Rhys loves giving herself a challenge.

 RHYS BOWEN: Well, dear Reddies, I am about to send my latest book off to the publisher. It's called (at the moment. Who knows what marketing will finally want it called) FROM SEA TO SKYE. I think I've told you about it before. Set in the 1960s, and 1930s and early 1900s.. a young writer is hired to help an elderly writer with dementia finish her last novel.

The challenge has been to give the reader what the elderly writer has written so far, so that the young writer can go to Skye and find clues to what really happened there. Which meant I had to write a novel in a style that is no only not my own, but is also not the usual style of this writer!  Yes, I must be a glutton for punishment.

But I hope I've carried it off:

Here's how the manuscript starts:

But the writer didn't always write like this. Here is a paragraph in her usual style:

When John was reading my manuscript, as he always does, he wanted to change the wording in one of these chapters.

"You can't do that," I said. "I didn't write it."

"Who did?" He looked confused.

"Iris Blackburn. It's her book. The phrasing has to be hers," I said 

"Who is Iris Blackburn?" He was more confused now.

"The writer of The Wild Girl.  Okay, it's me, but I'm writing as Iris Blackburn"

I don't think he has completely understood this yet.

Anyway, it's done and heading for my publisher and I'll be taking a well-earned rest! I really enjoyed revisiting the island of Skye vicariously. It's been years since I was in Scotland but I still have keen memories.

Have you enjoyed reading a book within a book? One of my favorite books ever was Possession by A S Byatt. The true story is revealed through two lots of poetry, both brilliantly constructed with the feel of Tennyson and Rosetti. I don't claim that mine is anywhere as good but it is a good story with a lovely twist at the end.

And I hope you don't mind if I finish with a small plug for my upcoming book, MRS ENDICOTT'S SPLENDID ADVENTURE.  I've been thrilled to see it included in lists of the best books for the second half of the year, the best upcoming historicals etc. It comes out August 5 and I am doing lots of Zoom interviews, podcasts etc. I'll keep you up to date on those.

A Sneak Peek! at ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: First, two bits of breaking news! 

First, my new book, ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS, a just got a rave starred review from Library Journal! How fantastic is that? It says:

“Ryan nails the feel and pace of life as an author, and creates a love letter to booksellers and librarians amid the suspense and twists. Ryan has written her best book to date, which should be on everyone’s reading list."

So that’s good, huh? I can tell you I am totally and utterly thrilled. Whoo hoo.

The next breaking news: there’s a Goodreads giveaway for ALL THIS COULD BE YOURS all right now! And here is the link.

Make sure you enter! It’s such an easy way to win an advance review copy of this book. Crossing fingers you win.  (And all good reviews are joyfully welcomed.)

I am so thrilled about this book.

It's the story of debut Author Tessa Calloway, whose first novel becomes a surprise bestseller – – and she is sent on a glamorous coast-to-coast book tour. Problem is, it soon becomes clear that someone is not only trying to ruin that career, but also destroy her beloved family back home. 

What makes it even worse, Tessa fears it is all her fault – – her current danger the result of a Faustian bargain she made long ago. 

And now,  a big-time book tour becomes a deadly cross-country cat and mouse chase. And the author must run for her life. 

It’s also super meta! As you can imagine. And when the time comes, I’ll tell you where the idea came from. But any author on book tour or any reader who’s ever attended a book event will recognize the insidious reality— authors on tour are incredibly vulnerable.

Here is a tiny snippet from an early chapter  of the book – – an exhausted Tessa, returning to her hotel room, gets a call from her husband Henry.

The long hotel corridor stretched out in front of her, jewel-toned paisley carpeting in some only-in-hotels pattern, lily-shaped sconces casting a dim glow onto the row of numbered doors.

She found hers, 3016, and patted her pockets for her room key card. She tapped the card against the metal square. The light blinked insolently red.

She tried the card’s other side. Red.

“Kidding me?” She tried again. Red. Her phone buzzed in her pocket.

“Tessa?” Henry. Finally.

“Hey, honey. Hang on. My key card isn’t working,” she interrupted his greeting.

“Did you put it against your phone again?”

“No. I didn’t.” Though possibly she had. “Sometimes they’re cranky. So about Linny—”

“How’d it go tonight? They loved you, right? Tessa Calloway, instant best-selling author. Inspirer of women. Bringer of power. The darling of social media. Hang on, Tesser,” Henry said. “I think I heard something. A sound. I’ll call you back in ten minutes. Fix your key.”

“What’s wrong? What sound? Is it Linny?” The kids. Henry. Their brand-new house. But there was only the flat white noise of nothing. He’d hung up.

Footsteps behind her. A man carrying a grease-spotted paper bag from Panera glanced at her as he walked by; he seemed to be taking in her face, her whisper, her bag, her suitcase, her phone call. She smiled at him, the wan acknowledgement of a fellow traveler, telegraphing all good, nothing to see here, waiting for my husband to check on a strange sound in our new house.

The man paused, assessed her again, opened his door. At least Panera Guy had a key that worked.

It’d be easy for someone like him to pretend to be a registered guest, the thought crossed her mind. While, in reality, be lurking, scouting, targeting. Using the built-in anonymity and accepted proximity as cover. As disguise.

But that was her writer-mind at work. These days, with a deadline for an unwritten second book looming, everything became a potential plot element.

She examined her card again, front and back, trying to discover what was wrong.

Oh.

She patted the pockets of her new book-tour trench coat; knee-length, black, suitable for airplane, rain, and substitute bathrobe. In the right-side pocket, her fingers closed over another hard plastic rectangle. She’d been using a key card from her previous hotel.

“Idiot,” she whispered.

She tapped, and her keypad light went green. She opened the door, then paused. Looked, ridiculously, for Panera Guy.

But the corridor was silent, empty, only an anonymous row of identical closed doors. She deadbolted her own door. Chained it.

She was Tessa Calloway now, and safe.

 

I will be on tour for this book starting in September, and cannot wait to see you all! We are announcing the tour stops very soon, and of course you will be the first to hear.

Readers, have you ever been to an event on an author's book tour? What was your experience?  Authors, are book tours a treat for you? Or a test of your endurance?

(And here is that Goodreads Giveaway link again!)

Hallie on writing setting from her mind's eye

HALLIE EPHRON: One of the pitfalls of being me is that people assume that I know something about writing screenplays. Let me assure you (as I do them), I do not. 

My parents were screenwriters. My sisters, too. But my favorite things to write are setting and internal dialogue (narrator's thoughts)... none of which show up in a screenplay. In a screenplay it's mostly dialogue and (brief) suggestions on the staging and character affect.  

I love to write setting in combination with internal dialogue, neither of which show up much in a screenplay.

Moving the reader through the setting with the characters usually requires research. The writers has go GO somewhere and take notes, record sounds, take pictures, talking to locals. Research, if it's an historical setting. A ton of world building if it's fantasy.

But there's a special pleasure (and ease) writing a story that is set in in A PLACE FROM YOUR OWN PAST.  Possibly a place that no longer exists the way it was then.

I did this In "Night Night, Sleep Tight" which takes place Beverly Hills in the early 60's when I was growing up there. The THERE/there no longer exists except in my memory, so that's where I went to find the details I needed.

In one of the opening chapters, Deirdre reluctantly driving back to her childhood home to deal with her wayward father. Along the way she's flooded with memories, just as I was writing this since I'd taken that drive (decades ago) a gajillion times: Sunset Boulevard, from the San Diego Freeway to Beverly Hills. 

I remember every curve. Every stoplight...
**

Deirdre crossed into the left lane and accelerated. Power surged and her Mercedes SL automatically downshifted and shot forward, hugging the road as she pushed it around a bend. She braked into the curves and accelerated coming out, weaving between cars on the winding four-lane road. 

Forty, forty-five, fifty. The end of her crutch slid across the passenger seat, the cuff banging against the door.

The car drifted into the right lane coming around a tight curve and she had to slam on the brakes behind a red bus that straddled both lanes and poked along at twenty miles an hour, idling just outside walled estates. STARLINE TOURS was painted in slanting white script across the back.

Deirdre tapped the horn and crept along behind the bus, past pink stucco walls that surrounded the estate where Jayne Mansfield had supposedly once lived. 

It had been a big deal when the actress died, had to have been at least twenty years ago. And still tourists lined up to gawp at her wall. Breasts the size of watermelons and death in a grisly car accident (early news reports spawned the myth that she’d been decapitated)—those were achievements that merited lasting celebrity in Hollywood. 

That, or kill someone. 

It was the same old, same old, real talent ripening into stardom and then festering into notoriety. Deirdre sympathized with Jayne Mansfield’s children, though, who must have gone through their lives enduring the ghoulish curiosity of strangers.

Buses like the one belching exhaust in front of her now used to pull up in front of her own parents’ house, passengers glued to the windows. Most writers, unless they married Jayne Mansfield, did not merit stars on celebrity road maps. And in the flats between Sunset and Santa Monica where her father lived, notables were TV (not movie) actors, writers (not producers), and agents, all tucked in like plump raisins among the nouveau riche noncelebrity types who’d moved to Beverly Hills, so they’d say, because of the public schools. 

You had to live north of Sunset to score neighbors like Katharine Hepburn or Gregory Peck. Move up even farther, into the canyons to an ultramodern, super-expensive home to find neighbors like Frank Sinatra and Fred Astaire.

Arthur Unger had earned his spot on the celebrity bus tour through an act of bravery that had lasted all of thirty seconds. It had been at a poolside party to celebrate the end of filming of Dark Waters, an action-packed saga with a plot recycled from an early Errol Flynn movie. 

Fox Pearson, the up-and-coming actor featured in the film, either jumped, fell, or was pushed into the pool. Sadly for him, no one noticed as the cast on the broken leg he’d suffered a week earlier doing his own stunts in the movie’s finale dragged him to the bottom of the deep end. Might as well have gone in with his foot stuck in a bucket of concrete.

A paparazzo had been on hand to immortalize Arthur shucking his shoes and jacket and diving in. Fox Pearson’s final stunt, along with its fortuitous synchronicity with the movie’s title, earned more headlines for the dead actor than any of his roles. Suddenly he was the second coming (and going) of James Dean, a talent that blazed bright and then . . . cue slow drum roll against a setting sun . . . sank below a watery horizon.

(Yes, I really did used to sit in our front window and wave at the tour busses.)

I have no idea how you'd write this as a screenplay. There's not a single line of dialogue, precious little action, and a ton of setting and internal dialogue. 

Flashbacks? Voice over?? Beats me.

Are there mental journeys that you can take with details of places that are long gone but still vivid in your mind's eye? To the corner store? To the drive-in movie, local dive bar, swimming hole, lover's lane, fabulous view???