Guest Blogger: Margaret James

At last some cheerful news! I'm delighted to welcome my fellow Choc Lit author, lovely Margaret James to Home Thoughts Weekly It's publication day for her new novel The Wedding Diary and here she is to tell us about it...

Thank you for inviting me to be your guest today, Chris. It’s great to be here!

I’ve always loved fairy tales. Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, Snow White, Rapunzel – all those heroines waiting for handsome princes to come along and save them from fates worse than death (or even death itself) fascinated eight-year-old, unreconstructed, pre-The Female Eunuch me.

I’m considerably older and more cynical nowadays, but I still love fairy tales, probably because they have such strong story lines and they’re so life-affirming. You, dear reader, can wish upon a star. You too can have your happy ending.

I wrote my romantic comedy The Wedding Diary at a time when my own life was in meltdown. I was almost too scared to pick up the phone because I knew something else would have gone wrong. I’ve written several historical novels which have casts of thousands and are full of drama, action and – inevitably, since I often set my stories in wartime – death. But in the summer of 2011 I couldn’t face writing about things going wrong for my characters. So I decided to write a rom com instead.

The Wedding Diary is a present-day reworking of Cinderella in which the heroine starts off in a very bad place – she’s just won a wedding competition but she doesn’t have anyone to marry because her fiancé has vanished off the face of the earth. So what does she need if her story is to have a happy ending? Well, a handsome prince, obviously – and a fairy godmother to make sure this happy ending is delivered.

My handsome prince is a building projects manager whose own heart needs some urgent repair work, and at first my fairy godmother seems anything but fairy-like. She behaves more like the wicked witch in The Wizard of Oz than a dear old lady with a talent for bibiddi bobiddi boo. But in fairy-tale-land things aren’t always what they seem, and after some fairly hair-raising frights and setbacks my heroine finds her happy-ever-after with her very own handsome prince.

Nowadays, I’m in a better place, too!

Thank you so much for being my guest, Margaret - it's been great to have you here.

Links

Buy The Wedding Diary HERE

Margaret's on Facebook Twitter

And you can find her blog here

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