July 1st 2013 is a special day this year … as that’s when the SUNLOUNGER anthology launches!

What is it?

It’s the brainchild of author Belinda Jones (and the Belinda Jones Travel Club) and it’s going to be the best book to put on your Kindle for your summer holiday. It features 40 short stories by some of the best women’s fiction authors around at the moment – and each takes you to an exotic location.

Mine features Jo and Amelia from THE MAKING OF MIA who take a road trip from LA to Las Vegas… if you’ve ever wondered what they’re up to now here’s your chance to find out.

Who else has written for it?

Basically, everyone. The list is literally endless but my Orion friends Katie Agnew, Kate Harrison, Cally Taylor and Ruth Saberton have joined in, along with Rosie Blake, Tamsyn Murray, Lucy Robinson, Sasha Wagstaff… the full list is here. See? Massive.

Why a roadtrip between LA and Las Vegas?

A couple of years ago I met one of my best friends in Vegas (I flew in from Philadelphia, she from Texas) and we decided to drive to LA. We pictured a dusty dirt track which would lead us through the desert. We hired a Mustang convertible (a bright red one, pictured below), packed up our bags, and … and it was kind of awful. The pictures below do not express the stress.

I discovered my friend couldn’t actually drive (despite having a license she’d forgotten how to after years living in London), we realised the dirt track was actually just a massive highway, and it took an awful lot longer than we thought it would. After eight hours of solid driving we still hadn’t reached LA and we’d had several near-death experiences with a couple of lorries and a spaghetti junction style road which didn’t have a crash barrier. I’ve never been so scared.

In the end we found a motel, hung out in a jacuzzi and the next morning we made it to LA. But not before I drove straight into another car at a set of traffic lights near Burbank. Oops. Anyway, I’m planning on making that journey again and making it less traumatic (with Julie if she can face being in a car with me again!). Getting my fictional character friends Jo and Amelia to do the trip for me in A ROAD TRIP TO REMEMBER was my way of researching how to do it properly. All the places they stop at are real and I can’t wait.

What’s with all the snazzy author photos?

They’re good, aren’t they! And they certainly get your attention.

Fourteen authors got their asses down to Trader Vic’s in London for a tropical-themed photoshoot. I’ve been on shoots before (a couple of Page 3 ones and some for retailers) but had never been a model before. It was exhausting! But so much fun!

I spent about an hour and a half in make-up (Lisa Hancox is actually amazing), and about the same time getting my hair done (by the extremely talented Olivia Howarth), and I then spent the day trying not to bash into everyone else with the biggest skirt you’ve ever seen (and to make it even bigger stylist extraordinaire Wendy Rigg put a frothy pink petticoat underneath it – it was heavier than it looked!).

This is what commercial fiction authors look like: hot.

Anything else?

Remember the SUNLOUNGER competition to include an unpublished writer in the anthology? These are the amazing judges who’ve been reading all the entries, and the winner will be announced on June 1st. I’ve heard all of the stories are fantastic – and I can’t wait to find out who’s won. A star will be born.

So how does one have a life worthy of a chick-lit novel? This is how:

Who you are:

You’re a completely ordinary girl who lives an extraordinary life completely out of the blue! You’ll probably have to overcome some sort of disaster, but you’ll do so with the help of cocktails, movie-style montages when you update your wardrobe, and a collection of friends and bad men. This is who you are. Like, totally:

• You’re girl-next-door pretty. At least one of your friends is model good-looking (or is, actually, a model), but you’re the unassuming relatable one who’s about five pounds over weight. But that’s okay! Because when you drop the puppy fat and have the obligatory make-over everyone will think you’re totally hot.
• You’re smart, but not in an intimidating way. Crazily smart girls are ugly and never get boyfriends, right? Right. You’re clever enough to hold your own, but you’re also kind of ditzy: you think nothing of running up credit card debts on shoes you don’t need, clothes you’ll never wear, or cocktails that you know you’ll end up sicking up the next morning.
• You’re a kind, good person. You probably wouldn’t have an affair (or if you did you’d do so unknowingly). You’d never bully anyone because you were bullied at school / by the cool clique at work (until you lost those five pounds).
• You’re a feminist! Who needs to be rescued by a man.

Who your friends should be:

You’re not living the chick lit dream if you don’t have at least two of the following:

• A circle of supportive girl friends with characters akin to the women in Sex and the City (the sex-mad one, the kooky one, the proper one, the career-focused one) or the hipster stereotypes in Girls (the chubby, clever one, the wild-child one, the prim conventional one, the naïve fluffy pink one).
  A gay best friend who will be your date for those single-girl moments, will tell you how pretty and fabulous you are even after your make-up has smudged from crying over yet another bastard, and will covet every single item in your wardrobe. You’ll probably fall in love with him for a bit as a subplot to your already over-complicated love life.
  A best friend who’s super sorted. Because she’s got life all figured out she has plenty of time to listen to your dramas, feed you proper meals, and set you up with her husbands eligible-but-dull-friends.

Where you live:

If you’re going to be a true chick-lit character you can only live in one of the following:

• In a nice part of the country where you grew up. It’s Every Town for Every Girl. But you want more from life! So you move away from your overbearing mother, quiet father, and mousy best-friend from school to find fame and fortune in the big city! (note: after many years of disastrous dating in the city you’ll move home and marry the boy who lived over the road).
• In a smart part of London that you could never, ever afford on your salary. Yet you still dream of moving to New York, LA or Paris.

What your potential Disaster Zone boyfriend should look like:

Every wannabe chick lit character needs a checklist of men she needs to date before she meets The One and lives happily after. These can include:

• The commitment-phobe. You have the best sex ever, you like all the same things, but he’s just not ready to settle down, baby. Not until at least 2025 … and then it won’t be with you because you’ll be too old by then.
• Mr. Damaged Goods. This guy totally wanted to settle down until he dated a complete psycho (note, no chick lit character is EVER a psycho) and got hurt in the process. Now he treats women with suspicion and contempt, and even though you’re a happy-go-lucky girl with only credit-card issues to your name you won’t be able to convince him you’re the one. Nobody will.
• The traveller. He thinks you’re the greatest, and you think he’s the greatest. But that doesn’t change the fact he’s planning on fucking his way around South America this summer and nothing – not even true love – will be able to stop him.
• The competitor. You’ve finally got that business loan to open your cupcake company! But watch out – that Mr Dreamy who you keep bumping into in the cake aisle in the supermarket is one step ahead of you and not only does he make the best cupcakes in your area, he’s also mastered macaroons.
• The boy-band guy. He’s not actually in a boy-band, but he struts around the place thinking he is because he imagines he’s a) irresistible to all women and b) he has a Harry Styles haircut even though he’s 35. If you’re not already in love with him he’ll do everything in his power to change that … and then he’ll dump you.

What your Happy Ever After boyfriend should look like:

Regardless of career choices, if you want to be a chick lit character you’ll ultimately be on the hunt for a husband – and everything else is just a subplot. Here’s who to look out for:

• The dude you absolutely hate. You’ll detest him on sight – for absolutely no good reason. But as you’re thrown together in what appears to be a random situation (it is not) you’ll start to like him until you realise, one day, that you’re in love with him.
• The kind guy you automatically placed in the Friend Zone. You’ve been through all the Bad Men in the Big Bad City and every time another relationship ends you cry on this guy’s buff shoulder. You don’t notice him until he takes off his glasses and starts to date a yoga instructor. And then you realise. He’s the ONE.

What a chick-lit career looks like:

We’re modern women so we have modern careers, yo. But if you want to remain attractive to men you only really have two options:

• Go hard or go home. If you don’t work in magazines, PR, fashion, the music industry, the book industry, the movie industry or anything vaguely related to celebrities give up now. Unless you’re a shop assistant who’s about to follow Her Dream.
• You’ve started your own business! You have your own cupcake bakery, a coffee shop with second-hand books, a flower shop, a vintage fashion shop, a fashion label, or you’re a self-employed personal shopper. Remember, it’s okay to show you have a brain as long as it’s in a feminine industry! No engineers or scientists allowed. That would be butch.

How your chick-lit career – and story! – will end:

Because it will end on a Happy Ending (a non-sexual one, preferably, because it’s going to be based on some sort of True Love):

• You get married and live happily ever after with a very rich husband. Because that’s what every girl dreams of, right?
• You have an inappropriate one-night stand that results in a pregnancy that comes as a surprise to only you. But not working is okay; your whole life was pointless until you became a mother.
• You overcome whatever disaster ruined your life and you become a better, happier person – with a hot, supportive boyfriend by your side.

THE END.

PS. The above is satire. I like commercial women’s fiction a lot. Obviously.

Not a day goes by when I do not use the internet in some way, and often I get in a cycle of checking and checking and checking – waiting for something, anything, some random sort of interaction, even though I don’t know exactly what it is that I’m hoping for. Every day I check my email several times an hour, I log onto social networks on my laptop or iPhone (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, FourSquare, Daily Spank, Timehop…), and I am connected. I have many digital reflections of myself on many websites, and I use them. I talk to people. I engage. It is, after all, what I’ve built my career on since 2001.

And yet – what would it be like if I stopped? I am good at stopping stuff; I’ve not eaten red meat since 1990, I’ve not drunk alcohol in 486 days, I’ve not had a puff on a cigarette since September 2012, and I’ve not eaten wheat or potatoes since December. If I can do all of this can it be so hard to stop consuming the web? When thought of logically it should be simple, but it’s not the technology that’s so hard to say goodbye to – it’s the interactions with others that makes it difficult.

We live in a time of over-sharing. When something pops into our head we often – almost automatically – write it on a social network and share it with others, much like we would in an office if we thought it was a conversation point. These thoughts can be profound, but they are often more mundane, and we get trapped in a cycle of feeling as if things only really happen or matter if we record it in some way. We used to take photos of our holidays to show our friends on our return. Now we post images and updates of our romantic mini-breaks as they happen. We are now the stars of our own lives – and we’re the editors and the producers – yet we don’t stop to think what would happen if our own channels of distribution disappeared … and what would happen to us.

After spending a week away from it all I think we would be happier. I know that I learned that I don’t need to prove myself to anyone, on any platform. I’m not sure when it was that I started to feel like that was important.

A recent opinion piece in the NY Times suggested that people now see marriage not as a life commitment to another person, but as a status symbol — ‘a highly regarded marker of a successful personal life.’ So many people of my generation feel like catastrophes if they’re single (and would rather be with someone – anyone! – than believe they don’t have to follow the social norm), and while I’m obviously not an expert and may sound like I’m writing a sixth form psychology essay, I think it’s this same mindset that applies to how some use social media.

I check into places on FourSquare to show others the sort of person I am by the places I go to (private members’ clubs and cool restaurants and bars – I am a media wanker). I post arty Instagram photos of my life (and my cats) to convey a sense of beauty in my world (although I draw the line at selfies or mountains of photos of myself; I am not that insecure). My friends are all successful and good-looking, and to show I have good taste (although this is debatable) I stream music I listen to via Spotify, review the books I read on GoodReads, and post industry-related articles to convey a sense of cleverness. Everything I post is a construct designed to tell you who I am and that I have a happy, successful life. I may refuse to use marriage as a status symbol, but I’m not beyond using social media in a similar way. I behave in a highly curated way and my friends do too. We are glorious; we are living the dream. If you don’t know us – really know us, I mean – we probably come across as self-satisfied assholes.

And yet … I don’t mention all the times I’m depressed because I’m in chronic pain and no consultant knows what to do with me (I had twenty days of migraine in February, you didn’t see that on Twitter, did you?), that my romantic life feels hopeless because I’ve fallen for someone who’s not ready for a relationship, that I’ve just been stitched up by some friends who I genuinely trusted, or that a recent venture looks like it will be a failure. That’s not who I am online and that’s not who I want you to think I am. I write novels for a living; I am good at telling stories.

So what happens when the construct stops? I could have chosen to stop the bullshit and to no longer self-edit – but suddenly sharing the brutally honest truth seemed a tacky step too far. So what if I just walked away instead? What happens when you remove yourself from every social media presence you have and are forced to live in the real world – the world without a pretty Instagram hue to make everything better?

Because of the career path I’ve chosen it’s difficult for me to spend time away from the internet. The last time I spent proper time offline was when I was in Cuba in 2009 – and that was enforced because there was no 3G or wifi to be found. So I made a decision not to work for a week at Easter, and therefore it made it easier for me not to be online. I cheated by checking my email twice a day (I had to, I have a book proposal on submission), but that was all I did … and suddenly, without any sort of restrictions in place, I was free to spend a week in London doing exactly as I chose. So I did. I saw all of my best friends, spent uninterrupted time with members of my family, and I relaxed and had a lovely time. It was brilliant.

But it was also lonely; I’ll admit that. Without any apps on my phone – and the notifications of communication that they bring – I’m struck by the silence. I realise that my friends don’t phone me as often as they used to: that we rely on texts or Facebook messages or Twitter DMs to get in touch with each other. My friends are still there, of course – along with the emotional comfort that I can ring or text anyone I like – but they’re not as visible. I don’t know what my friends are up to, and it would feel strange for me to phone them up to see how their days were. I realise – somewhat belatedly and rather stupidly – that this is what I use social media for, and that I miss the background noise of my friends’ lives regardless of if their snippets are highly edited (like mine are) or over-emotional, embarrassing splurges. The only life I have left to concentrate is my own. So I do.

And then it was time to go back online. As soon as I downloaded all the missing apps on my phone there was suddenly the colour that had disappeared when I’d deleted them; there were new in-jokes shared by friends on email, there was news on the web I’d not read about in the papers, and there were the daily dramas of people on my Facebook and Twitter that I now reluctantly realise are my new soap-operas. It was as if I’d been on a detox and was now presented with a massive bar of chocolate – I felt great, but I still wanted to greedily gobble it up. Now. Fast. And sod the consequences.

The first thing I did was to upload all the photos I’d taken of my week off on Instagram (because I wanted to get them printed as Polaroids). I was greeted by my community of Insta friends who’d wondered where I’d been, and it was lovely; it was nice for me and my millions of cat photos to have been missed. I eased my way back into Twitter and Facebook – but with some reluctance; it felt flabby to share as much as I formerly had, and I wasn’t yet sure how I’d present myself honestly or where I’d draw the line. I chose not to reinstall FourSquare as I’d really only used it to show off (and I am not proud of this fact), and I could give or take the others.

And now? Now I appreciate how technology has brought us all together, and that’s not something I want to take for granted. I think we’re extremely lucky that we can talk with people who we genuinely like, regardless of if we know them offline or not. We all have neighbourhoods we live in, and friendship groups we’re part of … but there’s a special place for the virtual community we create around ourselves. It’s made up of people we choose to interact with in a way we couldn’t possibly replicate offline.

However, I now also value my private life even more. I don’t feel the need to tell everyone where I am and who I’m with – I don’t need validation of people knowing I have a social life, and nor do I think that if I don’t record something online that it didn’t really happen. I don’t need to boast because I’ve learned that it doesn’t make me happy to. My life is genuinely richer and I feel content; my personal life is now fully my own, and I know where the line – the line I am most comfortable with – should be drawn. It’s an experiment I’m glad I’ve done.

There are three awesome competitions floating around at the moment:

• Sunlounger Short Story Competition

The Belinda Jones Travel Club has invited 30 authors (including me, Kate Harrison, Cally Taylor, Paige Toon, Ruth Saberton, Tamsyn Murray…) to write a short story for the Sunlounger anthology, out July 2013 – and you can join us! To be published in Sunlounger you need to write a cracking holiday-themed short story. The best will be included. More details can be found here.

• Racy Reads Competition
  

ITV’s Lorraine is looking for the next big novel for 2013. If you write erotic fiction (think Mills and Boon), the show wants to hear from you. Your manuscript has to be written and ready, as publication of your book will be this summer. Jackie Collins and Victoria Fox are judging. Enter Racy Reads here.

• Writersphere Prize

Author Lucy Robinson is judging this spring’s Writersphere Prize, a competition based on short stories of up to 2000 words. Winners will be published on site, become featured writers, and the overall winner will receive a cash prize – this is a great opportunity to get noticed! Find out more and enter here.

Ages ago I wrote the following blog posts which may come in handy if you’re going to enter the above contests:

• How to write a novel
• How to come up with a plot

And if you know of any more contests feel free to leave information in the comment section below … Good luck! x

If you can’t wait either, here’s an extract of ALL THAT GLITTERS to get you going. Enjoy! x

PS: you can buy ALL THAT GLITTERS as a paperback (from September 13th) or as an ebook (from now!).