Why Fun, Romantic Reading Should be Prescription Reading

By Jessica Clare

It’s 2022, and we’ve been through hell.

(That’s it. That’s the statement.)

Okay, but for real. In the last few years we’ve been through an absolute rollercoaster of things. We’ve had contentious elections. Bombings. Social movements. Beloved celebrities dying. War. Inflation. Housing crises. Supply crises. Everything crises. And a pandemic that’s given us all kinds of post-traumatic stress. 

(Does anyone else get unnerved when someone stands a little too close in the grocery store line? Just me?)

As a collective people, we’ve been through a lot. And I’m a firm believer in books as escapism. When I was a child, I absolutely loved books like The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where these displaced children went to another world and became important and powerful. I loved The Secret Garden, where a displaced girl found a special home for herself that no one knew about. As a teenager, I loved Anne McCaffrey’s Pern Books, where people on a strange planet rode dragons and saved the world. I loved epic fantasy, too, where farm boys discovered they had special powers and rode off to adventure. I was never a huge fan of dark, angsty stories with terrible things happening to people. I hated a tragedy. 

There’s enough of that in the world right now.

So I think to unwind, it’s time we take some of the ‘fun’ back for ourselves. What better way to do that than to read some escapist, light, fluffy fiction where there are no bad guys and the biggest question is will they or won’t they?  What’s wrong with that?  We go through so much on a daily basis that when I ‘escape’ into a book (just like those kids escaped into Narnia) I want to be wildly entertained. I want to know what I’m reading is SAFE and HAPPY and will end in a way that makes me smile.

I don’t want to cry while I read. I don’t want to feel grief. I don’t want to be frightened out of my wits or horrified at another person’s actions.

I want to be wrapped in a fluffy, cozy blanket of feel-good that’s provided by the author. I want to awkwardly fake date Adam Carlsen (The Love Hypothesis). I want to go on my sister’s honeymoon with the annoying best man (The Unhoneymooners).  I want to have a sexy handyman help me get out of my comfort zone (Get a Life, Chloe Brown). I want to hire a sexy escort to help me navigate love (The Kiss Quotient).

I want to close a book with a sigh and a smile. I want a few hours of the day to be nothing but sheer joy. We need that right now. And if we’re feeling sad or stressed or lonely, we need to be able to turn off the news or the internet, and have a nice, cozy place to dive into that will envelop us in a warm hug and show us that people are good, bad dates can be funny, and occasionally you just might date a sexy boat captain that will build you a gazebo to show you how much he loves you (It Happened One Summer).

New York Times bestselling author Jessica Clare writes under three pen names. As Jessica Clare, she writes erotic contemporary romance. As Jessica Sims, she writes fun, sexy shifter paranormals. Finally, as Jill Myles, she writes a little bit of everything, from sexy, comedic urban fantasy to zombie fairy tales

Catherine Hokin On Being A Visual Writer

by Catherine Hokin

I am a visual writer.

No, you didn’t read that wrong. What I mean by that statement is that I am inspired by the things that I see and by the way images are used to tell stories.

 Pictures or films or photographs are most often the inspiration for my novels. If you know me you won’t be surprised by that. The walls of our house are covered in paintings and film posters and prints. My noticeboard plays host to the maps I draw – from country down to street level – of the places I am writing about and the cinema is my favourite hang-out.

Like all historical fiction writers, I am obsessed with research and my starting point for this – and for idea generation – is usually physical places. I prowl round art galleries, museums, streets and sites of historical interest like a magpie with a smartphone, snapping at anything that sparks my interest. And, because my books are set in Berlin, it’s usually Berlin where I can be found going walk about.

Both The Commandant’s Daughter and The Pilot’s Girl, the first two books in what will be a four-part series about photographer Hanni Winter, started this way. A good photograph –which my main character becomes a master of, although not in the way she imagined that she would – can take us on a journey. It can also tell a very different story to the truth and that’s where my writer brain starts. And where book one of the series, The Commandant’s Daughter began.

The image which kicked off Hanni’s story is in Berlin’s German Historical Museum and was taken in 1933 on the night Hitler was made Chancellor of Germany. It records a moment from the torchlight procession which Goebbels organised to sweep through the Brandenburg Gate, past the Adlon Hotel and along Wilhelmstraβe to the Reich Chancellory where Hitler was waiting to be adored. The photograph is in black and white and yet it isn’t: the river of torches springs out of the frame like molten silver. It is glorious and it is also, when you stop and consider what the picture commemorates, truly terrible. And that was my starting point. A little girl standing on a balcony, staring down enraptured at the dancing flames, who is about to be taught to properly look at them. A little girl who, from that moment, will never see the world in the same way again.

The Pilot’s Girl also had its start with a museum and a photograph, but this one can also claim an artifact (a very big one) and a film in the mix as well.

The museum this time was The Allied Museum which is located in an old movie theatre in the area which was once the heart of the American forces in Berlin. I went there already knowing that I wanted Hanni’s story to advance from 1945/46 into the Berlin Blockade of 1948/49. What I didn’t know was that I would be able to climb into one of the airplanes that was used to fly supplies into the city and is now a museum exhibit. And what I also didn’t know was that I would find my key character – the blockade pilot in question – grinning down from a wall there. The first thing I noticed about him was that he bore a passing resemblance to Montgomery Clift, the American heartthrob from the 1940s and fifties. I grew up in the days of Sunday afternoon films which I used to watch with my father who was a massive film buff and I’ve had a bit of a thing for a chiseled jaw ever since.

When I got home, I started to watch a number of films which were made and set in Berlin at the end of the war and one of those – The Search – starred the aforesaid Mr Clift. The film  tells the story of an American soldier who is stationed in occupied Germany in 1945 and finds a young boy living wild in the ruins of the city. The film is fascinating for lots of reasons – not least that most of the children who feature in it were actually from Displaced Persons Camps and had lost everything in the war, including their families and sometimes their names. Clift also apparently made a lot of alterations to the script so that his character was less a hero and more a flawed human being shocked by the truth of life in post-war Berlin. His character is part of the city and also not; highly visible but also able to retreat back into his American safety-net. And that was where I picked up the thread…

My character Tony in The Pilot’s Girl looks like Montgomery Clift but that is where the resemblance ends. I have taken the idea of a dashing hero who is the toast of the city and made it very dark. But his beginning was in a photograph in the same way that Hanni’s was.

And what about book three in the series which is coming next year? I’ve gone back to a film again – a shocking piece of propaganda shot by the Nazis in the ghetto town of Theresienstadt – and to photographs of the bombed out remains of Dresden and the empty spaces in Czechoslovakia where towns like Lidice were raised by the Nazis to the ground. And Hanni is now something of a celebrity herself, mounting – rather dangerously given what it contains – her first exhibition.

As I said, I am a visual writer. Images tell stories to me. I tell stories from them. Fingers crossed for the next magpie expedition…

Catherine Hokin is from the North of England but now lives very happily in Glasgow with her American husband. Both her children have left home (one to London and one to Berlin) which may explain why she is finally writing. You can find her on  Cat Hokin FB page or on twitter @cathokin

The Saturday Slash

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THE GREAT RESIGNATION, a first-person 66,000 word upmarket novel with a passionate adult love story, mixes the humor and vulnerability of Something To Live For by Richard Roper with the voicey style and narrative twists of a Jonathan Tropper novel. I always tell people to start with their hook - everyone has a title, a word count, and comp titles. Start with something no one else has - the hook for your book. Could just be me, but that's where I land.

Presaging today’s headlines, it’s 2009, If it's set in 2009, it can't really presage today's headlines, b/c we already have that knowledge. I realize that's a loose interpretation of the word, but it was my immediate thought upon reading it and Will and Clara quit their respective positions as lawyer and local newscaster to pursue risky dreams. Like what? We need to know what they are in order to believe that they are risky, or understand why this presages anything Spurring each other on, they become deeply involved. With what? Each other? These risky dreams? How do they spur each other on? Will persists down the low-status path of working as a children’s clown and musician, informed by his guilt over acquitting a client who went on to murder her child — an impossible debt to discharge. It's an interesting idea, however, why does he feel like this appraoch cleanses him? Will’s mother, brother, and colleague urge him to bear up and get back to work. His original career? Only Clara stands behind his career change — until she does an abrupt 360 and begs him to try her father’s battery case. What is Clara's arc? What was her risky dream? You already stated earlier that they spur each other on, so we don't need the restatement When Will refuses, Clara leaves him, claiming he is limited in his capacity to give, an assessment Will grudgingly accepts. Even so, he and Clara seem on the verge of reconciliation when she learns of his rebound one-night-stand with Alessia, the daughter of Clara’s ruthless new boss.New boss in what sector? Clara is totally lost in this narrative, even though it began seeming as if it was about both of them Now, without Clara’s support, Will must persevere in his new calling — strictly for himself. But wasn't he doing it for himself to begin with? There was no statemetn that made it seem like Clara is benefiting from his new career When a botched surgery takes Alessia’s life, Will offers his legal services to Clara’s boss to save her grandson from an abusive father. So he'll return to the career he hates for the son of his one night stnd, but not for his girlfriend's father? Why? As Will seeks to win the case, and Clara, he continues to explore whether he must change himself to fit the world. We need to know more about the motivation - why would he quit in the first place? How does he think the new career is going to save his soul, and what's the motivation for returning to it? What has changed that he would even consider it? This also needs to be reframed so that it doesn't open sounding as if it's going to be equally about Will and Clara - it's not.

This story is loosely based on my own journey from lawyer-to-clown-to-kids-musician as featured in my NY Times essay http://ow.ly/fuI030iK7TC which provoked 465 reader comments. From this experience, I learned to use my work not to gain prestige but as a means to craft a joyful life.