Christina Hollis - Revisiting Romance

The original cover, courtesy Harlequin Books  S.A

I used to write historical fiction for the Harlequin Mills and Boon Masquerade line, under the name  Polly Forrester. That was in the days before everyone was online, so the books were only distributed in the UK and Europe. Since then, life's changed a lot.  Practically everyone's online, so I'm going though my backlist and gradually releasing my original historical romances as ebooks. The first to come out in this form was Lady Rascal, which is set in 1789, during the French Revolution.

I've learned a lot about the process of turning print into ebooks since that first experiment. This spring sees the release of my medieval romance, Jewel Under Siege. Bringing the prose up to date and creating a fresh new look for the cover have kept me busy during the long winter evenings. Like my heroine Elena, I'm really looking forward to seeing the sunshine again!  At the moment, Jewel under Siege is at the exciting stage of artwork and distribution co-ordination. I'll be issuing a newsletter soon to give my subscribers a sneak, pre-production peek at the new cover. It's been designed especially for the ebook by artist Samantha Groom, who also works with writers like Jean Bull. If you'd like to be one of the first to be in on the secret, you can subscribe by clicking on the envelope symbol here: http://bit.ly/1eKihHg

In the meantime, you can find out more about my first historical ebook, Lady Rascal here (if you're in the US) or here (if you're in the UK).

What do you like best about historical fiction? Is it the idea of familiar passions experienced in different cultures? Or is it the tight breeches and galloping horses? Leave your comment for the chance to win a signed book from my backlist, in a draw to be made on 17th January.

Christina Hollis writes both contemporary and historical fiction - when she isn't cooking, gardening or beekeeping. You can catch up with her at http://www.christinahollis.blogspot.co.uk, on Twitter and Facebook, and see a full list of her published books at http://www.christinahollis.com

Christina Hollis - 3 Lifelines For Writers

There are three things every writer needs - a story to tell, a way to tell it and the opportunity.

Everyone has their own ideas about the first two items on this list. Put three writers together and you’ll come up with a dozen different plots.  Each of them will have their preferred way of working, too. That can be dictation and voice-recognition software, typing straight onto the computer screen, good old pencil and paper or a combination of all three.

It’s getting the opportunity to write that causes all the trouble. Here are three tips I found useful when working on Lady Rascal, and my current WIP, Jewel Under Siege.

1. TIMETABLING: When do you do your best writing? If it’s first thing in the morning, set your alarm an hour earlier and use that time just for writing. If it’s after work or the children’s bedtime, lay in plenty of coffee and get writing once it's quiet. DO NOTHING ELSE! Don’t let yourself get distracted by anything at all. Set a kitchen timer, or call on the team at #1k1hr on Twitter to get yourself motivated. 

2. A SPACE OF YOUR OWN: Make sure you've got your own dedicated writing area. No matter how small, it'll be your private territory and that will give you a boost. It also means you don't have to hunt all around the house for your dictionary, thesaurus and other reference books, once they're all concentrated in one place. If your writing space doesn't include access to the Internet, that's better still-unless you're single-minded enough not to go online while you're working. The net is a great help with research, but it can turn into a terrible time-waster.

Mother's Little Helpers

Try to get your family to share the domestic chores so you can write. Make it fun for them, use bribery-anything to make sure you can get your “me time”. You might discover somebody has a hidden talent. When our children were small, we worked our way through The River Cottage Family Cookbook among others. As they've grown in age and experience, they can now take their turn in cooking dinner.

That's a real luxury, as long as you can shut your ears to the racket coming from the kitchen (or the eerie silence, which can be worse...). This spaghetti carbonara and chilled fruit pudding was produced by Son No.1. It was delicious!

That's a real luxury, as long as you can shut your ears to the racket coming from the kitchen (or the eerie silence, which can be worse...). This spaghetti carbonara and chilled fruit pudding was produced by Son No.1. It was delicious!

3. SHORT CUTS: Online shopping is a Godsend for the time-poor. Try your local supermarket delivery services. They're convenient and reduce the amount of impulse-buying, too. The discipline of making out a list to shop just once a week is another time-saver if you usually hit the aisles every day. We use Abel and Cole and Laverstoke Park Farm, too, for those times when there's nothing in the garden.

Of course, all these tips can easily be adapted to other areas of your life, such as reading or hobbies. How do you organise your own "me time"? 

If you'd like to keep up with the latest news about Jewel Under Siege, you can subscribe to Christina’s newsletter by sending her an email at christinahollis@hotmail.co.uk with the word “subscribe” in the subject line. You can also read her blog athttp://www.christinahollis.blogspot.com, and see a complete list of her published books athttp://www.christinahollis.com.

Christina Hollis: Research and Romance...

Istanbul by Bertil Videt

I wrote my first romance almost by accident, but found I loved the process. 

My writing career began in journalism. A  piece I did on Robert Curthose, the eldest son of William the Conqueror, attracted a lot of interest. Writers love to see how many ways they can use the research they've done, so I decided to try expanding my work into a new biography of Robert. It felt like a good idea, but at the time publishers weren't interested in anyone who hadn’t been immortalized by Holbein - like the much more famous Henry VIII. 

Young Robert led a wild and exciting life, but he ended up as a pretty obscure footnote to English history. Without much in the way of written records or illustrations, I was told his natural habitat was between the pages of an academic thesis. That didn't appeal to me, so I put the idea aside. 

Then one day, BBC Radio 4's Woman's Hour did a feature on historical romance. When I was at school, I'd loved the books of Georgette Heyer so I decided to try turning some of the general research I’d already done into a novel. The result was Knight's Pawn, which was published by Harlequin Mills and Boon under their Masquerade imprint. This was followed by five more historical novels for Harlequin, written under my pen name of Polly Forrester. At the time they were only available in the UK. I'm now in the process of bringing them out as ebooks, to introduce them to a wider audience. 

Lady Rascal is already on sale and my next title, Jewel Under Siege, is due for release later this summer. Jewel under Siege is set in Constantinople (modern-day Istanbul), at the time of the Crusades. Elena is a young widow who finds herself in an impossible situation when tough warrior Emil literally falls into her life. He is the enemy, but the lure of the forbidden means Elena and Emil are attracted to each other despite the dangers. Robert Curthose manages to become a footnote to their story, too!

One thing I've noticed when revisiting my earlier work is that my fiction tended to be sweet, rather than steamy. As my career in fiction-writing has expanded, I've lost some of my inhibitions so I’m busy warming up the scenes between Elena and Emil at the moment . 

How do you like your historical romances - tender, or torrid? 

If you'd like to keep up with the latest news about Jewel Under Siege, you can subscribe to Christina’s newsletter by sending her an email at christinahollis@hotmail.co.uk with the word “subscribe” in the subject line. You can also read her blog at http://www.christinahollis.blogspot.com, and see a complete list of her published books at http://www.christinahollis.com.

Christina Hollis - Writing In Winter

It's often said that other countries have a climate, England just has weather. That's been very true in 2012. The year started with the country stricken by drought. Then it started to rain, and didn't stop for weeks at a time. Now we're heading towards the coldest months of the year, we're all hoping it doesn't turn to snow. We've been snowed in for days on end during both the last two winters. That's always a hazard when you live off the beaten track,  but it had been twenty years since such severe weather happened here. The good thing about spending long period inside is means there's plenty of time for writing. I always keep a notebook handy to jot down ideas and the short, dark days of winter are the perfect excuse to review them and plan the next year's projects. A diary would be ideal for this: unfortunately, each January 1st I start one with high hopes, only to become dispirited by the number of blank spaces I have to turn past each time I remember to pick it up. I've solved this problem by getting a  large book of blank pages and calling it a journal, rather than a diary. There's plenty of space for pictures and recipes as well as notes, and there aren't pre-printed dates to induce guilt. I like to include lots of different sources of inspiration, and it's lovely to be able to look back on things when it's too dark and cold to venture outside.

Despite all the rain this year we did manage a few walks in the surrounding countryside. OH took the top photograph on one of our rambles through the Gloucestershire countryside. He had to snap the scene between torrential downpours, then tweak the image to make the sky look lighter than it actually was, to give more contrast. He was aiming for the Old Master look, and I think it turned out pretty well, don't you?

What's your favourite source of inspiration at this time of year? There's a warming recipe from my winter journal for a comment picked at random!

Christina Hollis has written both Historical fiction and Modern Romance/Presents for Harlequin Mills and Boon Ltd, as well non-fiction for national magazines and prize-winning short stories. Her current release, Lady Rascal is available for download from  Amazon, iTunes  and many other retailers, while her next book,  Winter of the Wolf, will be published in early 2013. She loves to hear from readers - you can contact her through her website or her blog.

The Romantic Fiction That Was Paris...

Although I'd travelled widely in my native England, I was eighteen before I set foot outside of the UK. My first serious boyfriend arranged a romantic week for three in Paris. That's right - three. Now, before you get carried away with ideas of athletic high jinks in the land of the menage a trois, you should know something that I didn't when I signed up for this trip of my (then) short lifetime. I was booked in to share a room with his  mother. She came along to keep an eye on him - not me. It served me right for dating an early manifestation of The Big Bang Theory's Howard Wolowitz!

The Mrs W template and I had a wonderful time sightseeing, doing all the usual touristy things and ganging up on my soon-to-be ex-boyfriend. I chalked up another first on that trip when I visited a supermarket - in those days, we didn't have them where I came from. Imagine it! You can tell how long ago it was - Carrefour seemed like a fairy palace. I'd never seen so much stuff for sale in one place before.

It was all a far cry from the Paris I'd been led to expect from Paul Gallico's Flowers For Mrs Harris. I can never hear Humphrey Bogart say "We'll always have Paris..." in Casablanca without remembering my unintentionally hilarious visit, although it did sow the seed that eventually became my Harlequin Historical novel, Lady Rascal. This was originally published back in the 1990's, long before the arrival of ereaders, so I've just brought out an ebook version.  Here's a taste of it -

Finding herself in a Parisian dressmaker's shop, poverty-stricken Madeleine has grabbed the chance to dress up in the glamorous accessories and impractical shoes she has only been able to dream about until now...

 Madeleine suddenly saw something she couldn’t live without a moment longer. Picking up one of the candles, she took three wobbling steps out from behind the safety of the counter. Balancing precariously in front of a long mirror, she took down the wisp of gossamer that hung beside it.

It was a shift of some description, needing only the hem to be finished. But what a shift! Almost transparent, the fine fabric rippled through Madeleine’s gloved fingers like water. It was all she needed to complete her outfit.

In a moment her work dress of coarse brown stuff had been cast aside. It took her a few minutes to work out how to get into the shift, which had no fastenings but pulled on over her head. At last she managed, arranging the folds of fabric about her painfully thin body.

It clung to her like pale mist, flowing with every movement and making graceful her stumbling steps in the borrowed shoes. She was entranced, and so beguiled that the running footsteps outside went unnoticed. Only when a foreign voice called out very close at hand did she jump out of her dream.

Then panic turned her to water. To be found here, dressed like this would be certain death. Like an idiot she had not thought to douse the candles, and now it was too late.

The door flew and a large shadow rippled through the shop towards her.

With a scream Madeleine dropped the candle she held...

I’d love to hear what you think of Lady Rascal, and whether you have ever looked forward to a romantic moment only to have it turn out very differently?  There's a signed copy from my backlist for a comment picked at random.

Christina Hollis has written both Historical fiction and Modern Romance/Presents for Harlequin Mills and Boon Ltd. She loves to hear from readers - you can contact her through her website.

Past, Present and Future...

For the past few years I've been writing contemporary romance for the Harlequin Presents/Extra Mills and Boon Modern Romance lines, but that hasn't always been the case. For many years I wrote factual articles for magazines. Then I branched out into historical fiction. This was in the days before the Internet - and although that makes me sound ancient, it wasn't really so long ago! Instead of using a word processor I wrote all my articles and stories out in longhand. Research meant a forty-mile round trip by car to the county library, with the children. There was no pushchair access in those days, so I had to leave the buggy outside and cart babies and notebooks upstairs. While I worked, they played under the table. They spent so much of their formative years surrounded by books it's no wonder they both grew up with a love of reading. After tagging all the way home again, I incorporated my research into the final draft of my manuscript then typed it up (duplicated with the help of reams of carbon paper) and sent it off to the publisher. After time spent first in the postal system and then under editorial consideration, my editor would ring to discuss any revisions then the original manuscript would be sent back for alteration and resubmission. The whole process took forever, and cost a fortune in paper and postage. Things are so much easier now, with on-line research and virtual documents flying backwards and forwards via email.
Recently, I wrote some pieces on my blog http://www.christinahollis.blogspot.com about how things have changed and the revolution of epublishing. I had so many interesting comments and emails, I decided to experiment with the situation myself. The result is the re-issue in ebook form of "Lady Rascal", an historical romance which was originally published only in the UK  and Europe by Harlequin in their Masquerade line. It opens in Paris during the summer riots of 1789. That's a bit early to be called a Regency Romance, but publishers love their categories and 'Revolutionary Romance' doesn't strike quite the right note! Madeleine is a chancer with nothing to lose, who dresses up in "borrowed" clothes. When English gentleman Philip Adamson mistakes her for an aristocrat in danger, Maddy plays along. She hopes to benefit from his good nature, but soon finds his sense of honour has put his future in grave doubt. He needs her streetwise determination as much as she wants his sophisticated charm...

I can remember gazing out of my window at falling snow while I was working on the summer night seduction scene of Lady Rascal. Warm starlit evenings in the arms of my handsome OH seemed an awfully long way away. He was working in New York at the time and the baby was tormented with chickenpox. Writing helped me escape to a time when the countryside was green and lush, with a happy ever after guaranteed. I'm really excited to be bringing Lady Rascal to a worldwide audience, and I hope you get as much pleasure from reading it as I did from writing it. 

Do you have an ereader? Do you think it will ever replace "real" books in your affections? One of the very last signed author copies of the original Lady Rascal paperback is on offer for a comment picked at random.

Christina Hollis is a best-selling writer of romance, who lives her dream life with her family in the middle of an English bluebell wood. You can visit her website at http://www.christinahollis.com, and read her blog at http://www.christinahollis.blogspot.com


*UPDATE*: Lory's name was first out of the hat in the draw for a signed copy of the original paperback version of "Lady Rascal"!
Congratulations, Lory! If you could mail me at christinahollis@hotmail.co.uk with your snail mail address, I'll get your prize into the post asap.

Thanks to everyone who posted. I really enjoyed our "chat" and your good wishes for the success of Lady Rascal. I hope you can all get to enjoy it, whether by way of ereader, or a good old printed book!
Best wishes
Christina x