Sunday 14 July 2019

The Hippo Hands Over . . . . to Sue Moorcroft


I'm delighted to be handing over to Sue Moorcroft today to talk about her hugely popular book A Summer to Remember. This little beauty is on my list of books to read this summer and the ebook is currently available for 99p so why not add it to your TBR too!


COME AND SPEND SUMMER BY THE SEA!


WANTED! A caretaker for Roundhouse Row holiday cottages.


WHERE? Nelson’s Bar is the perfect little village. Nestled away on the Norfolk coast we can offer you no signal, no Wi-Fi and – most importantly – no problems!


WHO? The ideal candidate will be looking for an escape from their cheating scumbag ex-fiancĂ©, a diversion from their entitled cousin, and a break from their traitorous friends.


WHAT YOU’LL GET! Accommodation in a chocolate-box cottage, plus a summer filled with blue skies and beachside walks. Oh, and a reunion with the man of your dreams.


PLEASE NOTE: We take no responsibility for any of the above scumbags, passengers and/or traitors walking back into your life…


GET IN TOUCH NOW TO MAKE THIS A SUMMER TO REMEMBER!

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Sue's written an interesting post about why it was so difficult for her to write it.


A Summer to Remember was my fourteenth novel and somewhere in the process I went wrong. It became my most difficult book to write.

Looking back, I think it happened in two stages. I didn’t follow my own golden rule in knowing my heroine and hero’s major goals and conflicts well enough and I let myself go down a blind alley. I think the latter happened because even though I’d finally paused to analyse the conflicts in the book, I forgot to keep them in mind. One story strand refused to work with another.

I woke up one morning on a horrible moment of realisation and thought, ‘Oh nooooooo …’ There was nothing for it but to rewrite the work of several days. As a measure of what a trauma this was, I seem to purged from my memory whereabouts in the story this happened! I only know it was a nightmare and I went out one evening with a writing friend and wailed miserably about not being able to get the book back on track and that I’d never hit the deadline.

Deadlines are a bit of a thing for authors. Some like to joke about them whooshing by but whenever an author misses a deadline, their publishing team has to work around that. I’m not keen on that idea so I did send the book in on time, thinking, ‘My editor’s going to earn her salary with this one …’ I despatched the manuscript to my friend and beta reader Mark at the same time and went off gloomily to catch up other jobs like putting food in my fridge.

The first surprise was when Mark messaged me and said, ‘I can’t see too much wrong with this.’ I was so astonished that I messaged back to say, ‘Are you sure? Have you read it all?’ He was, and he had.

A few days later the email came from my editor with the heading A Summer to Remember - edit. Despite Mark’s positivity I literally didn’t want to open the email. I could imagine eight pages of structural changes or, even worse, just an invitation to a telephone conversation so we could discuss how to salvage things. Instead, the email - when I couldn’t put off opening it any longer - was upbeat. She loved the story and the characters and edits were very light. Somehow my storytelling skills had seen me through and my sigh of relief could probably be heard in Norfolk, where the book’s set!

For the next book, I definitely knew the conflicts and kept them to the forefront of my mind.

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Photo courtesy of Sue Moorcroft

Sue Moorcroft is a Sunday Times and international bestselling author and has reached the coveted #1 spot on Amazon Kindle. She’s won the Readers’ Best Romantic Novel award and the Katie Fforde Bursary, and has been nominated for several other awards, including the Romantic Novel of the Year Awards.

Her short stories, serials, columns, writing ‘how to’ and courses have appeared all over the world.

Part of an army family, Sue was born in Germany and lived much of her childhood in Malta and Cyprus before setting in the UK.



You can get your 99p copy using the links below:

You can find out more about Sue, her books and connect with her using these links:



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