Read more about her at her PRESS RELEASE.

 

Frequently asked dinner party questions

 

(as seen at the Lilydale and Wheelers Hill libraries February 2007)

 

 

 

 

HOW DID YOU BECOME AN AUTHOR?

 

 

 

 

I always loved writing.  From girly fairy stories in primary school to angsty poetry in high school, lyrics at University and screenplays in the year after, writing was something I did.   Though it never occurred to me that I would make a living at it.

 

I did a double English Lit major at university then fell into the world of film and TV after Uni.  Writing scrips in my spare time.  Acting a little.  Dancing a little.  Production managing a little.    But it never really took.  I didn’t have the drive that I knew some of my friends had to make it in such a cutthroat business.

 

I love watching movies, but I love reading more.  So one day, for the fun of it, I sat down, opened up a fresh word file and instead of writing “Scene One” I wrote “Chapter One” and it felt like I had put on the most comfortable pair of slippers after wearing too small high heels for ten years.

 

That first ever book was a romance.  It wasn’t by choice it just kinda happened.  I just wrote to see if I could.  And after I became enamoured of the characters, clichéd and two-dimensional and melodramatic as they were, I wrote it to see what happened.  I had to know not if they’d make it in the end, because I am such a mush there was no way that wouldn’t  happen, but HOW.  Which is really why we read anything.  The journey to the end.

 

Lily and Luke’s story now resides in the very bottom of a dusty box somewhere in my house and as a password protected file on my computer.  It’s terrible.  Really really awful.  But I discovered with that book that I could finish a book.  Writing all the way to THE END is a huge step for any would be writer.  Most get to chapter three and run out of steam.  But I had a story.

 

It gave me the confidence to try again. And my second book was better.  Much better.  By that stage I did my research.  I found out that my book was just the right length for a Mills and Boon.  Books I had read since I was a teenager, crawling under my grandmother’s bed for bags of books to take home to devour all summer long.   I took notes on the query process.  And that you don’t need an agent.  Big plus! I was terrified enough of sending of a synopsis to a publisher but an agent?  A middle man who could tell me my writing sucked?  Forget about it.

 

 

I also joined the Romance Writers of Australia, and through them found the requisite amount of guts to just do it, I sent a chatty letter and a partial – the first three chapters of a book I had entitled ‘Wishin’ and Hopin’ to Harlequin in London.  You’ve got to be in it to win it right?

 

Several months later – yes several MONTHS – I received a letter requesting the full manuscript.  I had been hoping not to get a form rejection letter!  Or maybe even a page of advice!    This was “not an offer to buy” just an offer to read the rest of the book.  A book I had not finished.  (This is against advice you would hear from anybody in the industry mind you.)

 

So I took the next month to finish it – figuring since  it had taken them several months to read the thing in the first place, it would be okay to send them the best book I could not the fastest.  A month later I posted the completed manuscript to the editor in London.  Posted.  That’s like $50 postage.  Eek!  I still remember watching the lady behind the counter take my package away and literally feeling like I wanted to throw up.  I had cold sweats and the shakes.  It was that terrifying – thinking somebody out there would soon be reading a book I had written.  Crazy, ridiculous and terrifying.  What was I thinking?

 

I didn’t hear back for months.  Yep.  Again with the months.  Then on Wednesday the 29^th of January 2003 the phone rang.  “This is Bryony Green from Mills and Boon in London,” she said.

 

I think I might have said “Uh-huh” a lot while furiously taking notes.  She had revision requests.  Could I get them back to her within the next week?  I was working full-time at the time. But of course I could get them back to her in two days!  If she’d asked for them overnight I would have agreed.

 

The next I heard from her was an email asking if I was home.  She sent it Friday morning her time.  I got it Saturday morning my time.  Thus by the time I got the message it was too late.  I had to wait the longest weekend of my life, knowing she wouldn’t get my panicked “call me any time day or night” email until Monday evening our time.

 

10pm Monday evening, the phone rang.  I let it ring three times before casually picking up the phone with a frantically shaking hand.  After what felt like hours of pleasantries Bryony made an offer to buy my first book, THE WEDDING WISH.  My husband claims I leapt so high off the chair, punching my fist in the air I hit the ceiling.

 

The contract I received in the mail was dated February 14^th.  Valentines Day.  I thought that was kinda nice.

 

Am I typical?  I don’t think there’s any such thing.  Stereotypes are Barbara Cartland with her fluffy white dog and pink feather boa. Harlequin authors are for the large part women, but the others in Melbourne I lunch with monthly have come from every other kind of background imaginable.  One was a physiotherapist, another a statistician, another teaches English as a second language, another was a head research scientist working on cancer cures.  Most are married.  Most are mothers.  Most have enough life experience to be able to have real emotion in their work.  But the common thread is an unstoppable desire to write.

 

 

IS THERE A FORMULA?

 

 

Not as the questions means.

 

Any genre novel has certain expectations.  Or what we in the Biz call “genre promise”.  For romance it is: Boy meets girl through to happy ending.  The same promise can be found in any fairy tale.  Or any romantic comedy movie.  Within those bounds you can do what you like.  But for a book to be in the genre of “romance” it needs those key ingredients.

 

Just as a mystery needs a victim, a crime, a good guy, a bad guy, and the bad guy gets taken down in the end.  Take away any one of these ingredients you could still write a rollicking good book but it simply wouldn’t end up in the mystery aisle at Borders or in your local library.  Popular/genre novels outsell literary by a mile, and you might well miss out on the ready well of readers who want to read that kind of novel.

 

As to the magical Mills and Boon formula, there is no such thing.  Never has been.  I fear somebody somewhere made a tongue in cheek joke about it to a reporter years ago and it stuck.   Many authors have their own set of parameters they like to write by but these are borne of habit, preference, practice, taste, ease, and enjoyment.  Not any down from on high set of rules.

 

Within Australia Harlequin novels are colour-coded.  These colours differentiate sub-genres, which have their own “promise” just as there are popular sub-genres of movies and TV shows.  Harlequin publish medicals (like ER), action-adventure (like Alias of Buffy), love affairs across a lifetime (like The Notebook), traditional romances (like any old Meg Ryan movie – my books are baby blue), and sexier romances (in Australia these books have the red covers and are the best-selling across the world).  Again this all goes back to promise.

 

Different readers have different tastes and the colour-coding makes the satisfaction of those tastes easier.  Quicker.  I blame marketing ;).

 

 

HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU MAKE?

 

 

Seriously!  I get asked this all the time.

 

This is a strange one.  In all the funky odd jobs I’ve had over my lifetime it’s not a question I was ever asked at dinner parties when meeting someone new.  But since I became an author, I get asked.  And often.

 

My usual answer?  *How much money do you make?

 

But in all honesty I think people don’t think about what they’re saying.  They are just surprised to find that someone like me really exists.  A regular girl with one of those kinds of crazy jobs people want to have when they grow up. ;)  Like an astronaut or a ballet dancer.

 

The long answer?  If you sell a book to a reputable publisher you will be offered a contract.  You will be offered an advance, which can range from $10 from some epublishers, to multi-millions of dollars for the likes of JK Rowling.  Most of us fall somewhere in between.

 

Then, in any boiler plate contract you will be offered royalties against the advance.  Therefore once you have sold enough books to cover your advance you get six monthly royalty checks.  The amount depends entirely on how many books you sell.  JK Rowling and I were likely on the same contract when we both started out.  She sells a trillion times more books than me, therefore earns more money.

 

A fair answer?  A speaker at the Melbourne Writers Festival last year claimed there were 8 writers in Australia who make a living writing novels.  I regularly have lunch with twelve of them.  Writing genre novels you can make a living.  Literary?  Much harder.  Though if I’d kept writing those fair stories I favoured in primary school I might well be a quizzilionaire by now!

 

 

WHERE DO YOU FIND YOUR IDEAS?

 

 

Anywhere and everywhere.  Usually something small and unexpected that tickles my fancy gives me the seed of an idea which then blossoms into characters, a plot and hopefully a fully-fledged story.

 

My last couple of books were born of such simple things as a gelataria brochure, and then a news story that told of restaurants in Brisbane where you have to check your mobile phone at the door and a pool house from 80s movie Cocoon.   I began writing my current release, MEANT-TO-BE MOTHER while on a plane trip to Cairns.  As such the heroine became a flight attendant.  This lazy decision coloured the entire rest of the book.

 

The ideas are the easy part.  The hard part is sitting down at the computer every day and writing 60,000 words of a story you hope thousands of others might read and enjoy.

 

 

CAN ANYONE WRITE A BOOK?

 

 

If that’s something that is burning inside of you to do, my advice is to do as Nike suggests and just do it!  Time waits for no man.  The only way to write a book is to write it.  Start now.  Well not now, but when you get home.  No excuses.  Open a word file and just go.   Don’t think you need plots and character arcs and timelines and back stories all worked out in your head beforehand.  The fun is discovering all of that as you go.  The surprises along the way, the twists and turns even you don’t see coming are the beauty and the magic of writing a book.

 

To give yourself a fighting chance a couple of hints?

 

Nanowrimo is one way to give yourself a good head start.  In November hundreds of thousands of people who’ve never written a book sit down to write a book in a month.  Nanowrimo.org will tell you more.

 

Keep a notebook on or near you at all times.  This way you can write down any ideas you may have so that by the time you get to your computer you won’t have forgot.  Because you WILL forget.  In the same way you forget your dreams.  They fade until you can barely remember if you ever dreamt at all.   I must forget twenty fabulous ideas for every one I am in the right place and right time to remember.

 

If you are looking to sell said book, find out which publishers have published your kind of book recently and check out their website, or call them to find out how they like queries to be sent.  Some will accept email.  Most will only accept via snail mail.  And many will only accept agented submissions.

 

 

WHY ROMANCE?

 

 

I LOVE THE GENRE.  Pure and simple.  I was a mushy teenager with crushes every week.  I love romantic comedy movies best of all.  And it feels like that’s what I’m writing.  Meg Ryan movies in book form.  I’ve read a  million romance novels.  The way they work has permeated.
 

AND FROM A BUSINESS POINT OF VIEW. Writing romance, and in particular writing for Harlequin has so many advantages.  Statistics:

 

·  Last year, Harlequin alone sold over 160 million books worldwide – that’s more than 5 books every second

  

·  Harlequin’s books are sold in over 100 international markets and translated into 23 languages around the world

 

 · Romances accounted for 54.9 percent of mass-market paperback sales in 2005 and 39.3 percent of all fiction sold in North America, which is the world’s biggest fiction market.

 

But I would never encourage anyone to want to become a romance author for the money.  The same way you wouldn’t want to become an actor for the money.  Or a painter.  There is the chance for great success out there but there is more of a chance that you either will never sell, or won’t ever get beyond hobby status.

 

Eg: Harlequin receive around 20,000 unsolicited manuscripts every year.  Unsolicited meaning not including those written by their already contracted authors.  Out of those 20,000, they buy perhaps 30 new authors a year.

 

 

WILL YOU EVER TRY TO WRITE SOMETHING DIFFERENT?

 

 

I’ve attended lectures hosted by criminologists and real life CSI types, because I love watching real life TV shows – Border Patrol. The First 48 Law and Order -  I love reading murder mysteries, but every time I think I might try and write one I realise I’ll have to live with blood and guts, and gore, and horror, and cruelty, and sadness for a good 3-4 months.  But in writing romance I get to live with two gorgeous characters whom I love and like a fly on the wall I can spend my days watching them fall in love.  The choice to write romance is so easy it’s ridiculous.

 

But harking back to the whole sub-genre discussion from earlier, I have always written sweet books.  Traditional romance.  But last year I started writing a book knowing it felt different from anything I’d done before.  It was sassier.   Sexier.  Not the kind of thing they’d publish with a baby blue cover.  I had no idea what this beast might become but I was having so much fun writing it, and I had a couple of months up my sleeve before I had to start my next so I wrote and wrote and wrote.  It was soooo much fun the first 25,000 words were written in one week.

 

I sold that book, GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS, to a brand new line which has launched in Australia a couple of months back called SEXY SENSATION.  Red cover!!!  I never thought I’d see the day.  One of the great stumbling blocks for an author attempting to pour their heart out onto the page is “one day my mum might read this”.  And you can’t imagine how much that can colour your words until you try to write a sex scene.  Phew!  But after writing ten books, I think I had gained confidence, and momentum, , the book wrote itself.  I sold my second book for this same line about a month ago.  Seems I’ve broken free of the “my mum will read this” shackle once and for all.  Though Mum and I have made a pact that my dad will never be told when they hits the shelves in Australia.

 

On another angle, if you do write a book, and sell it, you’d better love the genre.  Because your publisher will want to know there’s more where that came from.  When readers discover a new author, they dive into their backlist looking for more of the same.  New stories, fresh plots, different characters but at the core...more of the same.  It’s that old “promise” chestnut again.

 

John Grisham writes lawyer books.  Tom Clancy international politics. John le Carre spies.  Stephen King horror.  JK Rowling wizards and magic.  Dick Francis horse racing.  And these are guys who have succeeded in a big way.

 

I’ve read almost every book by all of these guys, and if any of them branched out and tried something different, I don’t think I’d be at all happy.  Which is highly unfair but it’s the way things are.  John Grisham branched out with The Painted House, I got about three pages in and said ‘Nuh.  Not what I paid for.’    We as readers only have so much time in our life in which to read.  So we are picky.  And stubborn.  And unforgiving of those who mess with the promise they’ve made us.

 

So if you ever decide to try to sell a book, looking to make a career out of it, be prepared...

 

That said, I’m a never say never kind of gal.  I’ve begun a young adult fantasy, a paranormal time travel trilogy, and a murder mystery set in the surrounds of Boston politics.   If an idea grabs me enough that I simply must take time out from my bread and butter job in order to write a new kind of book I’ll do it.  Not a worry.

 

 

DO YOU SIMPLY WAIT FOR INSPIRATION TO STRIKE?

 

 

When I was first starting to write – you bet.  I would flit from one story to another as the ideas drove me.  In this manner it took me two years to finish my first book.

 

Now that I have deadlines I don’t have that luxury.  I have to treat this like a job.  So I sit down every day and I write.

 

One problem, I have no will power.  Working form home brings distraction such as the television, the internet, the fridge.  I have to be strong.  And to do this when within my office I surround myself with a form of fake inspiration.  I always have a cup of coffee, a bowl of M&Ms, a glass of water at the ready.  I play certain music.  I wear certain comfy clothes.  I have my desk set up in such a way that I want to be there.  And then I hope it’s enough to keep me with my bum on the chair.

 

I have my moments when even that isn’t enough.  About a month ago I had revisions due on a book, and I just couldn’t make myself do it.  My will power had gone away at Christmas time and never come back.  So I put all the television remotes into a bag and made my husband take them to work with him.  It worked.

 

My first book took ~ two years to write because I had all the time in the world in which to write it.  Last year I wrote five books.  It’s a job.

 

 

DOES IT GET EASIER?

 

 

The short answer is kind of.

 

Practice makes perfect.  Or it makes things come more naturally.  Things like story arcs, and internal conflict and black moments and word length and genre promise and all these crazy technique things that come to your attention when you write stories for a living begin to come more easily.   They aren’t forced.

 

I know now that I CAN finish a book.  Which for a fledgling wrier is the biggest hurdle.  The first three chapters are a blast.  You have these two fabulous characters, you throw them into the deep end and wait to see how they pull themselves out, and then you hit the mid-book blues and everything suddenly feels like you are dragging your words through mud to get them onto the page.  After 13 books, I know I can do it.  I know I can do it quickly if needs be.  I know I have enough ideas to sustain me for years. 

 

But having said that every book is different. 

 

Some flow from my fingertips like magic.  GETTING DOWN TO BUSINESS, my first sexier book, was like that, as was my current release MEANT-TO-BE MOTHER.  It was a joy.  The words came easily.  The characters and their internal conflicts were clear to me from day dot.  Yet their actions still surprised me enough to keep each working day interesting.  Lovely lovely fun.  (Though I may well have blocked the bad days from my mind ;))

 

On the flip-side while writing book five, I realised with a month until deadline that I hated the story and where it was going.  I had written myself into a hole and couldn’t get out.  So I started afresh.  New characters.  New story completely.  I took a deep breath and just wrote the whole thing in one long panicked stream of consciousness.  Another I was so sure would be rejected during the month long wait to hear back from my editor I wasn’t even a tiny bit nervous.  I sold both, with the first being my biggest seller to date.

 

So as I open that fresh word file before every book I really truly have no idea what awaits me.  Some days the words fly and I can look up to see hours have gone by since I last thought about the real world.  Other days the words come like cooling treacle and have to be pulled from me with pliers.

 

But I love what I do.  The romance writing community is also unbelievably welcoming.  Encouraging.  I have travelled the world “researching” knowing that Rome, New York and Paris can and will end up in a book some day.  And they have.  My editors live overseas meaning I have to travel every few years to meet up with them for lunch.  Right?  And the whole lot is tax deductible!  And best of all, I work in my pyjamas.

 

I wouldn’t trade jobs for any other in the world.

 

Any other questions you've always wanted to know the answers to,

check out my blog or email me at ally@allyblake.com!

  

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