About my latest novel….

I’m about 90% through writing my latest novel. It’s been a real challenge for me as my main character is ‘sympathetic’, as women’s fiction marketeers like to call someone who we all can feel a bit sorry for. On the other hand, I have tried to write ‘Bridget Jones with a Backbone’ to plug the gaping gap in the market for someone who is proactive and has issues which she is fully capable of dealign with.

The novel is called ‘More Than One Way To Skin A Cat’ and is about a girl called Clementine who starts steeped in superficial shallowness and ends up with a man. What’s new about that, I hear you ask? Sounds like any other piece of fluffy fiction. But, you see, with Clementine there’s something else. In fact quite a lot of things.

Clementine is adamant that she has no baggage. Or has she? She’s struggling with her mother who has had plastic surgery, her dad who speaks only in cliches and she finds her estranged sister on her doorstep. Or, rather, in her new boyfriend’s shrine to his ex. Oh, and she’s terribly horny. She organises her love life via a list that pre-selects the qualities her next man should possess. She has a best friend and a male friend. She’s needy, but not desperate.

The reason that it was difficult for me to write Clementine sympathetic is her sexual appetite. She makes no apologies for enjoying her own body and her relationships are half heart, half head but grounded in her sex. In some ways this sets her aside from my previous MC’s who have avoided sex, wheras Clementine actively seeks it and sometimes craves it above love. Yet she is slightly naive. Initially, she thinks that all relationships are happy-ever-after coupledom. She gradually learns that all the couples she knows are embedded in a long running war of attrition with each other for reasons she could never have ordinarily guessed.

Her family’s quest to find her sister Charlotte uncovers deep rooted feeling and emotions that finally free Clementine from the straight jacket of her list of criteria for her men.

I’ve enjoyed writing this novel as it’s given me a chance to explore how romantic love has parallels with non-romantic love and how, even when someone leaves our lives, a shadow of them remains both tangibly and ethereally.

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