FIONA MALBY

Hello,

Another week, another lovely guest blog. I actually discovered Fiona or F.C.Malby as she writes under, on Twitter. She always posted such interesting and well written blogs, so when I conceived the idea of having guest bloggers, she was one of the first people I contacted. I also wrote a blog for her page which you can see here: http://fcmalby.wordpress.com/. 

Thank you Fiona for writing such a wonderful blog for me about your writing style and inspiration. Please everyone check out her novel, Take Me To The Castle, it's actually free this week on Amazon, so do pop along and snag your FREE copy while you can!

F.C.Malby

  

 

Author Bio

F.C. Malby is the author of Take Me to the Castle. Born  in East Anglia in the UK, she left the University of Reading with a degree in Geography and Education and went on to teach and work as a wedding photographer. She spend time teaching English in the Czech Republic, the Philippines and London before moving to central Europe. She enjoys art, photography, travel and skiing.

Writing Style and Inspiration

Thank you to Jon for hosting today and for allowing me to write a guest post on his fun-packed website. If you haven’t read Jon’s timeline, do! It’s brilliantly written and hugely entertaining. I’m happy to see that Matt Dunn has paved the way for me today!

Readers often ask where you get your ideas from as a writer and how you begin. ‘How do you think of a scene?’ ‘Do you write about your own experiences?’ ‘Do you have the whole book mapped out in your head?’ I have been met with these questions on many occasions.

Like Jon, I’m less of a planner and more of a ‘let’s see how the characters flesh out the story’ kind of writer. The idea of meticulously mapping out each chapter fills me with horror. I don’t work that way, some do but it’s not for me. I start with the characters and the hook, the core tension or issue/s in the story, and build from there. Sometimes an idea strikes and it’s all there ready to go, and sometimes it starts with something I’ve seen – an incident or a conversation, maybe a film. Then it builds with time, slowly, and it gathers enough momentum to be written down.

I think many writers do use their own experiences to a certain extent but the art of fiction is to be able to weave elements of reality into a believable story. You need to be able to pour emotion into the characters in a way that doesn’t sound awkward. It has to come naturally, especially if it’s humourous.

Writers also use their outside passions to inspire their work, whether it’s sport, travel, music. I am an artist and a photographer as well as a writer, I’m highly visual and I like to use images to start ideas. I also create boards on Pinterest of far flung destinations to help with detail. I have written short stories set in Marrakesh and India so I created boards for these to help with scene setting, clothing, and fine detail.

I also find inspiration in film and music and when I write I try to imagine each scene as a film. It helps you to see the points of view from the perspectives of different characters, to imagine how the scene will work, and to think about the detail of the surroundings and the body language of each character, especially in a high tension scene. The aim is to show how the character is feeling or reacting to a situation, either through dialogue or through what they are doing or how they are reacting with their body – arms folded, turning away, moving to another room (or sitting in the shed with the cocktail collection!)

So for me, writing is a fairly organic process, developing out of a theme or an idea and then it evolves. I learned a great deal from writing Take Me to the Castle and I am now writing short stories. These are a great way of experimenting with different themes and styles and I like the impact that you can create in a short piece of narrative.

Blurb

Arriving in Letovice, Jana is trying to escape a personal loss and come to terms with the changes in her country and in her own life. She stays with the Martineks and meets their son, Miloš. When he leaves Letovice and she travels back to Prague, she encounters a deep and shocking betrayal. Jana meets Lukas, a conservator working on the restoration of a mosaic at the Cathedral of St Vitus, Prague. But who is he and what is he hiding?

Take Me to the Castle has been nominated for The People’s Book Awards and is currently free to download this week until 1 March.

Connect with F.C. Malby:

Website fcmalby.com

Twitter @fcmalby

Facebook FC Malby Author Page

Goodreads FC Malby

INCONCEIVABLE

Hello,


It's been a pretty busy week. I want to start by thanking Matt Dunn again for his great guest blog. It was really quite exciting for me personally and also a great blog. I have another guest blog coming your way next week! 

So I wrote this short story last week. I was approached by a website called Readwave who support up and coming writers. They wanted me to write a really short story for them. Challenge accepted! A day later and I had written Inconceivable. It's a story about Matt and Lisa who have the perfect relationship and their whole lives mapped out, until they start trying to have children and realise they can't. This is the blurb:

Matt and Lisa. Lisa and Matt. For so long the perfect couple, but what was once so certain is now inconceivable. In more ways than one.

And here is the rather spiffy cover I designed:

You can read the story at www.readwave.com  so pop along and check it out.


I've also been working super hard on a top secret project that my editor, agent and I have been conjuring up together. I can't say much yet, but it's related to This Thirtysomething Life and it's going to available to download free hopefully in the next couple of weeks. I'm really excited about it and I hope you will be too!

that's it for now.

Hugs,

Jon X

MATT DUNN

Hello,

I'm super excited for this guest blog. It's my first ever guest blog and I hope the start of many more to come. Matt Dunn is one of my heroes. I read his first novel Best Man a few years ago and that along with Turning Thirty by Mike Gayle, really gave me the confidence to write. Books like Best Man and The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook were exactly the sort of books I wanted to write - I just didn't know it until I read them. So I owe Matt a huge thank you for helping me get started and also another huge thank you for writing my very first guest blog. Cheers, mate!

This is Matt Dunn reading the aforementioned The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook.

I'm the author of seven romantic comedy novel, which have been published in both in the UK and as far as the US, Germany, Brazil, Turkey and Serbia. On the back of that, I've also written about life, love and relationships for the likes of Cosmopolitan, Company, Glamour, Elle, The Sun, Daily Express, Guardian, Times, and the Mail on Sunday. Metro even used me as a relationship agony uncle once, though  I only realised this after I'd seen the joke answers I'd submitted to what I'd though were made-up questions appear in the paper!

In terms of how I started, I knew I wanted to write from the age of fourteen, when I wrote a piece to be read out in front of the whole school which got a few laughs. And while that may have been because my flies were undone, it was then I knew I wanted to be a comedy writer. Unfortunately, it took me another twenty years to sit down and start writing my first novel, Best Man, partly because work/life got in the way, but mainly because it wasn't until I read Nick Hornby's High Fidelity that I realised there might be a readership for the kind of thing I wanted to write about.

For us men, the pursuit of women is the thing that dominates most of our lives, and yet the strange thing is that very few of us are any good at it. As my love life progressed – or didn't – and I saw the trials and tribulations I and my friends were going through, I'd often sit down with them over a beer to discuss what was going on, and the conclusion we'd reach was often 'you couldn't make it up'. So fortunately, I didn't have to - once I started writing, I realised I had a wealth of material, then I just wrote how/what came naturally. Best Man was a story I'd been mulling over for a while - I had a friend going through a similar dilemma – so writing it seemed quite logical.

I then took the usual submission-to-agents-followed-by-rejections route (I think I had 31, but if you're a man, again, you're used to rejection), but a few were kind enough to give me some feedback, which I tried to incorporate in my next rewrite. Eventually, I got an agent, and from there, a book deal with Simon & Schuster in the UK. The surprise was that I had to sign to write two books, so I frantically had to come up with an idea for a second, and then formulated the premise for The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook in the space of about half an hour – ironic, because it went on to be my best-selling novel, sold around the world, and was even optioned for sit-com development by CBS.

I always intended to write about what I saw as the six main issues/dilemmas the modern man faces: friendship (Best Man), being dumped (The Ex-Boyfriend's Handbook), fatherhood (From Here To Paternity), maintaining a relationship (Ex-Girlfriends United), marriage (The Good Bride Guide), and proposing (The Accidental Proposal), so once I'd done that, I had to have a long think about what I wanted to do next – which was when my seventh novel, A Day At The Office, was born. Having written all my novels from the first-person point of view (a fairly straightforward approach), I thought it might be interesting to do something different, and write a multi-strand, multi-viewpoint book set in an office over the course of one Valentine's Day, and following the interwoven stories of five characters as the day progressed. Hopefully it's turned out OK, but getting the technical side/timings right and ensuring I tied up all the loose ends meant I certainly developed a few more grey hairs while writing it.

In terms of my writing days, they all start in the same way - I look at my mortgage statement, then frantically start typing. Like most writers, I'll set myself a word target (either a thousand words a day, or two thousand if I have a deadline looming) – that way, I know I'll have written the first draft of the novel in around three months. Then the fun starts – for me, it all comes together in the editing – and I can put the jokes in (or at least, try and make the ones I've already written funny), which as a comedy novelist, is what it's all about.

And next? I'm in the middle of trying to write something a bit more serious, although to be honest, I have to keep stopping myself from slipping jokes in, so maybe it'll turn into another comedy after all.

Matt Dunn's latest Novel, A Day At The Office, is available now in ebook.

This is Matt's latest book, A Day at the Office, pop along to Amazon and get your copy now!

Until next time.

Hugs,
Jon X