Writer Spotlight - Holly Martin

On Coffee and Roses I like to bring you news of exciting authors who are either waiting to be published or published and worth checking out.

This week, I'm delighted to welcome the lovely HOLLY MARTIN into the Coffee and Roses Writer Spotlight...

When did you first decide that you wanted to write?

I've always written stories. Even when I was a child my first proper story was a piece of fan-fiction, my own version of The Animals of Farthing Wood, when I was about 9 years old. I asked for my own typewriter as a Christmas present one year when I was about 11. I started writing seriously about five years ago after reading gorgeous, rose-tinted stories by Jill Mansell and thinking I wanted to create something like that.

What interests you as a writer?

Being able to tell the kind of stories that I want to read with the wonderful characters that I want to read about. I can take my readers to different lands and immerse them in different experiences. Anything is possible when you open up a new story and start writing. The direction my books go will often surprise me.

Do you have a typical writing day? If not, when is the best time to write for you?

I work full time at the moment, very long hours. I'm up at 4.30am most mornings and won't get back till 7pm most nights. My writing time is then crammed into the few hours before I fall asleep over my laptop or weekends. My best writing time is in the school holidays when I have a week or even 6 weeks off to write all day. Then I normally stay up till 3am writing and sleep in late.

Which authors inspire you and why?

I just want to tell gorgeous stories, with great characters. The kind of stories that leave you with a big smile on your face. So I love to read stories like that too. I'm a big fan of Miranda Dickinson, Jill Mansell, Belinda Jones, Catherine Alliott, Aven Ellis, Lisa Dickenson and Sophie Kinsella. This is chick-lit to perfection – funny, heart-warming stories with characters you just fall in love with.

Tell me about your latest book.

The Guestbook is a romance told solely through the messages in the guestbook of a holiday cottage. It's a unique way of telling a story. Annie Butterworth owns Willow Cottage and lives next door and it's mainly her story that unravels through her interactions with her guests. But the guests have their own story to tell and we get a little glimpse of their lives as they come and go, too.

What are the best things about being a writer?

The feedback you get from people who have read your book. The way it touches people in ways you could never hope to achieve. When I put out my fantasy YA book, The Sentinel, I never expected the response I got. The reviews I received were outstanding and from people I had never even met or spoken to. Their reviews and messages brought me to tears. After years of rejections from agents and publishers, the people that loved it were the most important people – the readers. It made me realise that I might have created something special. The response to The Guestbook has been the same and I still can't get over how much love and support I've received.

And the worst?

I suppose that your work is out their for public review. People will either love it or hate it. I've been fortunate enough not to get many bad reviews – the majority of my reviews are 5 or 4 stars but the 1 star reviews do hurt. You spend months, sometimes years crafting what you hope is something worthwhile and then people destroy it with a few hateful words. You develop a thick skin very quickly in this industry. The poor reviews always make me laugh now. People will either get my work or they won't and it would be a dull world if everyone loved the same books. I read a brilliant quote somewhere once that said something like, to attack a book with anger and hate is like dressing up in a full suit or armour to attack an ice cream sundae!

What are you working on now?

My next book to be published with Carina is called One Hundred Proposals and will be out in the summer. It's about two friends, Harry and Suzie, who work for a proposal company, helping couples to create the perfect proposal. Harry wants to know what Suzie's perfect proposal would be and sets about creating one hundred different proposals for her to find her perfect one. I'm also working on my book 2 in The Sentinel series, The Prophecies, which I hope will be out in June.

Do you have a dream project you would love to write?

Bizarrely I have ideas for a zom-rom-com, with zombies and love and a lot of comedy, but I've never got round to putting pen to paper. Maybe one day.

What are your top three tips for aspiring writers?

1.Read lots, read the people you love in the genre that you're writing for, see what works well for them, how they create dialogue and characters. Try to use some of those skills in your own writing.

2. Write. I know that sounds silly but if you are always thinking up ideas in your head and never write them down they will never turn into anything. Write down ideas for a scene, a conversation. It might turn into something, it might not, but writing it down, even if its just a few sentences, will help you think more about your ideas and how you can add to it. Finding time to write, even it's only five minutes a day is important, too.

3. Don't give up, you will get rejections, but just remember that is the opinion of one person and somewhere out there is a perfect match for you and your book.

Anything else you’d like to say?

I love finding new authors, someone I've not read before. I don't get a lot of reading time lately because of any limited spare time goes on writing, but when I do I love to find a little gem. One of my favourite new authors is Aven Ellis and her newest book, Waiting For Prince Harry,is just a superb, heart-warming read.

Thanks so much to Holly for a great interview! To find out more about Holly and her books, you can visit Holly's blog and follow her @hollymartin00 on Twitter.

Neal Doran - Getting 'The Call'

At the beginning of this year I chose my magnificent seven Future Stars and I've been working with them on their amazing writing projects. So I was over the moon (and not surprised at all) when one of my Future Stars, NEAL DORAN told me he'd been offered a two-book deal! His first novel, Dan Taylor is Giving Up on Women is available on Kindle now - and it's brilliant. I asked Neal to tell what it felt like to be offered his book deal...

I had a clear idea how it was going to be when I found out I was going to be published.

My family would know I’d got ‘The Call’ because of the music that played. For years Rosalita (come out tonight) by Bruce Springsteen had been an essential part of the dream. If you don’t know it, it’s a fantastically uplifting song, written when Bruce was astoundingly young, about him trying to get his girlfriend to sneak out of her parent’s house for a big night out (it’s cool -- the characters are probably late teens/early twenties, it’s not about two 40-year-olds who still live with mum and dad). It’s medically impossible to not jump up and down when you hear it, and it has this line…

Whoa, so your daddy says he knows I don't have any dough,
Well, tell him this is his last chance to get his daughter in a fine romance,
Because the record company, Rosie, just gave me a big advance!

Now, this might not seem that relevant at first. I accepted, ooh, weeks ago, that I’m never going to be a rock star. And I was expecting to hear from a publisher not a record label. But it was this line, so full of exuberance, vindication, and joy that became part of the moment that would make the work worthwhile. It was going to be the soundtrack to jumping off a table, twirling my wife around the kitchen, and throwing my kids up in the air (and catching them). It was going to get the party started.

I imagine every writer has something like this - a scenario that they can play out in the head, of what it’ll be like when they get the news they’re going to be published. It was one of those things you have to think about a lot when you’re stuck with a half-finished novel that looks in urgent need of CPR and you aren’t sure it’s going to pull through. It’s insulation for your hopes when the cold reality of another auto-response agent rejection comes in, or you get told -- yet again -- that you’ve written a funny book, but men don’t read rom-com, and women don’t read rom-coms written by men.

I knew that getting there (and I had to believe I’d get there) would involve being on the wrong end of rejection. I knew it was going to be a case of one step forward, one step back. There were a lot of times when it just felt like all the steps were being taken on a travelator going the wrong way.

But you go through all that to get The Call that means you have a book deal.

But when it happened, I wasn’t anywhere near the CD player, or the kitchen table. Instead, I was stuck in my home office, bleary-eyed and on a day job deadline. Kathryn from Carina UK called, and BAM! Out of nowhere I had a two digital book deal. Someone had mucked about with the travelator, and suddenly I was heading in the right direction. But life didn’t change in that second. Corks didn’t pop. I had a very late night ahead of me at work, I could only text my wife the news as she was in a big meeting, and the boys needed to get their chicken goujons before football practice.

For days I kept going in a kind of trance. I told lots of people and said I was really delighted. But if you’d heard me, I don’t think you’d have thought I’d achieved something I’d been working towards for years, and dreaming about for decades. It was a couple of days later before it really hit me. We were going away for the weekend for my birthday, it was a big one, and one that I’d set as a deadline for something to happen with the novel. Heading out of town and looking for a place to stop for ice-cream, I put on one of our in-car compilation CDs.

The guitar, Hammond organ and sax of the E Street Band blared, and Bruce started calling out his gal, Rosie.

It sank in. The setbacks and the self-doubt, the re-writes and the rejections had all been worth it. Dan Taylor Is Giving Up On Women was going to be published! I’d made my deadline by a day…

I looked out at the road ahead, the windows down in the early spring sunshine, my wife and two sons joining in with the ‘Hey! Hey! Hey!’s to one of my favourite songs.

I’d done it.

The thing with being in a car with the windows open, is it’s much more likely you’ll get something in your eye...

You can follow Neal on twitter @nealdoran and on Facebook.