behind the scenes

Two weeks have passed since I hit the ‘publish’ button on Amazon. More about that in a bit, but for those of you who have read the book now, I thought it’d be nice to share some of the pictures I gathered whilst researching Sealed with a Kiss so you can see what I was thinking. If you haven’t read, these won’t make much sense at all but never mind, you can just go aaaaah at the animals.

 

This is Flora. In the course of writing, I ended up having to learn a lot more about seals than I expected, and the whole pace of the novel had to be set around Flora’s rescue. I also had a vet check over the details in the book to make sure they made sense, just in case any raging seal fanatics got cross and started sending me letters.

This is Duntarvie House – well, it’s not, it’s a gorgeous house that was for sale which I saw and instantly fell in love with. As I couldn’t afford to buy it, I decided to write about it instead. I’ve no idea how the story took shape, really. There wasn’t meant to be a seal in the story, or a thing about a – well, I can’t tell you about the thing or it’ll spoil if if you haven’t read it. Ha.

 

 

This is the grand entrance hall at Duntarvie House. The spot in the middle where the table is is where the big Christmas tree sits for the Hogmanay ceilidh. To your left is the sitting room where Kate goes when she first is taken to the house, and to the right – you can just see the door – is the way round to the kitchen. I don’t know if this is my slightly fact-obsessed nature coming out, but I actually had a floor plan printed out for the house, and I used to consult it to make sure that people were getting from a to b in a way that made sense.

 

I’m reposting this picture because it took so blooming long to do this that it merits more ‘ooh’ing. I broke down every scene and chapter and person and thing and they’re all here on this colour coded amazing poster of Post-It notes. And yes, as people have commented, it occurred to me that there’s at least another book about the island waiting to get out.

 

And this is the teeny tiny Willow (you can forgive her peeing on the floor of the pub when you see how cute she is, can’t you?)

 

 

If you want to have a look at how I initially planned Sealed with a Kiss, the post planning a novel using Pinterest  will give you an idea of how it worked (back then when I first started writing Pinterest was a tiny little invitation-only board for the geeks among us). And if you’d like to add me as a friend on Pinterest that would be lovely!

And if you haven’t downloaded your copy yet, pop over to Amazon UK for a copy or Amazon.com if you’re elsewhere.

More coming up tomorrow – gardening, for one thing (even by my lazy gardener standards this is getting a bit late for me to be updating the ‘what’s happening in the garden’ bit of the blog) and a big over-excited post about roller derby. Still madly in love with it. (Ridiculously so)