the bridge, letters, a poison-pen writer, the death of the town’s most popular golden girl. Swans, secrets and shadows. I couldn’t wait to start writing to discover who the body was in the river and whether the boy confessing to the crimes was as guilty as he believed. The working title of the book was Sweetwater.

As the book progressed those elements remained but it took an unexpected journey. I always knew I wanted to set it in the 1950s, but a 1920s thread also felt strong and a few months into writing, a fairly minor character in the 1880s became increasingly insistent to be featured more. This put the book back about six months, as I had to put it aside to research 1800s Australia before I felt confident about being able to portray this headstrong character and her life and times.

My journal entry for August, 2014 records I had just begun the first draft.

I could not have conceived at that time how dramatically different my life would be from that day I began the opening scene. My family faced several major challenges: we moved house from the city to the country. In our city life we had to deal with bullying developers, bullying children (and their even worse bullying mothers) and a health diagnosis for one member of our family that was shattering.

But throughout the chaos, I kept returning to the book and although it took me a few months longer than planned, I was delighted to finish the final segment, Wattle Dreaming, this week of The Secret Echoes.

secret-echoes-is-finished

I hope it makes it way with confident strong legs out into the world and finds a readership. With the New Moon (the Black Moon) just having passed us, I made wishes and blessings for its journey. And I’m excited to begin the next book, which has been calling impatiently to me for years.

Love and Light,

From above the clouds,

Josephine

Call Me

josephinetalepeddlerJuly 25, 2016 0 Comments

Research music for a Monday morning. #amwriting

http://https://youtu.be/StKVS0eI85I

Paula Hawkins in Angel Place

josephinetalepeddlerJune 6, 2016 2 Comments

I love a publishing story where an author has worked hard on their craft for years and then breaks though in some Charlie & The Chocolate Factory scenario. Even though I know there’s often another story behind the official story in publishing, I still find massive inspiration in their journey. I’m always impressed by those writers who never give up. I began my Ride the Rhino Series on this journal, to hopefully inspire creatives with similar stories of determination and resilience. Yes, I know Ride the Rhino went quiet for awhile, because I moved to the country and my own book deadlines, but it is returning. Resilience is vital for a writer. It’s a tough business and you do need the soul of a rose and the hide of a rhino.

image of Paula Hawkins via The Times

On Saturday 21st May, I travelled down the mountain to Angel Place in Sydney to see Paula Hawkins, whose psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train, was a New York Times bestseller, selling in the millions in the US ALONE, as a guest of The Sydney Writers’ Festival.

Angel Place’s uplifting bird installation.

Foreign rights for The Girl on the Train have been sold in 34-plus countries, and a movie by Dreamworks, will be released in October this year through Universal Studio.

Because I’m so busy with my current book and because I now reside above the clouds, I could only commit to one panel at this festival. But I didn’t want to miss Paula because I love her inspiring story.

I become the girl on the train.

For those who couldn’t make it, I have written out some of my notes from the talk. It was recorded for ABC Radio National. Please keep in mind that this is my paraphrasing of Paula’s conversation with Kate Evans.

Paula was born in Zimbabwe and moved to London in 1989. Paula’s early career involved working as a financial journalist. The germ of an idea for The Girl on the Train aspired when Paula’s train broke down and she spent a lot of time looking out of the window at an uninspiring view, hoping something interesting would happen – but it never did.

She always had a hankering to tell stories.

Paula wrote several other books (‘chick-lit’) under a pseudonym, Amy Silver. These books were good training and sold reasonably well, but she didn’t feel her heart and soul were in them. She’s not that interested in romantic comedy and had always wanted to explore darker psychological territory. Her fourth Amy Silver book bombed, selling under 1000 copies.

Her agent was very supportive and pushed her to do the thriller that Paula said she always wanted to write. The agent also encouraged her to bring in a secondary character from one of the Amy books she had liked a lot, who drank. The agent thought that character had legs and was going to go far, and so they put ‘the drunken girl on the train’.

Paula at this stage was feeling totally wretched about her career. She was in debt and had to borrow money off her father, which was dispiriting at her age. All that misery went into writing The Girl on the Train.

She wanted the reader to think they knew the character, and then as they progress through the book realise they don’t know the character at all.

The rhythm of the train journey gave the book its structure.

She was interested in the memory loss from drinking. Also, that drinking can give you blackouts and make you vulnerable.

Paula believes you don’t have to like a character, but you do have to find them compelling.

Difficult women tend to be interesting characters. Women traditionally have been told to be compliant. Paula, however, is not interested in writing about meek docile, pleasing people.

For the structure, she mapped out the book starting with Rachel’s voice, then Megan.

When Paula began talking about Megan, she started gesticulating with her hands and became very animated.

There were lots of timelines that had to correlate and it was in the writing that the architecture of the story formed.

She did know ‘whodunit’, but she had to work out the rest as she wrote. She talked about how thriller-writing is about pace, and drip-feeding key bits of information at different points.

With The Girl on the Train, it was as if anyone could have done it. She wanted a Hitchockian feeling to the book and an atmosphere of paranoia and self-doubt.

Writers influential for Paula include: Agatha Christie initially for her ingenious plots. Kate Atkinson for her believable characters. Pat Barker, Cormac McCarthy (who can say in ten words what most of us would take pages to say). Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller is a favourite book of Paula’s.

There were misogynist accusations against her, and Gillian Flynn as well for Gone Girl. Paula said nobody accused Brett Ellis of being a misogynist for American Psycho. It’s understood he’s writing a character and not saying that all men are like that.

Her current book is more difficult to write, because of more demands on her time, such as this very talk. It takes you out of the head of the character that you’re with when you’re having discuss a book you wrote years before. It becomes a disjointed process and a new pressure is a readership around the world waiting for the new book, which will be a psychological thriller concerning sisters and memory. She is interested in the different perceptions siblings have of shared events in their lives. It deals with family, memory, and our sense of self.

When it was time for questions from the floor the questions concerned such topics as:

Techniques applied when writing The Girl on the Train that she could share.

Paula replied: short chapters, always leaving each chapter on a note – even just a line that left the reader intrigued. Paula had never done any courses in fiction writing. Her agent, however, was a real help as she isn’t just about taking her cut of the money but is also interested in the editorial side of a book. Paula made the point that it’s incredibly difficult to write a novel (especially a first novel) without some editorial help.

There was also a question about her daily writing routine. Paula’s reply was that when the book is going well it’s a wonderful feeling. When it’s going badly it’s appalling. There is always a point in every book she writes when she sits at the desk and sobs.

She was also asked about her feelings regarding the movie version (starring Emily Blunt) which unlike the book is set in America. Paula said she’s not as upset as some of her readers and that the movie is a different format to the book. She thinks the movie, which features very pretty white-picket-fences location of the commute into a US city, will be equally, if not more visually interesting than the more gritty English look (which I was visualising as I read The Girl on the Train) as it represents the darkness beneath the pretty façade.

Personally, although I love the casting of Emily Blunt, I would’ve preferred the original setting for this book. To me The Girl on the Train’s appeal was its very Englishness. It was reminiscent of that great English eccentric Alfred Hitchcock, and also Agatha Christie’s 4.50 From Paddington where Miss Marple’s friend Mrs McGillicuddy witnesses a murder as she travels on her train. A 1961 movie, Murder She Said, was based upon 4.50 from Paddington.

Some of my take-aways from Paula’s talk. I already know these, but it always helps to have them emphasised again:

‘Failure’ is not necessarily a negative. If her ‘chick-lit’ had sold through the roof, Paula would be under pressure to continue writing them and we would never have had The Girl on the Train.

Write to your strengths and your influences. If your heart isn’t in romantic comedies, then go where the passion and drive is leading you.

A good agent is essential. Not someone who is going to show you the door if your first books don’t sell, but someone who is prepared to support you as you find your voice, and also offers editorial support if needed.

Characters that might be secondary in one book could have life and wonderful legs if used again, so be open to characters wanting their own book and space to breathe.

Nothing is ever wasted. No experience is unimportant or seemingly ‘negative’. If your train breaks down, don’t just browse your Facebook page. Stare out of the window and get really bored because that perfect idea might be lurking hoping to grab your attention. Don’t miss it through overstimulation of your brain and a stranger’s status update. JK Rowling would testify to that one as well.

Twitter can be a writer’s friend. This endorsement tweet from Stephen King would have helped propel The Girl on the Train’s massive success.

THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, by
Paula Hawkins: really great suspense novel. Kept me up most of the night. The
alcoholic narrator is dead perfect.

And finally:

Never Give Up

I hope you enjoyed reading my notes from Paula’s talk. Please share with any kindred spirits you feel might be interested. It’s obviously so much better to see the author talk in person and Paula said a lot more on the day which I missed here as I was so interested listening (which is exactly how it should be). I am really looking forward to Paula’s next book and also the movie version of The Girl on the Train

http://https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOuKLtSVFcY

Wisdom from The Company of Wolves

josephinetalepeddlerMay 27, 2016 0 Comments

Little girls, this seems to say / Never stop upon your way / Never trust a stranger friend / No-one knows how it will end / As you’re pretty, so be wise / Wolves may lurk in every guise / Now as then, ’tis simple truth / Sweetest tongue has sharpest tooth.

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Granny: Your only sister, all alone in the wood, and nobody there to save her. Poor little lamb.

Rosaleen: Why couldn’t she save herself?

Rosaleen: And then they lived happily ever after?

Granny: Indeed they did not!

Rosaleen: Is that all you left of her? Your kind can’t stomach hair, can you? Even if the worst wolves are hairy on the inside.