Articles and Interviews

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Is There Anybody Out There?

This is a piece I wrote for the Evening Herald about my website! (2004)

My lovely boyfriend, Ben, works in computers and I blame him. He was at me for months to set up my own website, so eventually I gave in. Now my site is about to go live and I am inching closer and closer towards having an official online ‘presence’. It was supposed to go live weeks ago but I’ve been dragging my heels more than a little, as my talented web site designer, Shane, will attest. ‘Wait!’ I’ve told him every few days, ‘I need to add a photograph’, ‘My mother wants me to change a line of my biog’, ‘I have a library event coming up, I’ll announce it then’.

I was exactly the same when we bought our new house. It took me the bones of a month to feel happy sleeping there - ‘Wait!’ I’d say as Ben picked up the phone to the van rental company. ‘We need to paint the spare room first’, ‘I can’t move my work files until next week, I’m in the middle of something’, ‘My sister’s away and I need her advice on where to put the furniture.’ Eventually he ignored my inane mutterings and simply got on with it, ignoring my feeble protestations.

Why was I nervous about sleeping in my fantastic new house? And why was I nervous about going live? I guess it all boils down to the same old thing - I’m a creature of habit and I don’t like my tidy and ordered little universe to change, even for the better. So I clung on to my old Epson computer, D drive and all, until it literally blew up (luckily Ben had had the forbearance to copy all my files on to floppy disks before it did just this - well, he’s not in computers for nothing!), I stayed in our small mews house for as long as I could, and I’ve even managed to delay the launch of my web site until now.

Who would visit the website and would they make of it? My friends and family, I figured, plus some other interested parties including my readers, I hoped. This worried me - had I got the tone, design and contents right for such a varied audience? I emailed my carefully-designed and written web pages to several of my writing friends and close family - people I trusted to be honest, and was a little perturbed by their feedback. ‘Nice and pink’ one friend said, another commented ‘Very eye-catching, I like the shirt you’re wearing on the biog page.’ My mother, apart from pointing out that she was a secondary school teacher and not a primary school teacher as I’d written in my biog (oops!), was strangely reticent when it came to the content. ‘Oh, It looks lovely, Sarah,’, she gushed. ‘Beautiful photo of Amy (my baby)’. Only one person, a writer who has her own website, made any reference to the content at all. ‘The buttons are good,’ she pointed out. ‘You’ve obviously put a lot of work into the different sections. It rewards people who take the time to look at more than just the home page. I like the pages that list your favourite books. And the short stories are great.’

You see, that’s just it - most of my friends and family had just looked at the home page and the photographs - only one person had actually bothered to read the text. And that’s when I started to relax. I realised that most website browsers are just that - browsers. They will rarely look beyond the home page and the photographs. I had worried in vain about getting the text just right.

Before planning and writing my own site I undertook extensive research into other sites. I looked at other writer’s pages and considered what worked and what didn’t work from a design and content point of view. I lingered on sites that I found interesting or informative. I thought about my own readers and considered what they might find useful or fun. I thought about why people browse the Internet at all and what they wanted most from a site. And I come to several conclusions.

The only people who revisit particular websites have a real interest in the site - if you visit once and don’t like it you won’t visit again. The most compelling ones are those that change and update their information - and especially their photographs - on a regular basis; and sites where you actually learn more about the subject or the person in question (sounds obvious, but a lot of the sites out there are all ‘fur coats and no knickers’ as my mother would say!). And, of course, people undertaking researching for their own website are the most interested browsers of all!

So now I’m not afraid of my website anymore. And I’ve finally gone live! Do let me know what you think of the photographs.

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My Friend, the Lap Dancer

I am, by nature a rather curious person. (I can hear those that know me snort in derision already). OK, I am a very, very curious person. I have been known to interrogate friend’s new girl or boyfriends over an innocent dinner, monopolise interesting or unusual guests at a party, and scare teenagers by my intense interest in the latest ‘trends’. Did you know, for example, and I have it on good authority after questioning an unsuspecting six class boy at my son’s sports day, that the dreaded ‘rat’s tail’ is back in fashion - that skinny pigtail that hangs down the back of the neck of an otherwise normal young boy or girl with short hair. I shudder at the thought. So when I started to write fiction, my friends and family naturally assumed in time, as I knew so much about them and all their foibles and quirks, that they would appear in some form or other in my books. Not always as leading characters, you understand, but as ‘glamorous aunts’, ‘attractive, intelligent and well adjusted friends’, ‘sympathetic and kindly parents’, their words, not mine. And I do admit that, like all writers, I am a magpie. I use all kinds of squirreled away information to write my books - what I’ve learned and continue to learn about love, about understanding childhood experiences and sibling relationships, about the importance of nurturing ones friendships, about loss, grief and those bleak, black days when getting out of bed seems like too much effort.

So when one of my closest friends, let’s call her Nadia to spare her blushes knowledgeably informed me that she was ‘Jodie’ in my second book ‘Always the Bridesmaid’ it gave me quite a shock. She’d already decided she was ‘Sally’, the man-eating, party-loving professional sailor in my previous book, you understand, when she clearly was no such person. Jodie, at the opening of this book, steals the main character, Amy’s fiancé, refuses to be penitent about it, and has blazing rows with Amy accusing her of being underhand and deceitful. A top interior designer, Jodie is a tall size fourteen to sixteen who happily scorns the gym and any kind of exercise. Nadia is a petit size eight investment specialist who hasn’t a bad bone in her body, is a dedicated hard-body and has never, to my knowledge stolen anyone’s boyfriend let alone fiancé. So why did she think she was Jodie? She has tried to explain her reasoning but frankly I’m still none the wiser. It has something to do with Jodie’s wise cracks and her strong, slightly spiky nature apparently. I’m keeping Nadia away from my man just in case.

As you may have gathered by this stage I write what is variously described as ‘romantic fiction’, ‘popular fiction’, ‘chick lit’, ‘sex and shopping’, ‘airport fiction’, ‘pulp fiction’ or, my favourite and hopefully the most accurate, ‘romantic comedy’. Us female (and we are largely female) ‘romantic comedy writers’ rarely get invited to literary festivals, are sniffed at by certain bookshops who have black shelving (although, to be fair, Waterstone’s are getting better) and are taken less then seriously by the general public and more ‘literary’ writers alike. But ‘romantic comedy’ sells, and sells by the bucket loads, and hundreds upon thousands of readers can’t be wrong. And, as most of my fellow ‘Irish girls’ will tell you, it’s great fun to write! And great work if you can get it.

What other job lets you indulge all your fantasies, entertain yourself by killing off or belittling your enemies, allows you to gorge yourself on designer clothes, expensive perfume, top of the range cars and four by fours? You can whisk your characters away to a sunny villa in Sorrento while outside the driving Irish rain lashes your windowpanes. Your leading ladies can be strong, courageous and conquering while you cower at a spider in the bathtub. Your leading men can be just what you’ve always wanted in your ideal other halves. You can fly to Paris and dine at an exclusive restaurant, cruise around the British Virgin Islands or be spirited away to Barcelona in a private jet. The permutations are endless. And it’s all available at the tip of your fingers. Writing is a fantastic job and don’t let anyone tell you the wiser.

But back to Nadia. I was asked to write a short story for the ‘Irish Girls About Town’ collection, published recently in aid of Barnados and the St Vincent de Paul. In order to demonstrate my point - that although the settings and even at times the situations in my books are sometimes based on reality, the characters and the plots are completely fictional - I decided to loosely base my short story on a real wedding I attended last year in Cowes, on the Isle of Wight. It was a fantastic wedding, full of pink lanterns and white silk, rocking music and shiny happy people. I tried to give my fictional wedding a similar atmosphere and feel, using different styling and different details. And I made a Trojan effort, while using the setting and the overall situation, to make the characters complete and utter fabrications. One of the ‘leading ladies’ was so unpleasant that I’d be worried if anyone associated themselves with her. I made the other main female character a lap dancer. And the men were hundreds of miles away from my real friends. It was an interesting case study - guess who thought she was the blooming lap dancer? Nadia! I can’t win. I won’t try that particular exercise again in a hurry.

There is only one single solitary time that I’ve put a ‘real’ person into one of books. He’d cornered me in a bar and asked me so nicely and so directly that I was happy to oblige. And Conor is now immortalised as a good-looking guitar-playing waiter. But it was the first and last time I will ever do it. I have heard of a writer ‘selling’ the inclusion of a person’s name as a character in her next book at a charity auction. Great idea but one I will not be emulating.

But to make things even more complicated, at the centre of my next book ‘Something to Talk About’ is the relationship between Lucy, a beautician and her best friend, Max, a kite maker. Lucy and Max have variously waltzed and tiptoe around their feelings towards each other over their years as friends. And, guess what, Dan, (another pseudonym) my real best friend is also a man. And yes, I have used all kinds of observations from our real relationship, and yes, his the dodgy 70’s green bathroom tiles play a small character role. Although, and Dan refuses to believe this but it’s true, Max’s gra for tropical fish, especially Clown Fish, predates Dan’s by at least six months. But as Dan is not Max and Max is not Dan, that hardly matters. As always, I’ve woven a fictional story with fictional characters out of the fabric of my own life. But I’m waiting for the phone calls. ‘I never knew you were in love with Dan, congratulations, when’s the wedding?’ Sigh, I can’t win. Maybe I should stick to the cookery books!

This article first appeared in the Irish Independent in 2002.