Doncaster and New Voices

Yesterday I was in Doncaster for the workshop on writing for Mills & Boon at the library there.

The weather was cold and wet so that was perhaps why half the people who had signed up for the event didn't turn up. A pity, but that was their loss. The group who were there may only have been small but there were lovely - lively, interested and enthusiastic so I had a great time. Thanks to everyone who made the morning so enjoyable including the young man who had just had his GCSE results and braved a room full of women discussing sex scenes and condoms with great composure. I know it must have been enjoyable because we didn't finish until almost 45 minutes after the alloted time.

Thanks too to Sandra the Librarian who made me so welcome and dealt with all the practicalities. The supply of tea, coffee - and wickedly tempting millionaire's shortcake and flapjacks was lovely and the ones the Babe Magnet and I took home we thoroughly enjoyed.

This workshop was part of the run-up to the New Voices Contest which launched officially this week so don't forget that the dates to start uploading your entries start on September 6th which is only just over a week away.

Thank you to everyone who came to Doncaster - I see that Sally is already blogging about it if you want a report.

And good luck to everyone with your entries for the New Voices Contest.

I just want to thank everyone who has commented on the Conflict Q&A posts. I'm sorry that I haven't been keeping up with responding to your comments - life has been so hectic plus a couple of health problems that have meant I haven't kept up with anything much recently.

And I also haven't picked a winner for the name of my new monthly column - must get to that too. But this weekend I'm off to York with the Babe Magnet to celebrate a friend's special birthday. SO looking forward to it as Kathy is someone I met through Caerleon Writers' Holidays and many of the Caerleon gang will be there too - not sure if York and Bettys tearooms can handle this! We're also going on an evening Ghost Walk which I have always wanted to do.

So Does anyone remember which of my books opened in York, with my heroine being part of the Ghost Walk? Anyone who's been on my Fishguard course should know the answer to this.

Clue - it was republished as part of the Centenary Celebrations in 2008.

I have a couple of signed copies to give away to someone who guesses right - please DON'T leave the answer in the comments but send it to kate AT kate-walker.com

Back on Monday - suitably spooked I hope

Questions, questions . . .

So in the last Great Big Blog Party Post, Anne Hobbs from Caerleon Writers' Holiday, asked as her giveaway question :

If you could ask any writer just one question - which writer would you choose and what would you ask them?

And several of the questions in response were aimed at me. SO I thought I'd answer some of these here rather than on the comments section. (I really have to get used to going in and answering Comments - after months of leaving it to my guest posters, I'm out of practise.)

So to start with, Dena asked -

Well I would like to know Kate who and how did your husband get his nickname? it's adorable. Actually my question Kate is if there was another genre that you would be interested in writing a book in?

Dena, to answer your question about the Babe Magnet, I have to go back to 2002 and the RNA's Conference at St Aidan's College Durham. I was giving a Workshop there and so was my husband in his capacity (then) as Dr Wade, lecturer in Creative Writing. (He still does that a bit but he also is Writer in Residence in a prison and writes his own books on the Grim and Gruesome that I've mentioned) He was giving a talk opn Teaching Creative Writing and Marina Oliver who was organising the conference along with Roger Sanderson asked me to introduce him.

As part of the introduction, I said that I had never realised that my husband was a Babe Magnet until I brought him to RNA Conferences and saw him chatting to the delegates who are mostly female authors. The nickname stuck for that Conference and then for the RNA as a whole and eventually, when I first started writing a blog over on eHarlequin.com, and referred to my husband as 'affectionately known as the Babe Magnet' the name stuck. And to see the resulting threats of handbags of dawn etc that appeared amongst the comments when he posted for my Great Big Blog Party, it seems he still has the magnetism for so many of those Babes out there! Though there are some who find the abbreviation of BM less delightful!

And to answer the second part of your question, I've always wanted to write ghost stories. Really good ghost stories. I once met Barbara Erskine at a Readers' Day we both attended and I loved talking to her. I also love her books - ghost stories and romance - that's a wonderful blend and I'd love to be able to write it myself.

But as I have a deadline way too close and a new book that's way too far from the ending, for now I'll just concentrate on romance.

More answers to questions tomorrow.

Great Big Blog Party 1 - Him indoors

So I said that this party was for special people in my life - friends I've made during my years as a published writer - but there's one person who I couldn't possibly miss out - someone who was with me before I was ever published - before I ever even submitted my first manuscript to Mills & Boon - someone who brought me coffee while I was writing, held my hand through the waiting, supported, encouraged me, believed in me even when I didn't believe in myself - and cheered the loudest when I sold my very first book

So who better to start off the Great Big Blog Party than Him Indoors - the Crime part of the Crime and Passion duo - the Babe Magnet himself ?

Be gentle with him - this is his first ever venture into the world of blogging.

Dear Bloggers in the world of romance,

I have been asked to contribute to the celebrations and to come up with 200 words of entertainment. Well my theme is how to write about murder when romance creeps up the stairs, into the rosebeds and curtains and even into the cats. Yes, I am the bluff Tyke, square shaped, brought up on Tetley's Bitter and Leeds united, but then I had an encounter with a romantic in the shape of my bit of Irish crumpet otherwise known as the missis.

What does a man do when he has to switch from a day spent with murderers, either from the past or across the table in a cell, to this very unpink and unCartland modern romance which is all about hunks, seduction and emotions spinning into magic words of love? Well, he retreats into the past and writes about more distant and manageable emotional turmoil.

I'm not saying I retreat from romance - oh no - I just flounder like a tugboat (dirty British coaster) in the wake of that elegant ocean liner Kate Walker. As writers, we drop anchor in different ports but I still meander on about historical psychopaths and the availability of arsenic in 1850.

I confess unashamedly - I live in the past, I hunt for stories there, I raid it for sensation and shock. Then the living world of romance, here in a steel town with wide green spaces, is waiting for me in the other rooms of this life, where my lovely wife reminds me every day why I love her.

So, writers out there - do you travel back to the past or leave it as a foreign country whose language puzzles you? I have a copy of the Grim and Gruesome A-Z of Yorkshire Murder to give away to the winner.

Steve Wade, alias Dmitri Todgeroff alias the BM