Tag: Anna

An excerpt from ‘Reunion of the Heart’

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 2 Comments

rothIt’s been a couple of months now since I published Reunion of the Heart. I thought I’d share an excerpt from it with you. For those of you who don’t know anything about it, it’s a romance about a young woman, a writer, who returns to the school where she was really unhappy as a teenager to attend a reunion.

Little does she know it, but her life is about to change forever.  This scene takes place at the reunion, where Anna has just encountered Will, the man who made her life a misery when they were at school together. Enjoy!

‘Anna?’ She turned around and Will was standing by her side.  She looked up at him.  He was tall, taller than she remembered and not half bad looking.  Her face burned as their eyes met. 

‘What do you want?’ Her voice was barely a whisper.  She removed her hand from his grasp and cleared her throat, saying more loudly and with some anger, ‘Will, I have nothing to say to you.  After the way you treated me at school, did you really expect me to talk to you tonight?  You and Matt and your friends made my life a misery.  All those taunts and catcalls. I would have found it hard enough anyway just being a teenager.  But the way you and your friends behaved towards me – well, to be blunt it made me want to end it all.’

Will was silent; his face was pale apart from two high spots of colour on his cheeks.  He appeared stunned by what Anna had just told him.  Finally he nodded.  ‘I understand,’ he said slowly.

She shook her head.  ‘No, I don’t think you do understand.  I don’t think bullies can ever really understand what that kind of treatment feels like until it happens to them.’

There was a long pause.  Anna wanted to turn away but something made her stay where she was.

‘That may be so,’ he said at last, ‘but I just wanted to tell you how sorry…’

‘Anna, is everything OK?’ Melissa’s voice came loud and clear.

‘Yes, I’ll join you in a second,’ Anna called.  She turned back to Will.  He was standing rigidly as if he were tense.  For a moment she wanted to let him speak, to give her his apology.  But then she remembered how he’d treated her at school, how awful he’d made her feel and her resolve hardened. 

‘There are times when sorry isn’t good enough,’ she told him, watching as the redness on his cheeks spread.  Before he could say anything else, she turned away and dashed across to her friends, sitting down with them.

‘What did he want?’ Melissa asked her.

‘To apologise,’ Anna said frowning as she glanced back to see Will’s retreating form.  ‘It wasn’t accepted.’

I hope you enjoyed this excerpt. 🙂 Reunion of the Heart is available on Amazon.com and Amazon UK.

‘Reunion of the Heart’ is here!!!!

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 13 Comments

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My second novel Reunion of the Heart is here! For those of you who don’t know, it’s a contemporary romance and so you know a little bit more about it, here’s the blurb:

After a messy breakup with her boyfriend, Anna is feeling fragile. So when her best friend Melissa suggests the two of them go to their school reunion, she’s reluctant as Anna’s school days weren’t her happiest. The evening is going well until she meets the boy who made her school life hell.
But the grown up Will is different and Anna is surprised by the direction her life takes. The reunion sets in motion a series of events that lead Anna to realise things will never be the same again.
‘Reunion of the Heart’ is a romance that will lead you to ponder whether love can atone for past mistakes.

It’s available to buy on Amazon and here are the links:

Amazon.com: http://www.amazon.com/Reunion-Heart-Elaine-Jeremiah-ebook/dp/B00ML03PZO/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408090441&sr=1-3&keywords=elaine+jeremiah

Amazon UK: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reunion-Heart-Elaine-Jeremiah-ebook/dp/B00ML03PZO/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1408090418&sr=1-3&keywords=elaine+jeremiah

So please do go and check it out! I’ll be around my computer for most of the day, tweeting and Facebooking etc so why not come and say hi?

My journey writing ‘Reunion of the Heart’

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 20 Comments

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I publish Reunion of the Heart tomorrow! Woo hoo! I can’t tell you how excited I am. It’s taken me a while to get to this point and today I wanted to write about… well how I came to write it.

When I published my first novel, The Inheritance, slightly less than a year ago, I did it as a kind of experiment.  It was my second completed novel (the first will never see the light of day!!) and although I knew it was far from perfect, I wanted to have the experience of publishing a book and just see how it went.

My husband encouraged me to publish it – he felt it would be a good experience for me.  And it has been.  Although I will say that I was disappointed by the lack of sales.  However I think that one of the main reasons that The Inheritance didn’t sell that well is because it doesn’t fit easily into a genre.  The best genre description for it is a family saga.

I did pretty well when I put The Inheritance on free promotion a couple of months after I published it. But I was disappointed that the free downloads didn’t translate into sales.

I’ve always felt with my writing that I want to write about what I want to write about, if that makes sense.  I don’t want to feel confined to writing in a certain way.  But if you’re writing a novel that’s going to be hard to market, you’re going to have problems, as I found with The Inheritance.

Reunion of the Heart is a contemporary romance, so it fits much more neatly into a genre than The Inheritance did.  However, with Reunion of the Heart, as with The Inheritance, I was writing about what I wanted to write about.  I didn’t simply choose to  write a romance.

With my latest as-yet-untitled work in progress, it’s been more of a conscious decision to write a romance.  I am very much enjoying writing this new one though, so I’m going to stick to romance for the moment.

So now while I’m writing, I do have one eye on my marketing: am I going to be able to market this book, does it fit well into a genre? OK so you might say that that attitude takes all the fun out of it. Not for me.  I’m loving writing romances and it started with Reunion of the Heart.  Writing it was a lot of fun, especially the editing (yes really!) and making it more romantic on the advice of my wonderful beta readers.

Writing Reunion of the Heart has given me so much more confidence in myself and my writing abilities. The pre-publication response has been wonderful.  I’ve had many people tell me they really want to read it.  Well that is just so encouraging.  I think often in life it’s easy to feel like you’re the underdog, that everyone’s doing better than you, while you struggle away and nothing comes easily.  I feel it’s especially true of indie authors: we can feel as though all our fellow writers are doing so much better than us while we’re struggling with that one paragraph or chapter that we just can’t get right.

With Reunion of the Heart I feel that even if it’s not as successful as I’d hoped, at least I’ve given it my all and had some great responses to it.  This writing journey I’m on isn’t always an easy or happy one, but it’s certainly an exciting and rewarding one.  Even though The Inheritance didn’t do as well as I’d hoped, I’ve had a number of sales and nearly 9500 free downloads.  So people have read it and that’s the important thing.  In publishing Reunion of the Heart I have nothing to lose.

See you tomorrow for the launch!

 

 

My inspiration for ‘Reunion of the Heart’

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 12 Comments

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Only two days until I publish Reunion of the Heart! Hooray! And continuing with my posts about different aspects of Reunion of the Heart, today I wanted to talk about my inspiration for the book.

A while ago I had an invite to a reunion at one of my old schools.  I didn’t go.  My school days were really miserable – probably more so than my MC Anna’s, although not quite in the same way.

But for a long time now I’ve been fascinated by the concept  of school reunions and what it’s like to revisit your past like that.  Would it be an enjoyable time?  Would it be horrendous?  What would it be like to be reunited with your ex fellow pupils?

Another aspect of a school reunion which I find really interesting is the way everyone changes physically over the years.  For example I often see photos of people on Facebook who I haven’t seen for a long time and I’ll think ‘Wow they look so different’.  It’s not necessarily just that they’re older – perhaps they’ve put on weight or they’ve got dark circles under their eyes from running around after their kids!

Whatever the case I found the concept of a school reunion really appealing and I thought it would make a great story.  What happens when a young woman returns to her school for a reunion, to the place where she was so unhappy?  And why would she subject herself to it if her schooldays had made her so miserable?

The story unfolded pretty well as I began to write it.  I had to think of what my MC’s day job would be and I thought it would be great if she was a successful, published author.  What I’d love to be, I won’t deny it!  So that was really fun too, to come up with a pseudonym she could use and how she felt about her success amongst other things.

Wouldn’t that be lovely, to be earning a living as a writer and to have your own agent, as my MC does?  Anyway dreams aside, having my main character be an author worked so well.  Because she thinks like a writer: she can picture lovely views in her mind, even when there isn’t one there; she imagines what people might say before they’ve said it and sometimes she overdoes it and lets her imagination run away with her and she’ll imagine negative things.

Being an author myself I was able to write realistically about the writing process.  It did require a bit of research – on the role of agents for one thing – but I felt that I was able to write authentically about how it feels to be a writer.  Of course I haven’t had the success that my character has had, but I could imagine what it would feel like to be successful – and the minuses of success as well as the pluses.

So that’s about all I want to say about my inspiration for Reunion of the Heart.

What’s your inspiration for your writing?  Do you write from experience or do you have to research a great deal?

Self-worth in ‘Reunion of the Heart’

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 14 Comments

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As part of the build up to my publication of Reunion of the Heart this Friday, I thought I’d share with you a little bit about one of the themes in the book.

Obviously as it’s a romance, love is the central theme. But there are others too and the one I wanted to mention is one of the lesser themes, though still important: self-worth.

It’s an issue that my MC Anna struggles with. During her school years she was dumpy and unattractive – or at least she thought she was. She was painfully shy and suffered from very low self-esteem.

I think a lot of us can relate to that. I had a terrible time at school and my self-esteem was basically zero. So when I was writing Reunion of the Heart, I definitely drew a little on my own experiences and channelled it into my portrayal of Anna.

The adult Anna, who we first meet when she’s just broken up with her boyfriend, is a lot more confident – at least superficially.  She’s still insecure about herself though and her self-worth is quite low.

At different points in the story her best friend Melissa tells Anna that she doesn’t realise how beautiful she is, and that men can’t make her out because she’s very attractive and yet so shy.

I think as regards the theme of self-worth in Reunion of the Heart, Anna’s self-worth – or lack of it – is one of the key aspects of the story.  It affects her writing (yes, in case you didn’t know she’s a successful published author!), her friendships and her relationships with men.

Anna doesn’t give herself enough credit for all that she’s achieved in her life – she’s not keen for people to know that she’s a published author for example and would rather hide behind her pseudonym.  She’s very close to Melissa and is constantly asking her for advice – she’s afraid to make decisions herself.

Again, that is a little like me!  I’m not great at making decisions (as my husband will tell you!) and so it was interesting for me to turn that aspect of my own personality into a character trait of my MC.

As for Anna’s progression in the story… well I’m not giving anything away!  But I will say that the story arc and Anna’s place within it are very much tied up with her feelings of self-worth.

I guess that’s true of a lot of us – the way we live our lives is closely linked to our sense of self-worth.  Seems to me that the greater your self-worth, the happier you’ll be.

So I hope you’ll pop over here for a chat on Friday as I publish Reunion of the Heart.  And maybe if you like the sound of the novel, check it out on Amazon…

Oh and one last thing: what are the lesser, but still important themes in your stories?  And do you find yourself growing in confidence as the years progress?

Until next time!

A sneak peek at ‘Reunion of the Heart’

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 11 Comments

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Well the release of Reunion of the Heart is fast approaching. Only four days to go!!

Now I know most of you don’t take part in WIPpet Wednesday, so you won’t have read any of the excerpts from Reunion of the Heart that I shared.

So… I thought I’d share a spoiler-free excerpt from it with you.  To give you the lowdown on the story, Reunion of the Heart is a romance about Anna, a young woman who returns to her school for a reunion after her friend encourages her to go.  She’s reluctant to go because her school days weren’t her happiest.  But the reunion sets in motion a chain of events that lead Anna to realise her life will never be the same again.

In this excerpt Anna has arrived with her best friend Melissa at her old school for the reunion.  She’s feeling nervous…

Melissa’s voice brought Anna back to the present with a bump.  She’d been so distracted that she had hardly noticed the car slowing down.  Now she felt all unprepared.  As the school loomed up ahead and the car ground to a halt, Anna could feel all her previous anxiety about the event hit her like a blow to the chest.  Am I doing the right thing in going to this thing? she wondered.  It was as if the reunion was her own personal D-day.  

Seeing her old classmates, gauging their reactions to her and making a good impression – she had to get it right or the battle would be lost.  She hadn’t forgotten what Melissa had told her, but being relaxed about it all and keeping it on her terms was easier said than done.

‘Are you OK, Anna?’ Melissa asked her voice concerned.  ‘You’ve been very quiet since we started talking about your parents.  I’m sorry if I’ve brought it all back for you.’

Anna shook her head.  ‘It’s not your fault.  Sometimes I find it hard to face the fact that my parents haven’t been together for years and never will be again.’

Melissa nodded.  ‘So you’re happy to face the brood of vipers now?’

Anna pulled a face.  ‘You make it sound so pleasant.  But yes, I’m fine. Don’t worry about me.  Let’s go inside.’

 ******

 They got out of the car and headed for the entrance.  Anna shivered in the cold wind.  Although it was early March, winter was still clinging on and she was freezing.  Her fancy coat and winter dress weren’t as warm as her puffer jacket and fleeces, but she wanted to look good and so today fashion won out. 

Her long chestnut hair was pulled back into a neat ponytail which Melissa said really suited her.  Anna stumbled a little as she walked; she didn’t wear heels very often.  As they approached the school buildings, memories of being a pupil here flooded back to her.  It was hard to believe that she and her ex classmates were thirty one now.  She and Melissa walked through into the hallway where there was a large banner saying ‘Class of 98’.  A middle aged woman she didn’t recognise was standing there waiting to greet them.

‘Welcome to Mayfield Secondary “Class of 98 Reunion”,’ she said.  ‘In case you don’t remember, the sports hall where the event is being held is at the end of this corridor.  I hope you have a fun evening.’

Anna and Melissa smiled and nodded, though they didn’t need to be directed.  Anna felt as though she had the memory of this place engrained in her mind.  They walked down the corridor which was every bit as long as she remembered.  Loud music from the sports hall drifted towards them.  Melissa gave Anna’s hand a squeeze.

‘It’ll be OK,’ she said softly.  ‘Just remember what I said.  And if you’re really struggling imagine everyone’s naked!’

Anna snorted with laughter and then covered her mouth quickly.  ‘You are quite loopy, Mel,’ she said.

Melissa shrugged.  ‘It’s what a friend taught me once,’ she said.  ‘You’d be surprised how well it can make you feel more relaxed.’

I hope this has whetted your appetite!  I’ll be posting every day on this blog in the run up to the release on Friday.

As always any comments gratefully received! 🙂

Not doing a blog tour but…

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 4 Comments

As I mentioned when I did my cover reveal, I’m publishing Reunion of the Heart on Friday (15th August)!!!

In support of its release, I’ve got various ideas up my sleeve.  I’m not doing a blog tour this time as I think I mentioned, BUT I would be interested in doing an interview or a blog post on a few different blogs.  Not too many – it’s not a blog tour!!

But if any of you would be interested in hosting me/interviewing me on your blog, let me know.  I really don’t mind if it’s after this Friday (I know I’ve left it a little late lol), just drop me a line if this sounds appealing to you.

My email address is: elaine (dot) jeremiah (at) gmail (dot) com

Oh and I should add for any of you who don’t know Reunion of the Heart is a contemporary romance.

Thanks! 🙂

Cover reveal for ‘Reunion of the Heart’!!!

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 19 Comments

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It’s finally here! Today’s the day I share with you my fabulous cover for Reunion of the Heart.

I also have ten lovely volunteers who will be helping with the cover reveal today!

This novel has been part of my life for well over a year now and it’s gone through various changes along the way.

Much of that is down to my eight wonderful beta readers who were good enough to read it for me and make so many helpful comments.

Now it’s pretty much ready for publication and I’ll be publishing it next Friday 15th August!  I’m going to follow its publication with some promo work, so watch this space.

Here’s  a brief blurb of the book:

After a messy breakup with her boyfriend, Anna is feeling fragile.  So when her best friend Melissa suggests the two of them go to their school reunion, she’s reluctant as Anna’s school days weren’t her happiest.  The evening is going well until she meets the boy who made her school life hell.

But the grown up Will is different and Anna is surprised by the direction her life takes.  The reunion sets in motion a series of events that lead Anna to realise things will never be the same again.

There you have it.  I’m really looking forward to having Reunion of the Heart available to be read as you can imagine.  Roll on next Friday!

A new version of an old scene

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 30 Comments

Welcome to WIPpet Wednesday!  I hope you’re all happy and well. 🙂  I’m OK except my husband has given me a cold – isn’t that nice of him? – and I seem to have it worse than he did. :-S

Anyway I’m not exactly at death’s door and since I’m currently not working – in between jobs, but I am looking for another one, honest! – I’ve had plenty of time to be working on editing Reunion of the Heart.

And all I can say is ‘I get it!’  I finally get what other authors mean when they say they’re so into their stories, it’s all they can think about and the characters are so real to them!  I’m rewriting many of the scenes between my two main protagonists, making it more romantic.  I’m enjoying it so much! 😀

My characters are really coming alive; it’s a cliche but it’s true.  I’m thinking about them a lot, especially the two MCs and imagining exactly what they look like.

As I said I’m rewriting a lot of the scenes between my MC and the guy she ends up with – I’m also cutting scenes and adding them. So it’s not simply editing, it’s rewriting whole passages!!  But yes I’m really enjoying it and – because I’m quite slow at all this – I hope to publish Reunion of the Heart by the autumn at the latest.

It partly depends on work; if I get another job soon, if I have time to work on my writing without being too tired etc.  So we’ll see. But at the moment I’m making the most of the time I’ve got to spend on my writing.

So on to today’s scene.  I may have shared part of this scene in its old version before.  For today’s date, I’m giving you 14 lines .  To give you an idea of what’s going on: my MC Anna is at a party her two friends from her school days have thrown to celebrate the opening of a new shop of theirs.  Anna knows that the guy who bullied her at school, Will, is going to be there, but she’s decided to go anyway.  This is when they see each other there:

‘So we meet again,’ a voice said in her ear. 

Anna turned around.  It was Will.  As she looked up at him, she was struck again by how tall he was and his looks were certainly arresting.  He was dressed simply yet smartly in black trousers and a deep blue shirt.  His clothes accentuated his figure in all the right places.  Annoyed with herself for thinking like this, she saw that he was smiling at her. 

‘I’m here with Melissa,’ she found herself saying.  ‘She said you’d be coming with Cathy.’  She shut her mouth as if to stop it from saying anything else without her volition.

‘So you knew I was coming, but you came anyway?’ Will was looking directly at her, his expression serious but his lips curving upwards slightly in a half smile.  Anna didn’t reply for a moment, feeling her stomach fluttering incomprehensibly.

‘Um… well… yes,’ she said finally.

You too can take part in the wonderful weirdness that is WIPpet Wednesday by posting on your blog anything you’ve been working on writing-wise lately.  Then put your details here.  Oh, I should add that your offering needs to relate in some way to the date.

Thank you K. L. Schwengel, Queen of the Flying Monkeys, for being our gracious hostess. 😉

Update on ‘Reunion of the Heart’

~ Elaine Jeremiah ~ 7 Comments

I’ve been feeling a bit under the weather these past couple of days.  Nothing is majorly wrong, I’ve just got a bit of a virus and it’s making me feel low.

The upside of that is although I haven’t felt well enough to do strenuous things, I have felt up to doing some work on Reunion of the Heart, my WIP.  I told you here that I’ve had it back from my beta readers, who were all fabulous BTW.  My mum has offered to proof read it for me when I’m done, which is great as she’ll do it for FREE!! (And I know she’ll be amazing at it!)

At the moment I’m going through it, alternating between changing minor words or paragraphs that my betas have flagged up, and changing parts, even rewriting them.  It’s a lot of work but it’s going so well!  I mean there’s a lot to do, but I’m loving just getting back to writing after my false start with the job that didn’t work out for me.

There is something with regards to this story that I’m in two minds about.  It’s how much romance during the story I should have between the two main protagonists, and how much I should leave till the end, especially as there’s a third party involved – it’s a bit of a love triangle!

Now I must say that this is a bit of a rhetorical question.  At this stage, having had the novel back from the beta readers, I don’t really want too many more opinions saying ‘do this, don’t do that’.  In a way I’ve kind of gone past that stage.

But I’m still interested to hear, from those of you who write romances, how much romance you have between the hero and heroine in your love story before their tale is resolved at the end?

Thanks as always for your comments.  They’re much appreciated. 🙂