Blog Tour - A Year of New Adventures by Maddie Please

It’s time for Billie Summers to have an adventure … but it might not be exactly what she expected.

Billie Summers has always been quite content in her little cottage in the Cotswolds. Sure, half the house hasn’t been renovated, but what’s the point when it’s only her? Working part-time at her uncle’s bookshop and planning writer retreats with her best friend allows her to pay the bills. What more could anyone want?

That is until Oliver Forest, the bad boy of the book world, turns up to one of her retreats and points out that Billie hasn’t done anything very adventurous. Couple that with her best friend falling head over heels and beginning to drift away from their Friday night wine and dinner plans, Billie is starting to wonder if it isn’t time she took control of her life.

So she starts a list: get fitted (properly) for a bra, fix up rest of house, find a ‘career’ and well, get a tattoo … Her life might just get the makeover it needs, too bad irritating and far-too-attractive for his own good, Oliver keeps showing up …

Because sometimes you need an adventure!

A Year of New Adventures is one of those books that a reader picks up to read for an hours and suddenly, five hours later, the book is finished and all the jobs are still waiting to be started. It is a great story, one which leaves the reader laughing out loud, and has a great cast of characters, some which are liked and others that the reader wants to take by the shoulders and give them a good talking to. I really enjoyed the writers retreat, being a fly on the wall, and watching each writer as they observed how each other worked, plotted and planned. 

The retreat was the start of Billie's year of new adventures and I really enjoyed following her 'journey'. I think that it is one of those books that makes a reader look at their own life and start a list of things to achieve in the year ahead, no matter how small or insignificant, we can all achieve!!

Today I am pleased to welcome Maddie Please to my blog. Maddie has agreed to share some of her writing tips with my blog readers to mark the publication of her new book, A Year of New Adventures.

Maggie Please's Writing tips.

There are so many books already published on how to write well. There are also magazines, websites, workshops, degree courses and blogs.

What would be my tips?

1)     Plot properly. Yes I know this sounds boring. It’s so much more fun to just set off, your fingers flying over the computer keyboard or your pen filling up page after page of your gorgeous new notebook as the story flows unchecked and your characters fall in love/solve the murder/find the treasure. But it doesn’t usually work like that because nearly always you will realise you don’t know where you are going/don’t know where you’ve been/can’t remember if the heroine’s eyes are blue or green/forgot that the hero is allergic to horses. Then the story will stall into a soggy mess and nine times out of ten you will go back and realise there is also a huge plot hole and perhaps the great aunt who died in chapter four is happily gardening and handing out advice in chapter twenty. With a plot you have a map to take you from Chapter One to The End.

2)     Write every day. Like most things (cake decorating, dancing, painting your nails) the more you practice the better you get. No one is born able to service a car, speak three languages or make profiteroles you have to learn the basics and then practice. Even if it’s just ten minutes in the car park while you wait for someone, it all adds up.

3)     Start at the right place. Pages of delightful backstory, character quirks, description of that lovely old house, the way your heroine’s parents met when they worked for Princess Michael of Kent – these are not the right place to start your story. Get in there with the challenge. The party/house move/fight/accident/redundancy. Start with action. The other stuff can be fed in through the book as you fill out your story.

         4) Keep going. I’ve been writing for years but when I started submitting to agents and       `publishers I got nowhere. I sent out my work too early. The formatting was wrong, the grammar was old fashioned, I used too many adjectives, characters shrugged their shoulders and ran their fingers through their hair far too often. Sometimes I got crumbs of comfort from an agent who bothered to send a few lines of encouragement as well as a rejection. Often I didn’t. I was still learning the hard way. I don’t think there is an easy way. Go to writing events, festivals (I went to the Festival of Writing at York twice and learned such a lot) and workshops. Talk to other writers. I recommend the Word Cloud (a free to join community of writers) and if you can’t travel think about doing their 6-week Self Edit Course run by Debi Alper and Emma Darwin. I did and I thought it was fantastic. Try new genres, different POV’s, unusual characters. Write as much as you can. Believe in yourself. What I’m saying is never give up.

Thank you Maggie for sharing these tips with my blog readers and to Avon Books for inviting me to take part in the blog tour.