Introducing loveahappyending.com featured author Chris Longmuir, who lives in bonnie Scotland and will be another of our guest speakers on 16 June 2012. Chris will be talking about crime, thrillers and her writing journey!
Chris Longmuir won the Dundee International Book Prize in 2009 with her first crime novel. The prizewinning novel, Dead Wood, was published by Polygon and was so successful that the first print run sold out within four months.
Since then Chris has published two further novels as ebooks. Night Watcher her second crime novel was published in March 2011, and her historical saga, A Salt Splashed Cradle followed three months later. Boosted by the success of her novels, Chris delved into the depths of her computer to dig out her short stories which she published in two volumes as - Obsession & Other Stories, and Ghost Train & Other Stories.
Chris also writes short stories and historical articles for magazines which are published in the UK and theUS. She is currently working on a further two crime novels.
Chris is fascinated by electronic gadgets of all types and descriptions and is never happier than when experimenting with new hardware and software. She designed and put up her own website and builds computers in her spare time. She describes herself as being a bit of a techno-geek.
I had an interesting chat with Chris the other day and I hope she doesn’t mind my sharing it with you! I asked the question ‘where did it all begin’?
I’ve been writing most of my life, although when I was a child, writing only took place in my head. I would plan books and stories and live in my imagination. I was a dreamer. You see, when I was younger my imagination didn’t stretch to thinking I could be a writer. After all writers were magical people, special people, and I wasn’t special.
So I did what most people did when they left school, I went to work. Now at that time girls weren’t encouraged into education because the expectation was marriage and babies. That meant I left school with no qualifications, my dreaming days were over.
Work wasn’t that bad. I worked in shops, offices, factories and was a bus conductress for a time, clippies we were called. That was fun. Then it was the marriage and babies bit, and that was good too. I was lucky, in an age when husbands expected their wives to conform to the ‘obey’ bit in the wedding vows, mine was far more flexible. So once the kids had grown up a bit I started to study, night school first and then the Open University.
That was when my dreams started to resurface. However I couldn’t waste the degree I’d worked so hard to get, so I became a social worker, and that’s where I learned about the dark side of life.
So now you know why I write dark crime and why I find it so difficult to write romantic fiction. Oh, I do sprinkle a bit of romance throughout my books, but it is quite a bit darker than many of the love stories and chick lit novels that are out there.
Anyway, back to writing. I suppose I’ve been writing seriously now for the past 23 years. Using a pen name I published short stories for women’s magazines. I wasn’t ready to come out of the closet at that time. Then I started publishing articles under my own name and I did quite well, managing to get published in the UK and the US. My confidence was growing and I started to write novels. My first novel was a historical saga, now published as A Salt Splashed Cradle, after that I wrote a historical crime which is not yet published, following which I wrote Night Watcher, and then Dead Wood.
Then the demoralizing round of submissions to agents and publishers started. I now had four books in the bottom drawer. But, although my confidence was at a low ebb I didn’t stop writing, because by this time it had become an addiction. If I wasn’t writing, I went into withdrawals.
When I published my first book, Dead Wood, it was the highlight of my writing career. But don’t think Dead Wood hadn’t been down the rejection trail, because it had. I could have papered my study with all the rejection slips I received over the three years I’d been hawking it round agents and publishers.
So, after all these rejections, what was the change that made my book suddenly acceptable for publication? Well, my big break came when I won the Dundee International Book Prize with Dead Wood, in 2009.
I really thought I had it made, particularly when the book sold so well that the first print run was exhausted within four months.
However, pride always comes before a fall, and my fall came when I tried to publish my second book. I thought book number two would be snapped up because Dead Wood had been such a success. What I hadn’t reckoned on was the recession and publishers refusing to take risks. They started getting rid of their mid-list authors, all good sellers but not in the millions category. Contracts were dropped, new authors were rebuffed. What chance did I have when some of my friends with over 20 books in publication were losing their contracts?
Like Dead Wood before it, Night Watcher was rejected time and time again. After two years, on the advice of an agent friend, I published Night Watcher as an ebook, this was closely followed by A Salt Splashed Cradle, and two collections of short stories. These books are all doing well as ebooks, and the only regret I have is that they are not available in paperback for those of my fans who do not possess ereaders.
So now, having come full circle and fulfilled my dreams by becoming a writer, I’ve found out that writers are not magical people nor are they special. They are simply people lucky enough to be following their dream and doing what they have to do. I wish I’d found that out earlier.
One of the delights in being a writer is meeting readers, people who appreciate the books we produce, and I’ll get that opportunity at the Summer Audience event at Tetbury in June. Hope to see you there so we can have a good chinwag.
We’re thrilled that Chris will be there on the day and we’re sure she will keep you riveted to your seat! So come along to a ‘Summer Audience’ at Sir William Romney’s school in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, we think you’ll have a fun day! See you there……
Initially writing poetry and articles, Kit moved on to writing her first novel back in the mid 1990s. In 2004 she was shortlisted for the Harry Bowling Prize for a London novel with Every Step of the Way. Published for the first time in this, the Queen’s Silver Jubilee Year and as a mark of respect for those who died during the Great Smog of 1952, it is the story of the good and bad times of the 1950s era. Writing across many genres, she has several other books waiting in the wings for publication including Whitestones, a paranormal centred on a Cotswold mansion where she lived when first coming to Gloucestershire; Queenie Queenie, a second 1950s’ story of jealousy and rivalry set in London and Australia; and A Moment of Time, a timeslip set on a Greek island.
Kit is also a loveahappyending.com Editor with her own monthly feature ‘Kit’s Corner’ where she interviews our soon-to-be-published writers and authors about their writing journeys.
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