Going, going, gone…..

Posted on March 3, 2011 by Helena

Because I use this blog in part as a diary, I am going to post a speech my deputy made today and show you the glorious cake the magazine team had made for me. I just don’t want you to think I am trying to show off. But it was too lovely a gesture not to keep…obviously I cried.

Here is the cake

Here is Rick’s Speech:
Helena, you wear us out.

You are a whirlwind.

We don’t know how you do it.

You’re a wife, a mother … a tennis player, a yoga practitioner … a
beauty spy, a trier and a tester … a fashion and style icon with
your signature leopard print and pink … a writer, a ghostwriter, an
editor …

We don’t know when you sleep.

Your unflagging energy and tireless commitment to excellence inspire,
ennoble, charm, delight … and only occasionally infuriate us.

We congratulate and celebrate with you on the publication of your
latest novel — and we tell you that our relationship with you is one
of:

Love in a Warm Climate.

Here I am with the cake:

And this is what is left of it now….

Let’s hope book stocks are depleted as fast…yum.

Read all about it…….

Posted on February 14, 2011 by Helena

From today’s Daily Mail….I am a novelist! Finally!

Novelist Helena Frith Powell writes, in her latest work, Love In A Warm Climate: ‘Johnny was tall, about six-foot-two, and well-built.

But he had the most delicate hands, like a pianist’s – small with elegant fingers. Sometimes I had to stop myself looking at them and wondering what they would feel like over my body…’

A friend of Miss Frith Powell confides: ‘Johnny is based on the chef Marco Pierre White, whom she knew when they were teenagers. There was no impropriety.’

Be that as it may, I notice the launch party is at Marco Pierre White’s on March 10.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-1357094/EPHRAIM-HARDCASTLE-Are-David-Davids-Tory-ambitions-rising.html#ixzz1E072zBwz

PLEASE BUY THIS BOOK!

Posted on February 9, 2011 by Helena

Love in a Warm Climate is out now, available in the 3 for 2 at both Waterstone’s and Smith’s. I urge you to buy it please, not only to see which character you think is based on whom (!) but to ensure I can afford to keep Leo in football boots, Olivia in laptops, Bea in chocolate biscuits and, most importantly, myself in matching underwear….

Today is the day….

Posted on January 23, 2011 by Helena

At 10 am UK time my first novel goes to print. I have been working on it, on and off, since we left France. In fact since before we left France. I remember having a long conversation with my agent while we were on our summer holiday in the Savoie in 2008. And that was about a re-write, so I had already written much of the first version.

In the end my agent got sick of editing the same book and told me that while she was delighted to represent my non-fiction, she would leave my fiction so someone else. So she effectively sacked me as a fiction writer. But I am still grateful to her for the idea behind the book which she came up with in her office in London some four years ago.

I had gone in to talk about writing the next ‘Great Gatsby’.

“Helena,” she said. “Chick-lit is your audience. Chick-lit is your level. Write a book about a woman who moves to France to run a vineyard with her family and finds out her husband has been having an affair.”

So this is what I did. Happily since she sacked me I have been able to ignore the traditional tenets of chick-lit. I have been able to be much more risque, ruder and generally more myself. I think it is a much better book now. Certainly more amusing and less predictable.

I always say that books are a bit like babies; you carry them, you nurture them, you try to make them as perfect as possible and then they’re out there in the big wide world – for everyone else to dissect and criticize.

This book has certainly taken a lot longer than a baby to make and carry, and there were times, especially during the editing and the proofing process, when I wondered why on earth I had committed myself to writing another book that probably won’t make me any money.

But now that it’s over (I literally just sent the final proofs off) I am already thinking about the next one.

So you see it is a bit like childbirth, you forget the pain and want to do it all over again.

Reading matter

Posted on December 26, 2010 by Helena

I have waited many years for someone to ask me to join a book club. When we lived in Sussex all those years ago, there was a rather snooty one run by a woman called Liz. As an unpublished, desperate and depressed author I hoped that I might get the nod. I never did.

In France there was a book club run by a lady called Sue. I was asked along once or twice but I think I ruined it when I took my friend Carla along and we spent most of the evening cracking jokes. You see it was a very serious book club, more of a study group really, and it was mostly in French. No gossip at all. Hopeless.
Here in Abu Dhabi the women all seem to belong to book clubs. And I have again failed to get the nod. So the other night I had an epiphany. Why not just set one up myself? That way I can invite only women I like and whom I won’t mind listening to as they drone on about their husbands/boyfriends/children/expanding midriff, which is of course the main point of a book club.
I have asked my friend Noch and a couple of others to join. I think we will start off small and membership will be given only very grudgingly as revenge for all those years I was left book club-less.
And another good thing is that my one New year’s resolution is to read more. As a journalist I find I only read more if I have a deadline. And there can be no better deadline than your very own book club.
Happy New Year.

Holiday time

Posted on August 7, 2010 by Helena

Tonight we head off to Europe. All being well this time tomorrow we will be in the Swiss Alps at the Tschuggen Hotel where we spend four nights (working hard on a travel piece) followed by Paris, London, Abersoch (it’s in Wales), then home to Sainte Cecile for a week and finally the Savoie to our friends Norrie and Mary. My mother will bring the girls to Sainte Cecile for a reunion.

I will be relaxing, sleeping, eating and drinking. But also trying to do some work on the book for which we have a cover…..what do you think? Leo and Bea are both concerned with her headless state. Nothing wrong with headless I say, that’s how I spend most of my days…..

Sophie’s choice

Posted on May 23, 2010 by Helena

I was ill in bed for most of the weekend so I worked on my novel. It has been renamed Love in a Warm Climate, which I like, although I did also like Lost in France. Mainly because of the Bonnie Tyler song.

The name may have changed, but the worrying is the same. Sometimes I read what I have written and think ‘that’s not half bad’ other times I think ‘who cares about this?’ or ‘why on earth do we need to know what Sophie eats, does, thinks, says, wears?’

Is this a problem all fiction writers face? Did Scott Fitzgerald worry that no one cared if Gatsby ended up with Daisy? I don’t suppose he did, he probably knew it was brilliant. I know this is not, but then you can hardly compare chick-lit with the master.

Another dilemma I have is Sophie, my main character. She has to chose between two extremely sexy, rich and gorgeous men (why write a book with a load of men no one can fantasise about was my reasoning). I have ended one chapter with Sophie telling her French friend Audrey that she has almost decided. “There’s just one more thing I need to do,” she says, mysteriously.

Well, what she needs to do really is a mystery. I have no idea. Any suggestions most welcome, before the book has to be submitted in August please….

Two of my favourite things…

Posted on March 7, 2010 by Helena

So my Zeldafication begins in earnest on Tuesday when I go to an advanced adult ballet class with our lovely new lodger Una, who was at ballet school until she was 14. Yes I know that I am not advanced, but did that ever stop Zelda? So wish me luck.

Meanwhile if you have a moment please sign this petition to save a library in Montpellier. I had this email from a friend yesterday and said I would do all I can to help: ‘The Anglophone Library (formerly called American Library) here was abruptly closed by the university Paul Valery in January. A group of us are trying to save the books( 30,000) as the university was planning on putting them in boxes and storing them. We are hoping that a new venue will be found for them and have a lot of backing, including that of George Frèche, but we’ve been advised to build as big a support base as possible. One of the things we’ve done is to put a petition online and if we get signatures of stars that gives us even more credibility. Now I know there was at least one of your books in the library, because I read it, so your name would be very significant. If you feel the cause is good, here’s the link :

www.ipetitions.com/petition/savethelibrarymontpellier’

Dancing and reading are the two things we Zeldas most appreciate…..

A virtual world

Posted on January 13, 2010 by Helena

The girls are totally and utterly obsessed with some game on the internet where you have a flat and pets and move your furniture around and go to sleep. My question is this: why not just play in a real room as opposed to a virtual one? Maybe it is because in a virtual world they are in total control?

Or they could even go outside. The weather is lovely at the moment. There is a cool breeze and warming sun, it is hard to imagine how hot and unpleasant it gets, right now it feels like paradise.

The novel is progressing. Not the writing, obviously, that comes last. But there is already interest from the US publisher of Two Lipsticks and a Lover, heaven knows how they heard about it. And Martin my publisher and I are back to our old habits of emailing each other at strange times of the night with “brainwaves”. When Rupert found me on my BlackBerry at 6am this morning responding to an email Martin sent in the middle of the night he quickly decided to go and play golf. “I can’t believe you two are back together,” he sighed.

Martin’s publishing assistant had come up with another title: Sex and the Chateau. I am not mad about it, but do see the need to make the title a little more intriguing and sexy than Lost in France. I came up with Three Lovers and a Vineyard, but we’re open to ideas….Meanwhile I need to get back to writing, or it will be a virtual book.

A great end to the year!

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Helena

Hello all and THANK YOU for such encouraging words from my lovely blog-readers. I just received this from my favourite publisher, Martin Rynja at Gibson Square…

“Hi Helena, you spake too soon on blog. I have been reading your novel (and so has Debora who helps me with some editorial stuff) and we both love it (though I have not been able to finish it to the end yet, as I am a slow reader) and I would love to publish it.”

So we’re off! Yippeeee! And tomorrow I interview Rafael Nadal, what joy. How could 2009 possibly get any better?