The Silver Chain
The three books in the Unbreakable trilogy chart the intense slow-burn love affair between the dark, aloof, troubled Gustav Levi and the younger, feistier redhead Serena Folkes, who meet each other one night in a London square when Serena is photographing some Halloween witches. They each have something the other wants, at first materially (he finances and launches her career in return for her exclusive female company) and then emotionally (when they start to trust and love again, with the aid of red- hot sexual attraction). Any similarity to other erotic romances ends there, because I have woven into the story not only the artistic details of Serena's photography but also lush descriptions of cities and locations, and crucially, some interesting, potentially explosive secondary characters in the twists and turns of the plot. No couple in real life is isolated from the rest of the world, and the 'unbreakability' of Serena and Gustav's relationship is constantly tested by the games and threats of various faces from the past.
Why do you still believe in the good old fashioned love story?
It's the archetypal theme, explored throughout the history of literature, music, poetry and story-telling, and it's also the force that drives through all of us. Fictional love stories enable writers to range far and wide in creating the characters and situations of their heroes and heroines, and it's often even more fun dreaming up the toxic elements who try to separate them. It's also the perfect frame work for erotica writers to be able to place sex, and lots of it, because sex is ultimately at its most fulfilling and magical when the protagonists are in love. So basically in the end, readers want to follow the same journey, whether or not there's a happy ending, because unlike a crime caper or thriller, nearly everyone can relate the aspects of a love story to some aspect of their own life.
Mills and Boon rejected your work for being too explicit, so how much have we moved on in terms of erotic fiction since this time?
Mills and Boon themselves have moved on leaps and bounds since that famous rejection slip back in 1994. They have plenty of steam coming out of their characters' ears now in their raunchier imprints, but because they are acutely aware of exactly what their faithful readers want and expect, I would say that there is still an element of coyness which isn't as full on, or doesn't 'let fly', as freely as in erotica, especially with the language. Erotica, meanwhile, goes as near or as far as you want it to go now, especially on-line and self-published.
In fact, if anything, I think the 'new adult' or 'erotic romance' genre that I currently write in is a nod back to the 'old fashioned' idea of romance, but obviously with very explicit sex thrown in. I say 'nod back' because not long after I started writing for Black Lace and various magazines, the erotica was becoming a literary form of porn, if that makes sense. The content was often very dark, bordering on the abusive, and with no real exploration of relationships, so I became increasingly uncomfortable writing it, so much so that when the erotic imprints started to close before the onslaught of 50 Shades, I was ready to give up writing erotica altogether. I was asked by my editor at Mischief, Harper Collins, to try my hand at an erotic romance, and now have the best of both worlds, as I'm able to forge a really intense love story with pretty wild sex scenes woven into it.
You are a legal secretary, have three sons and a husband, so how do you juggle your writing with everything else in your life?
I've blogged before about how difficult it is living with a writer, especially a writer with a deadline, but although my life is very full (we also take in foreign students) I have worked ever since I left school, including when I was a single mother, and am very lucky in that I am now able to work part-time, which enables me to devote certain solid days of the week to writing. Even so, I have to make a determined effort to step away from the keyboard when the kids come home from school, and focus on getting the supper on, otherwise my head is somewhere quite else and they might never get fed. My husband is great at taking the kids off at weekends if I'm busy, but we make sure we have plenty of walks, meals out and holidays all together, and of course when the deadline has been met and the latest novel is off with the printers, then we all relax! Also, my full life, both past and present, has provided endless material for my writing and I wonder how writers can fill a novel if they don't also have a full life?
Please tell us a bit about the characters of Gustav and Serena.
Gustav was going to be a modern day vampire when I first wrote The Silver Chain and even though I've now made him mortal I have retained the mysterious, Eastern European, slightly wolfish air about him. He is around 40 years old, dark, reined in, but with a smouldering passion about him that he is reluctant to allow to the surface. It emerges that he has come out of an obsessive, abusive marriage where his dominatrix ex-wife reduced him to a lifestyle that left him degraded, humiliated and ashamed of himself. The final blow was his wife Margot, in retaliation for him ending the marriage, seducing and running off with the beloved younger brother he had brought up from childhood. He has since thrown himself into building up an empire of galleries and art venues and although a well known entrepreneur finds it very difficult to trust or love in his private life, and at first uses the silver chain to attach himself to Serena and to keep her by his side until he realises that her love is enough to vanquish the ghosts from his past, even when they threaten to destroy everything, and let him love again.
Serena is a spirited redhaired tomboy who has spent her life fighting the coldness and indifference of her adoptive parents and after qualifying as a photographer has left Devon to forge her photographic career in London. She has had one childhood boyfriend and is not a virgin. She is also something of a voyeur, specialising in photographs taken of people who don't know she's watching which appeals to a wide audience of buyers when Gustav launches her first exhibition. She is still naïve in the face of Gustav's sophisticated, kinky demands, especially keeping her tied with the silver chain when they are alone. But she is a quick learner and soon finds that she craves the liberating, therapeutic aspects of sexual punishment until they both realise that a normal sex life without whips or cuffs or chains is just as fulfilling. But will the ghosts from his past prove too much even for her youthful determination to be with Gustav at all costs?
What is the appeal of New York as the setting for the new book?
Where to being? I was brought up in the countryside but all I've ever craved is city life, and went to live in London as soon as I left school. My boys and I spent a very snowy New Year in New York a couple of years ago and we just love the city. I have an American grandfather and wonder if maybe it's my spiritual home. We walked or went on buses everywhere – and got to meet some of my cousins there - so I got to know it quite well. I yearned to write about it, and felt that it was time for Serena to have an adventure, and it's a sign of commitment that Gustav takes her with him. New York feels a little like a kind of sister city to London, and is a great platform for her to enlarge her circle of clients, to people-watch, and continue her career. The city is a melting pot of slightly cynical, life-embattled characters within the hard edge of city life.
At what point in your life did you want to write erotic fiction?
My intention from a child was always to write romantic fiction. I wanted to be a princess in a long dress, with flowing pre-Raphaelite hair being wooed by a handsome prince. As a kid I had flyaway pudding bowl hair, scruffy jeans, and my prince eventually drove me away in a battered Saab. In the end my own romance came true, but when I started writing fiction I was a single mother with only a long line of frogs to be kissed. I submitted all kinds of fiction, literary, romantic to various publishers, until I submitted three chapters to Mills and Boon. And as previously discussed they rejected the sex scenes as too explicit. I enjoyed writing those sex scenes, especially between two impossibly beautiful and exotic characters, so it was an easy leap to turn that into erotica per se, and when my first short story was sold to 'For Women' magazine (now defunct) my erotica writing career was set. Short stories are still my favourite gentre, because they are so short and sweet, but developing this new genre of erotic romance throughout a full length novel is a fantastic way of creating three dimensional characters as well as making them inhabit their own world.
Why should set backs like the one you had twenty years ago not put writers off their dream of becoming published?
As set backs go it was a particularly helpful and constructive one, because the rejection letter from Mills and Boon actually took the trouble to explain why my submission wasn't suitable for them. Mostly you get a pro-forma slip giving you no encouragement and no idea where you're going wrong. What such a rejection should do to aspiring writers is one of two things. Either you can realise you might need help in getting it right, and get advice from one of the many writing advice services that didn't exist when I started out. I now advise erotic and romantic writers for the Writers Workshop and am brutally honest when I critique my students' MSS and tell them where they're going wrong and where they can improve. The second thing you can do when rejected, if you truly believe in what you've written, is to keep the ball in the air and send the MS out again and again to publishers you have properly researched, but if a specific issue has been raised, then it should put fire in your belly and determination to write it again until it passes muster. Actually there is a third option which again didn't exist when I was starting out, and is much more of a gamble, which is to self publish. But if you are going to do that, you really must get some professional editing advice because the standard of self-published work, including covers, can be very indulgent and not polished enough to be picked up by a mainstream publisher. I've used it myself to publish a collection of 'literary' short stories under my own name.
What is next for you?
I am waiting with baited breath to see how Book 2, The Golden Locket, fares with the readers, and am halfway through writing Book 3. I then have an idea for an 'offshoot' story involving one of the secondary characters who appears in the Unbreakable Trilogy and who is nagging me to write a kind of 'prequel' to The Silver Chain. I want to market my indie short stories 'Stabbing the Rain', currently available on Amazon, and I also want to write a mainstream, semi-autobiographical commercial novel under my own name.