Joining the New Zealand Romance Writers online community has opened a new window of opportunity for me - there are some wonderfully helpful people there like Shirley Wine, who writes Rural Romances as breathtaking and unique as the land that inspires them. Shirley has been generous with her advice and has hosted my first guest blog on her website-linked blog: http://www.shirleywine.comI hope one day I can help others in the group as much as Shirley has helped me. I've often been told that being generous with your help to other writers can reap its own rewards later on. If this is the case, Shirley deserves payback big-time.
This is what I wrote on her blog, which can be found at: http://www.shirleywine.com/2013/12/felicity-price-guest-post/:
Why I simply had to
write “In Her Mothers’ Shoes”
Like many Baby Boomers, I was born to an unmarried mother in
the 1950s and adopted at birth. My mother never even got to hold me or say
goodbye. I was simply taken from her while her stitches were being sewn up and
she never saw me again.
My adoptive parents told me from an early age that I’d been
adopted. It never seemed a big deal until I was a teenager, a time when many of
us question our parents and wish we’d been born to someone more glamorous and
lenient! From then on, I keenly wanted to know who my “real” mother was (I
wasn’t so fussed about my birth father) but it wasn’t until the New Zealand
adoption laws changed in 1986-7 that I was able to do anything about it.
I finally got to meet her in the late 1980s but it wasn’t
for another twenty-two years that I met up with my new brothers and sister.
The more people I spoke to about finding me new family, the
more I realised just how common my story is. It seemed almost everyone had a
half brother or sister, or cousin, or some close relative who’d suddenly popped
up out of the blue. It was a story waiting to be told, and for some time I
thought about writing it.
Until then, my books had been a bit like Marian Keyes’ books
– a mix of light-hearted humour with some serious issues, but essentially
entertaining. The title of one of them – “A Sandwich Short of a Picnic” – says
it all.
This new novel (yes, it is fictional, but obviously based on
my story) about finding my birth family, had to be different to allow for the
heart-wrenching time my birth mother had and the heart-warming feeling of
finally meeting someone who looks like you. Not to mention, realising that at
last you can have a sense of belonging, of fitting in.
So I started working part-time and spent a year attending
the “Bill Manhire” Victoria University Creative Writing course. It was the most
wonderful experience. I learned how to stop over-writing, over-explaining, how
to internalise better; I learned so many things that helped me write a better book.
When it was finished, my usual publisher, Random House, told
me it wasn’t commercial enough – which it wasn’t. Especially compared with my
earlier books. So I published it myself – in print and online – and documented
some of the fun and games on my blog. I’m still learning how to do it, how to
sell more books online, and how to write even better next time. Because, of
course, I’m writing another book this year. It’s quite different. Who knows if
it will be commercial?!
