Introducing…Rene and Flo!

I have been waiting and waiting and waiting to announce my good news. This has been bubbling away for nearly a year now but it has only just been confirmed so I can finally tell you about it.

Here goes…

The wonderful news that I have been waiting to tell you for AGES is…

…No, I am not pregnant…

…No, I am not getting married…

…NO, I am NOT going into Celebrity Big Brother…

But I am all signed up to write two novels for Hachette Book Group, and I am totally over the moon about it.

Just under a year ago (October 2010) a delightful lady called, Emily, phoned me and asked me if I had ever considered writing fiction. I told her quite plainly that writing fiction was my ultimate goal in life, and she then asked me if I would consider writing fiction for Hachette, the publishing company that she worked for.

As it happened, I was about to head off to Montreal for three weeks. My boyfriend had got a job there and I was going along as well with the intention of writing a proposal for a novel I wanted to pitch when I got back – a story based on a female friendship.

I wanted to write a story that spoke about female friendship in the same way that other books speak about love affairs. A story about how life affirming a female friendship can be, but also how destructive. The book I was planning to write was about two thirty something women called, Rene and Flo. However when I talked through what I wanted to do with Emily, and she told me that Hachette specialize in books aimed at children and young adults, it made total sense to take Rene and Flo back to when they were fifteen and follow their friendship through their lives from there. Emily understood what I wanted to do straight away and we remained on the phone for nearly two hours discussing friendship, and how they had affected us in our own lives.

It has taken me a long time to work out exactly how to write my story, but around three months ago it all came together. I sent Emily a few sample chapters that we continued to fine tune, and then two weeks ago she pitched it to the sales and Marketing team at Hachette. They all agreed it was a story worth creating and I am now signed up to write two books, in what will hopefully be an ongoing saga on the friendship of Rene and Flo.

The experience so far has been very cathartic. The parallels to my own life are very obvious, and on some occasions I will lift stories directly from my own teenage diaries (although I might not tell you which ones they are).

Although it will be marketed towards young adults I am writing this just the same as I would if it were for people in their thirties, and I don’t intend to dumb anything down for the sake of a younger audience.  It will not be chick lit. My childhood was not a romantic, obvious cliché’s so these books wont be either. This story is gritty, painfully honest, hopefully funny and most definitely a bit embarrassing at times, but then whose teenage life wasn’t?

The names Rene and Flo come from my grandma – her name was Florence.  After my mum died when I was seven I lived with my grandparents until I was ten, so she was a huge part of my upbringing. She always fascinated me, but not because she was particularly fascinating. More because she seemed emotionally detached, unlike every body else that I knew at that age. My grandpa was quite the opposite. When I read ‘A Streetcar Named Desire’ by Tennessee Williams at school, I read Stanley’s character like I knew him because in many ways I did. My grandpa was a lot like Stanley, but my Gran didn’t harbour the same passion and adoration towards him that Stella did for her brute.

Many years after my Gran died, my uncle (her son) received a call. It was a long lost cousin who wanted to tell us something. Apparently during the war my Gran had fallen in love with another man. A tall, handsome, gentle man who adored her and whom she adored right back. She had written letters, hundreds of love letters to him and somehow this cousin’s mother had acquired them before destroying them for fear of my grandpa finding out. As the cousin talked my uncle through what she remembered from the letters, she told him how his mother had known romance, and how she did understand desire. This came as a huge relief to me.

What was most amazing about this story was that Florence never revealed her real name to her beau. Instead she called herself, Rene. The person described in the letters was not the Florence I had known but instead a lover, a desired women, a woman willing to desire a man.  It was Rene, not Flo.

So that is why I am writing this story about two best friends called, Rene and Flo. Two very different women who share the same soul.

I can’t wait for you to meet them x