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Kathleen McGurl

~ Where past and present collide…

Kathleen McGurl

Tag Archives: Pearl Locket

News update

02 Sunday Aug 2020

Posted by kathmcgurl in News

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audiobooks, Daughters of Red Hill Hall, Emerald Comb, Pearl Locket, The Forgotten Secret, The Girl from Ballymor, The Secret of the Chateau, The Stationmasters Daughter

After an exciting couple of months watching how The Secret of the Château was doing on various Amazon deals in the US and then UK, this month it’s the turn of The Girl from Ballymor that is now selling at just 99p on Amazon UK.  It’s still my favourite of my novels, so I hope it does well.

the-girl-from-ballymor_highres

Later this month, on the 27th, all my older books will be released as audiobooks. There will be five coming out on the same day, which is really exciting! That will mean all my books are available in all formats. I’ll soon be recording some promotional video clips about the inspiration behind The Emerald Comb, The Pearl Locket, The Daughters of Red Hill Hall, The Girl from Ballymor and The Stationmaster’s Daughter, to celebrate these audiobook publications.

Also this month, I’ll be announcing news of my next novel – the tenth. I can’t wait to share this with everyone! Novel Eleven is also written and with beta readers for a few comments before I send it to my editor. And ideas for more are brewing, of course.

I hope everyone’s found plenty of time to read over recent months. I have – along with writing. And house clearing. We’ve been talking about moving for a couple of years, and are finally taking some steps towards doing it. Which means the loft and the garage that we’ve been ignoring for years all need sorting. Funnily, book eleven starts with a character clearing her attic. She gets on with it a lot faster than I have managed to.

Blog tour!

14 Thursday May 2020

Posted by kathmcgurl in Books, Uncategorized

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Emerald Comb, Pearl Locket, The Secret of the Chateau

Today the blog tour for The Secret of the Château begins, brilliantly organised by Rachel. I’ll be adding links to every review on the book’s page. Can’t wait to find out what people think of this book – please do go and check out some of the reviews. Book bloggers do such a great job promoting books – I really appreciate it.

The Secret of the Chateau Full Tour Banner

In other news, today is also publication day for the paperbacks of The Pearl Locket and The Emerald Comb. It’s so lovely to have these two available in hard copy. They were my first book contract, and I was asked many times by readers if they were ever going to be published as paperbacks, and always had to reply that it was up to my publisher.  I was delighted when they told me that they’d chosen these to go into paperback.

Not only that, but later this year all my older books will be published in audio format! It is all happening.

May already

03 Sunday May 2020

Posted by kathmcgurl in Books, Uncategorized

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Emerald Comb, Pearl Locket, The Secret of the Chateau

Or was April actually about six months long? It was shorter than March, anyway (or felt like it).

Cover

I have news this month – on 15th May my latest book, The Secret of the Château, will be released in ebook format. I’m really looking forward to seeing what people think of this one! It’s set mostly in France, as the title implies, and the historical parts are set during the French revolution. Had to do plenty of research for this one!

 

 

The Emerald Comb new coverThe Pearl Locket_FINAL

 

 

Also being released on 14th May are the paperbacks for my first two dual timeline novels – The Emerald Comb and The Pearl Locket. I have been asked so many times whether these will ever be available as paperbacks so it is very pleasing that they soon will be.

 

In other news, I recently signed a contract for audio versions of all my books that aren’t already in this format! The Secret of the Château comes out in July along with the paperback, and the others (the older books, plus The Stationmaster’s Daughter) probably around August. I’m delighted that all my HQ novels will be available in all formats.

My two favourite words…

27 Monday Mar 2017

Posted by kathmcgurl in Writing

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Tags

Girl from Ballymor, Pearl Locket, Writing

I just wrote “The End” on a (very rough) draft of my next novel. It is SUCH a satisfying moment! All the more so this time, as I have been racing ahead to finish a draft before going travelling – we leave in just 6 days time.

Having finished it before we go means I can print it off and take the printout with me to edit. I prefer doing the first, major edit on paper, with a red pen. It’s easier to be ruthless when you can put a big red cross over an entire page and scribble something different in the margin or on the reverse.

Of course, once we are away travelling in our motorhome printing will be a bit tricky. I’ll be taking my laptop of course, and we have various arrangements to allow us to be online (see here if you are curious!) but printing would involve taking a memory stick to a print shop and explaining what I need in broken French or even more broken Italian. It’d probably cost a fortune too. So I was keen to get to the point where I could print it at home and take it with me.

In other news – The Pearl Locket is currently on sale in the UK at 99p, but only for a few more days.

And don’t forget my new book The Girl from Ballymor is available for preorder in both ebook and print format!

Another blog… and some news

05 Sunday Feb 2017

Posted by kathmcgurl in Books, Campervan, Writing

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

good news, Pearl Locket

I haven’t been completely ignoring this blog – I have just been stupidly busy so far in 2017. I’ve been editing the next novel, and writing the one that’s to come after that. And I’ve been planning a six-month trip in our campervan, which will begin in April. Associated with that I’ve been learning Italian.

Oh, and then there’s the day job, of course.

So – about this six-month trip – my husband and I have set up another blog in which we will write about our travels. Please do take a look, and if you are interested in following our progress around Europe, bookmark it or subscribe to follow it by email. I won’t put much about the trip on this blog, which I’ll keep for writing and book news. Here’s the link to the new blog: https://inktravel2017.wordpress.com/blog/ 

And a little bit of writing news – my book The Pearl Locket is on promotion in the US, currently selling at just 99c. This has given it a lovely boost, and I was over the moon earlier today to see it reached number 27 in the overall Kindle chart.  Of course I had to get a screenshot of that, to grin stupidly over whenever I need a confidence boost:

us-charts-5-2-17

It’s slipped a bit since I grabbed that screenshot but it was up there for a while, honest!

Free!

27 Friday Nov 2015

Posted by kathmcgurl in Books

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

free, Pearl Locket, Promotion

For a limited time only, my novel The Pearl Locket is FREE on Amazon UK! I’ll be promoting it like mad – would love to see it at the top of the free charts, so please help me out here with a bit of sharing or retweeting!

I found this GIF which I think reflects the book well – moonlight across the sea was an image I thought about a lot when I was writing the book. Pretty isn’t it?

dancing-by-the-moonlight

Screen shots

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by kathmcgurl in Books

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

good news, Pearl Locket, Promotion

I have been making heavy use of the snipping tool today, capturing screen grabs as The Pearl Locket has climbed the charts. It won’t last long, so I’m enjoying it while I can. So please excuse this horribly self-indulgent post.

Here it is, #1 in Women’s Historical Fiction. It’s also #1 in Sagas, #50 overall, and has a lovely little best-seller flag.

best sellers 24-09-15 ranking KDD 8pm Saga best seller flag

Updated 5pm on 25th – book has continued to climb the charts even though it is now back at full price. Here’s the current snapshot which has me even more excited! Never thought I would hit top 10!

ranking 25-09-15 5pm

Kindle Daily Deal for The Pearl Locket!

24 Thursday Sep 2015

Posted by kathmcgurl in Books

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

Pearl Locket, Promotion

I always dreamed that one day Amazon might choose one of my books to be featured on a Kindle Daily Deal and today they have.

The Pearl Locket is 99p on Amazon UK for today only! Buy while stocks last, tee hee!

The Pearl Locket_FINAL

http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B00P1G6KHU/ref=tsm_1_fb_lk

From short story to novel

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by kathmcgurl in Writing

≈ 16 Comments

Tags

Pearl Locket

No, this isn’t going to be a post about how I began as a short story writer and became a novelist. It’s a post about a specific short story I wrote some years ago, which formed the basis for my latest novel, The Pearl Locket. Whenever I’ve mentioned to people that I turned a 2,000-word short story into a 70,000-word novel, their eyes have tended to widen and their jaws drop open.

Here’s a little insight into how I managed it.

If you’ve read everything I’ve ever published (then you are probably my mum) you will have come across a ghost story called We’ll Meet Again which I included in my book, Ghost Stories and How to Write Them. When I was putting that book together, and re-reading the stories I included in it, it struck me that here was a story which could perhaps become a dual-timeline novel. I’d just about finished my novel The Emerald Comb at that time, and knew I wanted to write more books using the same structure – ie alternating chapters telling a historical story and a contemporary story which were linked.

The short story We’ll Meet Again was all in one time period – the contemporary story – but I instantly saw that I could also tell the historical story: that of Joan and Jack and their love affair.

I set about planning the novel – using a spreadsheet and writing a couple of sentences about what would happen in each chapter; aiming for around 25 chapters. Obviously I needed to add lots of new scenes in both timelines but I made sure they were all there to further the main plot lines.

As with The Emerald Comb I found it easier to write the historical story than the contemporary. This was mainly because the historical has just a single linear plot. In dual-timeline novels, the contemporary story needs to include a plot and perhaps sub-plots for the contemporary characters, as well as showing how they uncover the mystery buried in the past, and it all has to weave together in a satisfying way. I can’t tell you how many times I rewrote the contemporary sections, juggling chapters and reworking events.

I had to add several characters of course – Joan’s parents, Jack’s aunt and friend, Kelly’s brother, the next-door neighbours in both timelines, and Kelly’s boyfriend Matt (who I fell a teensy bit in love with. What a thoroughly nice boy he is!) I decided to keep the same names for all the main characters as I’d used in the short story. They were already alive in my head and I didn’t feel I could rename them. It’d feel like renaming my children.

My first draft followed the plot of We’ll Meet Again quite closely. It was definitely a ghost story and had the same ending. But my excellent editors at Carina suggested I should make it less supernatural, so that it would still appeal to non-ghost-believers. The Emerald Comb has no ghosts (although little Thomas is spooked by the wind in the chimney and thinks there is one!) and so it made sense to ensure my second novel fell into exactly the same genre.

Removing the ghost from a ghost story was by far the hardest rewrite I have ever done. But along the way I wrote a new beginning and a new ending (completely different to the ending of the short story) which I knew were much better than the original. And after removing the ghost entirely I then went through it again and put it back in, but more subtly, so that only one character actually thinks there’s a ghost. The reader can now choose what to believe. (For those who’ve read Ghost Stories and How to Write Them, you might recognise that I’ve now provided an “Alternative Rational Explanation”. Perhaps I should have followed my own advice in the first place!)

Not every short story could become a novel, but every now and again you might write one which can. If your tale has a lot of back-story which is only hinted at, summarised or glossed over, then perhaps it is expandable into a novella or novel. It’s a big, tough but rewarding writing exercise!

The Pearl Locket – publication!

28 Saturday Feb 2015

Posted by kathmcgurl in Books, Writing

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

book deal, Carina, good news, Pearl Locket

Yesterday was publication day for my second Carina UK novel, The Pearl Locket. It’s been said before, that launch day for a book is a little like the day your son or daughter leaves home to fend for themselves. You’ve done your job as author, bringing your book-baby into the world, and you can do no more. Now it’s time for the book to be released into the big wide world, to sink or swim on its own merits. It’s a scary moment.

The Pearl Locket_FINAL

And I think it is worse this time round. With my self-published books, I thought that if I sold a couple of hundred copies that would be ok, I’d be happy. My first Carina book was exciting, but I still counted as a new author to most readers, and so there was nothing I had to live up to.

But (thankfully!) The Emerald Comb did well, and now I have readers who were eagerly awaiting my next book. I have been battling a confidence crisis for the last few weeks. What if they all hate the new book? What if I disappoint them? I know plenty of other writers – enough to understand that this is a perfectly normal reaction to publication of book 2. I have been trying to step outside of myself and say (as I have said to others in the past), “don’t be daft. It’s a good book – some people will love it, some might not, but you can never please everyone. Now off you go, promote it a little, and get on with writing the next one.”

So, that’s what I am doing. Getting on with the next one, that is. I am DELIGHTED to say that Carina have offered me a second two-book deal, which means I really DO need to get on with writing the next book!

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