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Spotlight: Off the Record by Sue Welfare (spotlight, guest post, giveaway)
Off the Record
written by Sue Welfare
published by Notting Hill Press
find it here: Amazon, Goodreads
About the book: When Liz and Nick arrange to meet someone in Norwich, it’s a crying shame it isn’t each other.
Liz is a recently divorced thirty-something, trying to rebuild her career as a journalist. Nick is single, deeply gorgeous and trying hard to improve his job prospects. They meet, are attracted and…if only life were that simple.
For Liz and Nick, things are about to get a lot more complicated, as one small economy with the truth threatens to wreck everything.
A heady brew of incompetent exes, good friends, and alcoholic artists manage to disrupt the course of true love. Will anyone of them realise what’s going on and see the answer through the chaos? Will they finally live happily ever after?
Warm, sharp and hilarious, this is a novel for anyone who’s ever fallen in love, taken a chance or had their life turned upside down by a delayed train.
Every Free Chance Book Reviews is pleased to welcome Sue Welfare, author of Off the Record and Cooking Up a Storm, to the blog today. She has prepared the following guest post for all of you.
Off the Record is one of my favourite books, and has two of my all time favourite characters, Jack Sandfi and his partner, Morwenna, in it.
When I first started to write these two kept popping up as minor characters in each and every book, jostling for position, staging huge arguments when my main characters were trying to get on with the story, and generally elbowing their way to the front. I’d always end up having to edit them out as they were too noisy, too big and too full of themselves to be minor characters! After the third time of writing them out of a story I decided that they deserved a book of their own and Off the Record is that book.
So when the idea came up a few months ago of getting titles from my back list up onto Kindle, I was really excited by the prospect, and Off the Record seemed like the perfect first book, and is, hopefully, the first of several books, that have never been available in the USA before.
Getting Off the Record to publication and Kindle ready has been a real labour of love. Back in the good old days (the late nineties!!) when it was first created, authors didn’t email copy in – oh no – we had to send two hard copies of the manuscript in to the publishers through the mail. Emails were around but book-sized attachments were almost unheard of, and we used to edit on paper too, so it occurred to me pretty early on that I probably hadn’t got a copy of Off the Record anywhere as a digital file– and if I had then it would be on floppy disk and a minimum of four computers and three house moves ago. Which meant I’d need to get it converted – rather than have it scanned (which was one option) I decided to have it rekeyed (or retyped as we oldies would put it!)
The person who was recommended to rekey the book lives in Canada – I’m based in the UK. And then it occurred to me, before I sent it over to her, that I better re-read it, just in case there was some plot twist, some glitch, some essential thing, in the story that I’d forgotten about that revolved round 1990’s technology .
Fortunately there wasn’t, but after about a dozen pages I realised it would need some serious up dating – it was littered with references to video recorders (VCR), tape recorders, phones that are plugged into the wall, telephone directories – and no one was regularly using mobile phones or tapping into the internet to find out what they needed to know – back then Google was just a pipe dream!
But I still liked the story and I still loved the hard drinking louche Jack Sandi and his scary partner, Morwenna, so I decided that once it came back from being rekeyed I’d update it and re-edit it, giving it a bit of a freshen up and a dust down before the re-launch.
It was interesting too to see at how far my writing has changed since then – and how styles and tastes have changed. During the re-write I slimmed the text down and took out some of the flowery phrases that had seemed just fine back then but now felt like over writing.
But the good news is that Jack and Morwenna are still as ghastly and noisy as ever! So if you didn’t catch it first time round then now is your chance to dip into some vintage Sue Welfare.
About the author: Sue lives and works in the UK and is a Sunday Times Best Selling author. She has written 25 novels and also writes as Kate Lawson & Gemma Fox.
And now for the GIVEAWAY!! Fill out the Rafflecopter form below for your chance to win an eBook copy of both Off the Record and Cooking Up a Storm! Ms. Welfare is giving this to 3 lucky winners! (Kindle version only)
See my review of Cooking Up a Storm here.
Happy reading wherever you are and whenever you get a free chance!!!
