Valentine’s Day had been and gone for 2020, but remember your romance with books and reading can be every day of the year! Welcome to blog contributor Trish Morey! Trish is a USA Today Bestselling Author who loves to travel and loves being a writer! Trish joins us here today to tell us about three things she learned while writing ‘One Summer Between Friends’.
1. That nothing beats being there.
Sure, there is always google to inform you about a setting. Images on line abound, and you can read any number of travel sites or travel blogs. All good info that we’ve never had access to before. But do they tell you about how the rainforest floor smells so fertile and rich after a rain shower, or how the palm leaves chatter almost like voices in the treetops with the breeze, or how those waves sound pounding against the coral reef fringing the island? You’re the writer, this is the kind of stuff you notice and you need to put in your own words. Don’t leave it to someone else, unless you have to.
And sure, you can work from memory (I first visited Lord Howe Island in 1998 on our honeymoon). I loved our visit, always said I’d go back, and was so lucky in 2016 when fellow author, Fiona McArthur said she was thinking of visiting Lord Howe Island, was I interested?
Hell yes! Because we do forget the detail over time, and so many memories were refreshed and rekindled and made new again during that visit.
2. That it’s okay to go into a story not knowing how everything turns out.
Okay, so I learn this every time I write a book, so it’s not just something I learned with One Summer Between Friends, and yet it’s always like a new discovery, that it’s a lesson in trusting myself and my process. Learning to dig deeper with every pass, and the story detail will be revealed along the way.
Something very important for writers who aren’t plotters to remember – trust your process, the answers will come (even if it’s like, 10:30pm on a Sunday night and you can’t see a way out of the black moment and still have 20K words to write and your manuscript is due in two days. Trust yourself!! – although it’s quite okay to hyperventilate a bit at this stage too…)
3. Don’t ignore that pink Breastscreen reminder!
Never believe that if you ignore that pink Breastscreen reminder on your desk (because you don’t want to jinx yourself while you write about a character undergoing breast cancer treatment), that it will somehow protect you from a similar diagnosis.
Take it from me, writing about a condition gives you no immunity or special protection from that condition.
Go get that Breastscreen mammagram done!
About One Summer Between Friends
Coming home was never going to be easy …
With a failed marriage behind her, and her career dreams in tatters, Sarah returns home to Lord Howe Island to run the family store. Paradise to most, Lord Howe is the last place Sarah wants to be, trapped on an island with her two ex-best friends, Floss and Jules.
Floss has the life she always wanted: married to her high school sweetheart, Andy, with five gorgeous children. But something is missing from her marriage. And now she has a secret that threatens to tear her happy family apart, and the only person she can talk to is the woman who pushed her away.
For Jules, forgetting the past is impossible. Her four-year-old daughter is an everyday reminder of the friendships she has lost. But when a discovery turns her life upside down, she knows this is an opportunity to set things right.
This summer, can these women overcome the pain of the past and find their way back to the friendship they once had?
You can find the One Summer Between Friends on Amazon and Booktopia.
About Trish Morey
Trish always fancied herself a writer, so she dutifully picked gherkins and washed dishes in a Chinese restaurant on her way to earning herself an economics degree and a qualification as a chartered accountant instead. Work took her to Canberra where she promptly fell in love with a tall, dark and handsome hero who cut computer code, and marriage and the inevitable children followed, which gave Trish the chance to step back from her career and think about what she’d really like to do.
When Trish spied a newspaper article reporting that Harlequin was actively seeking new authors, it was a “Eureka!” moment, Trish was going to be one of those authors! 11 years later, Harlequin finally came to the party and she sold her first book.
Since then, Trish has sold thirty-two titles to Harlequin with sales in excess of 7 million globally, with her books printed in more than thirty languages in forty countries worldwide. Her favourite editions are the Czech translations, where she becomes Trish Moreyova, and the Japanese Manga (graphic, or comic) editions, which to put it simply, are just very, very cool.
Trish is now also writing novellas for Tule Publishing and single title Women’s Fiction for Harper Collins/Harlequin Mira Australia.
Four times nominated and two times winner of Australia’s Romantic Book of the Year (RuBY) Award, in 2012, Trish was nominated for Romance Writers of America’s prestigious RITA Award, for her mad piano playing Count Volta, in A Storm Within.
When she’s not out traveling the world in search of inspiration for her stories, Trish divides her time between the city and the glorious beaches of the southern coast of South Australia.
Trish reckons she has the best job in the world.
Web: http://www.trishmorey.com/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/TrishMoreyAuthor/
Instagram: @moreytrish
Twitter: Trish McMuffin @MoreyTrish