Sally Quilford's Blog

To those who have only known me in latter years, it probably seems that I’m all about the pocket novels. This is not entirely untrue. I’ve been writing them since 2008, when I penned The Secret of Helena’s Bay and tentatively sent it to Maggie Swinburne (nee Seed) at My Weekly Pocket Novels. I now have over 20 under my belt (not all published by DC Thomson, but all published by Ulverscroft in Large Print), and I have to say it’s my first love. However, I started off writing short stories (actually I started writing fanfiction, but that’s for another day and is not about original work), and had some success in women’s magazines, with over 60 stories published. That took some time though, and I remember receiving 9 rejections in one day from one magazine. Ouch. I did okay, but never as well as my more talented story writing friends. I know I did much better when I was in the fantastic Story a Fortnight Group and learned so much from those talented friends. You can see our joi...

I like a nuanced ending to stories as much as the next person. I’m an intelligent woman so I know that there isn’t always a ‘somewhere over the rainbow’. Neither in real life nor in fiction. Yet nowhere are happy endings more vilified than in romantic fiction. A fellow romance writer recently linked to a review of her novel, which, quite apart from suggesting my colleague was ‘frittering’ away her talents writing romance (talk about damning with faint praise!), also dismissed happy endings in romance, as ‘boring as hell’ (I won’t link to the review as I suspect there’s some subtle trolling going on). As many other romance writers pointed out, no one complains when Poirot gets the killer the end of an Agatha Christie novel. Okay, someone is dead, and others have probably died too. But for the purposes of the sleuth having solved the riddle, it is, to all intents and purposes, a happy ending. The bad guy/girl is punished and the worthy get their reward (usually the fortune ...

I'm delighted to announce two new releases on Amazon Kindle today. <br /> Big Girls Don't Cry is the 3rd instalment of my Bobbie Blandford series, telling the tale of a 60s policewoman. The novel was published as Big Boys Don't Cry by My Weekly Pocket Novel, but I've decided to go with my original title for the Kindle Version. Loosely inspired by the Great Train Robbery, Big Girls Don't Cry sees Bobbie face a criminal gang and prejudice in 1960s Derbyshire. <br /> Eye of The Storm is set in Egypt, and inspired by the Saturday Matinees I used to love as a child (and also a little by Indiana Jones!). Nadine Middleton joins Countess Chlomsky (who has appeared in two previous novels as Mrs Oakengate) as a companion, but she has other fish to fry. She intends to find the mythical Eye of the Storm, a jewel that will clear her father's name. But she first has to deal with Lancaster Smith, a sexy archaeologist w...

A writer friend sent me a message the other day, asking my advice on how to dispense with her heroine’s absent husband. Should she kill him or just send him off to another country? It set me thinking of the tricky business of dispensing with the ex-boyfriend/girlfriend/spouse in romantic fiction. Jane Austen and Barbara Cartland had it much easier as their heroines were always unmarried maidens who usually fell in love with the first truly handsome man they met so didn’t have to be written out of a bad relationship. There might be a false love interest, such as Wickham in Pride and Prejudice, but there was no romantic relationship to speak of. It’s an unwritten rule that where there is an ex involved, either for the hero or heroine, it must be the ex’s fault that the relationship ended. In the past it was also required that the dead spouse of a heroine/hero had to be less perfect than the new lover, though thankfully that’s not the case anymore. One thing I love about Kate W...

Orson Welles as Mr Rochester The tortured hero is the staple of romantic novels. Mr Darcy, perhaps a mild version of the tortured hero, felt awkward in public situations, giving Lizzie Bennett the idea he was a bit of a dry stick (I still find him a bit of a prig, I’m afraid). Mr Rochester (my personal favourite) was tortured by an ill-conceived marriage to a woman who turned out to be insane. But it seems to me that there is a worrying trend amongst romance writers to create heroes who are not just tortured, but who, as a result, torture others, particularly the heroine. I don’t necessarily mean physical torture, unless we’re talking Fifty Shades, but certainly emotional torture. Christian Grey is the epitome of this type of hero, with his emotional abuse of Ana Steele. I’m told, though I have no personal knowledge of this, that American readers in particular will forgive a hero anything as long as he turns out to be a nice guy at the end. Because we all know that in...

© Marilyn Barbone | Dreamstime Stock Photos I have touched on this subject before, in relation to conflict within a romance. But I thought it was a topic worth visiting in depth. It is a tendency of newer writers – myself included way back when – to give their hero and heroine rather convoluted and angst-ridden back stories. It is, after all, how we gain sympathy for them and get the reader on their side. Even now I will often make my heroines orphans just because it's a quick way to establish her need to love and be loved. In Dickens times, such angst was the staple of the novels he wrote in serial form. Poor little Oliver Twist was born in a workhouse, treated abominably by the people who were supposed to care for him, and then walked all the way to London alone, before being taken up by Fagin and his gang and terrorised by Mr Monk and Bill Sykes. He had a lot of angst to go through before he found his happy ending. Despite that, Dickens managed to include humour an...

© John Siebert | Dreamstime Stock Photos The language of love in romance novels is important in order to set the scene. It has also changed much over the years. Gone are the flowery purple passages of Barbara Cartland novels, where heroines swooned and ‘touched the stars’, or whatever other euphemism Barbara used to describe an orgasm. Love scenes now use more realistic language, sometimes explicit, sometimes not, depending on the market and intended readership. But I’m struck by how some authors get it completely wrong. A  Facebook friend recently pointed out the blurb of a novel which describes the heroine’s ‘sexy snort’. Even in the film Miss Congeniality , Sandra Bullock’s snort is shown to be an unattractive aspect of her behaviour. Though with Sandra Bullock being so beautiful, I think most men would probably forgive that! But such a snort cannot be described as sexy. At least not with a straight face… I have also read novels where the designated hero ‘leers’ at...