The first in what will hopefully be a new at least semi-regular feature today: Brand new (unsigned) chick lit authors! Yes, "they" may claim chick lit is "over" (we know they're wrong, don't we?), but there are still plenty of great writers writing plenty of great books and I'd like to introduce some of them to you.
First up is Deborah Riccio. Find out more about her - and read an extract from her novel - over the jump.
Deborah's writing biography:
Short story called ‘Sidney’ printed in local paper in 1980s (yeah, same Sidney as in this book).
Won a crate of Mills & Boon books and pink telephone for running-up in a Mills&Boon/BT scriptwriting competition (gave the books to Geriatric Ward of hospital).
Won a weekend in Paris for winning a Valentines Limerick competition (again local press).
Poem called 'The Things They (Don’t) Tell You’ published in anthology of childbirth called ‘Diapers & Dimples’ (page one!)
Wrote a full length screenplay called ‘Beyond the Perm’ during maternity leave (which BBC rejected and so it went nowhere else) about small-town girl going nowhere who bumps into famous comic actor in disguise who’s come to her town to escape fame and get back to his roots (a few years later ‘Notting Hill’ came out – d’you think there was any connection?!!!)
Currently 20k into 2nd Novel - ‘Life, Lopsided’ - about exploits of mildly OCD character and her family and friends.
Extract from Reconstructing Jennifer:
THE SHAGGING FOREVER THING
I still wasn’t sure exactly how keen Rob had been for us to try for a child but he’d almost leapt with joy when I’d told him it would probably take years of trying before I fell pregnant. It had taken my parents five years to conceive me and I assumed, historically, genetically, that we would probably follow suit. Rob didn’t often grin maniacally but he had then.
‘Excellent!’ he’d announced. ‘Five years of unprotected sex!’ and we’d started almost immediately.
From then on (for me anyway) the act of lovemaking had swung from being an animal act of pure lust into a carefully choreographed production of timing, position and finale. The timing wasn’t too difficult to work out. All I had to do was time the length between each period and then count 12-14 days into the next cycle and there you had it – the perfect three days during which I was at my most fertile – whether I was feeling randy or not! As luck would have had it – Valentines Day fell exactly on the twelfth night (I wonder if that’s what Shakespeare was really referring to?). The position wasn’t too much of a headache either. I liked the Missionary. It made me feel feminine and submissive and - in my fantasies - overpowered. The finale at the end of this dramatic climax was the continuing to lie on the back with hips raised above head height (presumably to give the sperm more of a fighting chance in speeding towards Ovarian City).
And I made quite sure Rob didn’t see me in this post-coital position. He’d either have thought me quite mad or decided I was taking it all a bit too seriously and he seemed to be so looking forward to another four years and eleven months of unprotected sex. I didn’t want to disappoint him. By the time he’d come back from the bathroom all freshly spruced up I figured I’d given Team Sperm all the assistance they needed for this performance.
It had been my Birthday the following week. Rob had given me gifts of love. Little tokens of daftness: a cherry muffin with a candle on top for breakfast; two dozen red roses delivered to my office (one dozen for each Birthday as his wife) and a gorgeous romantic meal in the evening at our favourite Italian restaurant – taxis both ways so we could get pissed and not worry.
You know how sometimes you just 'know' something? Something you can't possibly know really? I guess it's what people call intuition. And it’s a funny thing, isn’t it? The minute Rob entered me that night after the Birthday meal and following the rather sexually-charged taxi ride home (who ever really tires of being felt up in the back of a cab?) I knew. Instinctively. It just felt different. Okay so it was a little more adventurous than we’d been of late, pure lust – forget the choreography for a change, but it just all felt different – ‘down there’.
And I didn’t even expect my period that month.
It would have been like waiting for Concorde to turn up at the bus stop for the 108 to the town centre.
Talk about being in-tune with your body!
This must have been what was meant in all those ‘nurturing nature’ pieces in women’s magazines. I’d never really identified with it before but now – Blimey! Talk about being in…. Sorry I already have.
Was I turning into a Mother Earth? I’d never thought it possible. Truth was I didn’t even know whether I actually liked children. Oh alright then – I didn’t. Like children. They scared me. Not frighteningly so but just the look on their faces was enough to send me into paroxysms of paranoia. They looked like they knew every-bloody-thing and I knew nothing – and they knew I knew they knew! Scared the pants off me. Some still do if truth were told. You know that kid who played Damian in the Omen trilogy? To me – all kids have ‘that look’. That’s the look I’m talking about – you know what I mean. The look that says ‘you’re incredibly stupid and I should know because I know everything’. Oh, and ‘I could kill you with just one thought if I really wanted to’. And if you try anything to shake this paranoia off – like pulling a funny face or simply smiling cheerily to show them that they don’t scare you, half of you just knows that they’re going to give you such a look of disgusted supremacy that you can’t bear to do anything at all. Except maybe whimper silently.
Of course they’re not as scary as Dwarf circus clowns or Punch and Judy shows but then that’s probably just me.
Deciding that Mother Nature - being the amazing creature that she is - would decide on the fate of my… fate…. I let the following few days just ride and didn’t say a thing to anyone. If it was a glitch then so be it – a late period then so be it – a phantom pregnancy because I quite liked the idea of being pregnant now – so be it. It was quite liberating to actually have a secret, especially from Rob. He usually knew everything. I didn’t have to tell him half the time. He said my eyes gave everything away. My mum had always said that too. God, I hadn’t married my mother, had I? All sorts of Oedipus stuff started to swirl about. Hormones. Another sure-fire sign then.
The day I did the urine test I couldn’t stop shaking. I don’t know how I managed to aim my pee at the end of that stupid stick, I really don’t. But I did. Even then I doubted my certainty. It had been a week since the no-show of Concorde at the bus stop so I didn’t really need much more confirmation than that.
A minute is at least an hour and a half on the clock-face of the hopefully expectant mother.
Rob didn’t leap with joy from the bed when I told him that night.
He didn’t even put his book down as a matter of fact.
‘Look!’ I was wafting the stick-thing about gently as if I was conducting an orchestra of whale-song (you never knew, a sharp movement may have dislodged the blue line and made it zigzag or something…)
‘What?’ he’d looked up, a vague air of annoyance about him.
‘I’m pregnant!’
He looked right at me now, touching his glasses in an intelligent fashion. ‘You’re what? You’re pregnant?’
‘We’re pregnant! We’re going to have a baby!’ The book was down now. And the glasses were coming off.
‘How do you know? Are you sure? Have you done one of those test things?’
I wafted in the string section with my blue-tipped baton and watched him swallow unnecessarily and quite hurtfully I thought, hard.
‘Ok then.’ He sat back on the bed looking a little winded. ‘Alright then. When?’ It sounded just like he was asking when tea would be ready. I bit back the urge to say ‘half past three darling – do you want your crusts cut off?’
‘Oh … about November time – sometime between the fourth and the fifteenth– something like that…’
‘November…. Hmmm. Pregnant. Okay then.’ I expected him to ask me to jot it down in his diary so that he wouldn’t double book or something. He returned to his reading.
‘You’re pleased aren’t you?’ Even his clear unexcited-ness hadn’t wiped the smile from my face. ‘You’re going to be a daddy!’
‘November….’ He repeated. ‘Okay. Good. That means we won’t have to spend Christmas with your parents.’ He returned to his book, pushing the glasses back up his nose.
Not exactly the reaction I’d hoped for. But before any tears had formed or any kind of lump had begun to develop in my throat, I quickly decided that perhaps Rob needed time to digest this news. He’d be different in the morning. He was probably pissed off more than anything – now he’d have to forgo the remaining four years and ten months of unprotected sex. He’d be lucky if he’d get so much as a tongue down the throat for the next eighteen months at least if some of the women’s magazines were anything to go by!
Oh God…. what had I done?
Later, as I lay in the darkness with my palm on my stomach I sent little vibes inside to the growing cells within. ‘It will all be okay,’ I told it. ‘We both want you and you will be the most loved little thing on this earth – you wait and see.’
THE SPILT MILK THING
‘Oh my God!’ My mother’s voice was a shrill as a peacock’s. And I’d never seen her move quite so fast. ‘Look! Thomas! Quick – get the teacloth! Quickly I said!’
Milly’s face was a mixture of bewilderment and entertainment. She’d only ever seen displays of this comic magnitude on the Teletubbies. She watched with interest as her Grandmother tore the cloth from my hastily returning dad’s hands and hurled herself at the spillage on the carpet.
‘It’s ruined!’ She wailed. ‘Ruined! Look at this – it’ll stink to high heaven!’
‘Mum,’ I started – conscious that Milly’s face was now pinking slightly and tears had started to well in her confused blue eyes. ‘It’ll be fine. It’s only milk. Here – use this…’ I offered a baby wipe, which she couldn’t have stared at with more disgust if it had had a swastika printed on it.
‘What is that?’ she screeched.
‘It’s a baby wipe – I tell you what, I swear by them – they get rid of anything off anything and I don’t know what I ever did before I had Milly because they’re a miracle invention…’ I leant over to scoop Milly up and away from the ‘carnage’. ‘They’re great, aren’t they Milly?’ I tickled her gently, not wanting her to become distressed as my mother continued to swoosh and swipe away at the ‘damage’ my little girl had done.
My dad returned to the scene with a bowl full of water and washing up liquid. God, some things never changed did they? That was their answer to everything. They just never moved with the times. They probably didn’t even have a spray gun of Dettox in the house. How archaic could you be?
My mother was still muttering and tutting to herself.
‘How did it happen?’ Dad asked.
‘Just dropped it!’ Mum almost spat, re-enacting Milly’s little slip-up as if it might just secure her a call-back to RADA. ‘Straight on the floor!’
‘Now hang on a minute!’ I started. Acutely aware that Milly was being held accountable for this and she had never in her life been made to feel guilty or responsible or anything bad for any spillage or damage howsoever it had occurred in our house at home – this was not going to start happening now!
‘The bottle slipped off the table’ I helped. ‘Look – it’s a shiny surface, the table must have tilted a bit and the bottle slid off…an accident’
It was one of those ‘TV dinner’ tables that open up like a deckchair in front of your chair. Polished to within an inch of its life (unlike the mantelpiece that held so many photo frames and ornaments I was amazed it didn’t groan with the strain as well as the bad taste and dust) it was no wonder the bottle slid off. Torvill and Dean would have had a hard time standing still on it.
‘It’ll stink!’ My mother continued.
‘Dettox spray.’ I said calmly. ‘That’s all you need. Washing up liquid won’t stop the smell – this is Dettol in a spray – kills bacteria, stops odours, brilliant stuff.’ I was beginning to sound like an advertisement. ‘Have you got some?’
The look on mum and dad’s faces was priceless. It was a look I now remembered from being at home when 'Tomorrow’s World’ had been on the telly. In particular the one about the advent of CDs. They’d been showing their viewers exactly what could be done to a CD and it’s virtual indestructibility (of course we all know now the bloody things jump just as much as vinyl!). But the minute the strawberry jam had been wiped off and the thing had still played perfect music, the look they gave each other was - well, the same as the look they were now passing each other. Sheer disbelief that this kind of thing could actually exist in their lifetime - coupled with the worry that maybe it could also produce some mind-altering waves that would one-day lead to global brain-melt. My Nan had had the same reaction to the Mash advert aliens but that’s another story.
‘I’ll take Milly down the road to get some.’ I said.
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If you're an agent or publisher and you'd like to snap Debs up, email me at editor [at] trashionista.com and I'll put you in touch.
