I am delighted that LOUISE VOSS is joining me on my blog today. Louise's women's fiction books have all been updated and are available as e-books from Amazon (published 13 July 2015).
I hadn’t planned to write books, as such. It was almost twenty years ago, I was working for a record company in New York and wanted to do something creative in my spare time, whether photography, art, or writing – I decided on writing, and enrolled in an evening class at the West Side YMCA. The tutor made us work with one character all term, so I ended up with lots of pieces of writing about the same person that I realised had the makings of a novel. I haven’t stopped since.
Where do your ideas come from?
Ooh. Writers hate this question! Anywhere and everywhere is the usual answer I think. Stories you’ve heard from friends, news items, or sometimes just a ‘what if’ theme (for example, Are You My Mother? came about because I was fascinated in the idea of someone adopted trying to search for her birth parents, and how being adopted can affect your sense of identity and belonging).
Have your personal experiences influenced your writing? And if so, how?
To some degree, I suppose. To Be Someone was written after I lost a close friend, and I wanted to set it against the backdrop of the music business, and how a band goes from playing in their dad’s garage to playing Wembley Stadium. So for that one, I did call on my experiences working in record companies, and my friend’s battle with leukaemia. I think my others are less based on any sort of personal experiences – my other protagonists are, respectively, an aromatherapist, an actor and a pro tennis player, none of which I have direct experience of!
Accessible, warm, page-turning, compelling, funny and emotional (I hope!!)
Not really, although I’m trying to write standing up as often as possible, and have to rest my laptop on top of the bread machine on a kitchen counter in order for the screen to be near enough eye-level….
Do you plot out the whole book before you start or just start writing and see where it leads you?
I have NEVER plotted out a whole book ahead of time. I just start and see where it goes. When I co-write (thrillers) with Mark (Edwards), we usually plan out in chunks what happens, but not more than about ¼ or 1/5 ahead, with little knowledge of what will happen after that until we get to it. And then panic!
What do you consider to be the hardest part of your writing?
Plotting! That’s one of the reasons I really like writing with Mark, as he’s better at coming up with twists than I am.
What's the most interesting place you have visited when researching your books? And what's the strangest?
The most interesting place I went to was when I was researching the original version of To Be Someone. Phill Jupitus, who’d I’d recently met through a mutual friend at a recording of Never Mind The Buzzcocks, kindly gave me permission to sit in on his then-radio show on London Live (I think it was still GLR in those days). It was brilliant, and massively helpful – and better still, Phill later read the book and gave me the amazing quote that I’m now using on the cover of the new version.
The strangest was probably when I went on a research holiday for a scene in Games People Play where one of my main characters has a nasty accident on a ski slope. It was a singles holiday to the Italian Alps and I had foolishly joined an Intermediate/Advanced group for the week, when my skiing was very much of Beginner standard! Fortunately I didn’t sustain any sort of accident, but the other people on the holiday were pretty strange (in the way that people on singles holidays often are, if you’re unlucky…)
Do you read? If so, who are your favourite authors?
I read constantly and avidly. I can’t remember the last time I didn’t have at least 2 books on the go. My favourite all-time authors are Kate Atkinson and Margaret Atwood, but there are so many others. I love women’s psychological fiction authors like Elizabeth Haynes, Rachel Abbott, Tamar Cohen, Sophie Hannah and Sharon Bolton…. So many good ones out there at the moment.
If you were writing a book about your life, what would be the title?
‘Regrets – I’ve Had A Few’ (Joke. Although I’m so bad at thinking up titles that Mark probably wouldn’t be surprised if I suggested it for one of ours)
What advice do you have for aspiring writers?
Writing is a craft and like anything else, you do improve the more you practise. So keep practising, and if your first novel gets turned down, write another one. It will be better.
And lastly, why should people read your updated books?
I don’t know which one to plug because I’ve just had all four of my women’s fiction novels republished, having updated them, given them lovely new covers and added new material… it’s like choosing between one of your children!
About Louise Voss
Louise Voss began her writing career in 2000 with four contemporary
fiction novels, all of which have recently been updated and reissued: To Be Someone, Are You My Mother?, Lifesaver
and Games People Play.
She successfully switched to publishing thrillers with Mark Edwards in
2011. She and Mark were the first British indie authors to reach No.1 on the
Amazon charts with Catch Your Death,
where they stayed for the month of June 2011. This led to a four-book deal with
Harper Collins, although they are now published by Thomas and Mercer for both
their joint and solo books.
Louise’s first solo psychological thriller, The Venus Trap, came out in February 2015, and her and Mark’s sixth
novel together (and the second in the DI Lennon series), The Blissfully Dead, will be out in September this year.
Are You My Mother?
E-book sold by Amazon (published 13 July 2015)
From the age of nineteen, Emma Victor has had to bring up her much younger sister Stella. It has shaped both their lives. Now Stella is almost grown up, and Emma's nurturing instincts extend to her work as an aromatherapist, and inform her relationship with the unreliable but irresistible Gavin. But something is missing, and Emma has to confront her deepest need - a need she's been denying for years - and embark on a search for her birth mother.
Find it on Amazon UK by clicking here.
Click here to read my review of Are You My Mother?
Games People Play
E-book sold by Amazon (published 13 July 2015)
Change is sometimes hard to face up to.
Rachel is a rising tennis star. But does she want success more than she wants a ‘real’ life, and a steady boyfriend like everyone else?
Susie is Rachel’s mother. All she wants is her partner Billy - but he’s left her, and it’s a huge shock. Is she brave enough to start again?
Gordana is Rachel’s grandmother. She has everything she ever wanted: health, wealth, and a loving family - or at least she thinks she does.
The link between them all is Ivan: Rachel’s father, Susie’s ex-husband, and Gordana’s son. It’s no secret that he can be difficult. But nobody is prepared for what happens when he gets arrested, or the changes that it forces on all their lives.
Find it on Amazon UK by clicking here.
To Be Someone
E-book sold by Amazon (published 13 July 2015)
Helena Nicholls - ex world-famous pop star and prime-time DJ - wakes up in hospital to find her looks, her career and her personal life in tatters. She has been let down by her boyfriend, and the one person she loved most in the world - her best friend since the age of five - is dead. She feels that she belongs nowhere, and her sense of identity, fragile at the best of times, is in pieces.
So Helena turns to the one thing that has always got her through, the one thing that has real resonance: music. And she begins to concoct The Plan. Using the request format that made her radio show so popular, where listeners rang in with detailed stories about why certain songs were so meaningful for them, she sets out the story of her own life, chapter by chapter, track by track.
Thinking about the songs that represent important chapters in her own life, Helena begins to come to terms with her past. But the present is more of a problem as, while in hospital, she has re-met an old friend to whom she is still hugely attracted. Her strict adherence to The Plan, however, means that time is not on her side. If she is to have a future at all, she must work out what it really means To Be Someone.
Find it on Amazon UK by clicking here.
E-book sold by Amazon (published 13 July 2015)
If you save someone's life, you become responsible for them.
When Anna receives a letter from Adam, thanking her for saving his son Max's life with a bone-marrow donation, it's the first positive thing that's happened to her for a long time. Grief-stricken at the recent loss of her baby, she's failed to give life in the past. Now this four-year-old boy is alive and healthy because of her: it's a heady realisation.
Anna is desperate to get to know Max, yet terrified at how responsible she feels for him. So she decides not to tell anyone about him or that she's arranged to meet his father. Soon she is immersed in a complicated double life, spending half the week with her husband, who believes her to be filming out of town, and the other half with Adam and Max.
But Anna has lied to Adam about who she is. And she's lied about her marriage. And soon these lies will catch up with her…
Find it on Amazon UK by clicking here.
