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Lucy Coleman writes feel good, uplifting stories, set in beautiful locations. Her most recent book, Summer in Andalucía, is about a Jamie Oliver style celebrity cook fronting a TV program that sounds a lot like MasterChef.
Hi there, I’m your host Jenny Wheeler, and in Binge Reading today Lucy talks about her remarkable work ethic – she’s like a book-producing machine – the special appeal of Christmas stories, and her contemporary romance under the pen name Linn B Halton.
As a celebration of the season, we’ve got three eBook copies of Lucy’s book, A Christmas Wedding in the Cotswolds, to give away to three lucky readers. Enter the romance giveaway draw on the website, www.thejoysofbingereading.com or on our Binge Reading Facebook page. You’ll find links to Lucy’s books and other information mentioned in the podcast on the Joys of Binge Reading website as well.
As regular listeners know, we’ve recently launched Binge Reading on Patreon for those of you who’d like to hear more exclusive fun content about our authors and the show for a small contribution to costs – as little as a cup of coffee a month.
I’d like to give a warm shout out to Margaret Jones, our most recent subscriber to join Binge Reading on Patreon. Every week I’m posting the Getting-To-Know-You Five Quickfire Questions from our authors – like Lucy, she will be here the same week this show goes out – and also other regular Behind the Scene news about what is happening with the podcast.
Your contribution helps defray my costs in hosting and producing the show, but the time I devote to researching and recording the podcasts is still all free. So thanks to Margaret and the other staunch readers who’ve got in there and got our backs to keep things going. Check it out on www.patreon.com/thejoysofbingereading.com and join in the behind-the-scenes fun.
Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:
- How Lucy relies on intuition to get her through
- Lucy’s three careers in one lifetime
- A well-timed research trip that helped avoid lockdown restrictions
- How she came to have two pen names
- Why she’s a genuine ‘Christmas-aholic‘
- Some of the many authors she loves to read
Where to find author Lucy Coleman:
Website: https://linnbhalton.co.uk/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/LucyColemanAuthor
Twitter: @lucycolemanauthor
Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17584891.Lucy_Coleman
Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/s?k=lucy+coleman+kindle+books&crid=3VE4UQ37E7EDI
What follows is a “near as” transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.
But now, here’s Lucy.
Jenny Wheeler: Hello there Lucy, and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.
Introducing holiday romance author Lucy Coleman
Lucy Coleman: Hi Jenny. Thank you so much. I’ve really been looking forward to this chat, especially as it very surreal, isn’t it, when you’re in two different countries so far apart.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s absolutely right. You were saying before we went on that you’re in the Welsh Valleys.
Lucy Coleman: That’s right. I was born in Bristol, which is in mainstream England and it’s literally across the bridge that brings us into Wales. When we were young, Wales was a favorite jaunt for us with our two sons.
We spent lots of holidays over here. It was either over in Wales or down in Cornwall unless you were going abroad. We always knew we would end up living here because my husband and I are inveterate movers. We married very young and I think this is our 16th house, so we’ve moved around a lot and enjoyed every single house we’ve lived in.
Jenny Wheeler: You have made a specialty of uplifting family stories. One of your tags is heart-warming books in beautiful locations. You keep up a highly productive publishing schedule, it seems to me, doing a summer book and a Christmas book every year. Is that how it goes?
Lucy Coleman: No, in 2021 I had three Lucy books out and two Linn books. Last year I actually wrote four books. I have a slightly lighter schedule for next year, but quite a heavy schedule at the moment, so I probably will be doing one less. The aim is to do no more than three or four books a year.
Lucy Coleman – From ‘obsessive reader’ to ‘obsessive author’
I’m at the time of my life – I had to wait to be able to write, because obviously I had two careers, sons to bring up, mortgage to pay, the same bills everyone else has to pay, and I always knew that once I sat down and started writing, it would be exclusively. You can’t do that until the kids are of an age and your grandkids are starting to grow up and you can say, right, I’ll devote family time to the grandkids but the rest of the time now is going to be me time.
This is my me time. I’m not an obsessive reader like I used to be. Certainly, the last couple of years, with the heavy workload I’ve got, I am an obsessive writer.
Jenny Wheeler: Great. The two summer books I’ve read, the recent one, Summer in Provence was published in late 2019 and Summer in Andalucía is just out in July this year. They both very much fit that niche of heartwarming stories in beautiful locations. Tell us a bit about Summer in Andalucía because that’s the most recent one.
Lucy Coleman: My work schedule has been so busy, and a part of the reason for that is I just can’t say, no. I get caught up in it anyway and I’ve got so many stories in my head that it’s fine. But it was halfway through 2019 and I said to my husband, let’s go and do a lot of book research all in one go.
A research trip with 300 photographs for future reference…
We went to Cornwall ready for my Linn series, we flew to Andalucía, we flew off to Lisbon. We did a whole raft of research trips because I think that even though some of these places I’ve been before – and certainly if I write about France, I’ve been there lots and lots of times over the year – I still like to go back and soak up the ambience and then it all comes flooding back.
When we go on research trips, we take probably 300 photos. Very few of them involve myself or my husband in them. I’ll take pictures of a stone floor and a stone wall and a beautiful bush and iconic architecture. We stayed at the Hotel Monasterio de San Francisco in Palma del Rio. It’s in the hands of the Moreno De La Cova family and the owners were absolutely amazing. They gave us a wonderful tour of the parts of the monastery that are not open to the public. It has been in secular hands, in their family, for a very long time.
Usually when I sit down to write a book I already have a one-liner, so I knew there was going to be a chef in this story and I knew it was going to be somewhere hot and I knew there were going to be lemons. I said to my husband, find me a monastery. We’ve never stayed in a monastery and I think it would be the ideal setting. So, he found this monastery and off we flew.
A monastery converted into a beautiful hotel
It was amazing. Although it is a hotel, it’s not hotel-y, if you know what I mean. You walk in and the monastery is as it was. The room we stayed in was beautiful. You go into a narrow corridor, there’s a huge bathroom off to the right and then all you see in front of you is this window with ornate ironwork – two opening out windows and two internal opening in shutters and a window seat. When you get there and you fling it open you see the market garden where all of the monks farmed years ago, all the neat rows, and it’s still a market garden today for the restaurant.
As soon as we got there, the story was boom, boom, boom in my head. Well, I had another whole book to write before I could write that one, but we take lots of pictures. I make a few notes because I don’t like to preplan, I don’t know how many chapters there are going to be. At that stage I did have the main two characters, but that was it. But the minute I was able to sit down and write it, my husband puts all the photos on a little stick, we put it into the TV, we’ve got a large TV screen where I write and as I sit down I’ve got those going in a loop and you’re instantly back there. It’s wonderful.
Being an author always comes with its own surprises – Lucy Coleman
Then, the characters write their own stories. I can honestly say there’s not a lot of thought between my brain and my fingers. My fingers, the words just flow, and they tell me what they want to do. Sometimes I’m there and I say, what, really? I have had surprises. One of them, I can’t remember which one it is, I think it was one I wrote last year, and a cat gets abducted. We have a Bengal cat and she is our princess and it was like, you can’t abduct a cat, you can’t steal someone’s cat. Where is this going? I didn’t know, but it worked out well in the end.
Jenny Wheeler: You mentioned the chef. He’s like a Jamie Oliver type character. He’s running this international competition, a bit like MasterChef, and it’s all incredibly glamorous. The woman in the story is there to cover him, writing this for a magazine. It’s all very chichi and exciting. Do you like food yourself? Do you like writing about food?
Lucy Coleman: I love writing about food. A lot of the photos I take are of food. Even in this country, if we go to a restaurant and it’s beautifully presented, the first thing I say is don’t touch your plate, lean back, I need to capture that plate of food because there’s such a joy. I don’t like volumes of food. In fact, if I go somewhere and I order, say, pasta, and it’s a huge mountain, I always say to them, I’ll probably eat an eighth of that. It’s not to say that I’m not enjoying it, but I just can’t eat a lot of the same thing. It’s not about volume.
How intuition help Lucy Coleman navigate the pandemic
When we go somewhere and the food is amazing, it’s such a treat. Food is one of those things. I like a nice wine and I like a nice plate of food. It doesn’t have to be volume, and I don’t mind whether it’s a starter, a main or dessert, but if it’s a joy and the chef has put his time and effort into making it beautiful, then I’m certainly going to photograph it before anyone around the table I’m sitting at gets to start.
Jenny Wheeler: You were a little bit far-sighted about that research trip because you wouldn’t have been able to do much in the way of travel over the last year or 18 months, would you?
Lucy Coleman: I’m what’s called an intuitive. I’ve always had it and it’s not something I necessarily encourage, but sometimes it pops into my head and I don’t know why. It was about February or March 2019, way before anything was being mentioned about anything, and I said to my husband, I think we should do a few research trips all in one go. That was quite a thing for me. To down tools and be away for a few weeks at a time is very difficult indeed because you’ve got a schedule to stick to for other books you’re writing.
I said to him, get them in as quickly as you can. I think we did that. I think it was June, July August, we did that over three months and everything was fine. Nothing was known about anything.
Adventures on the highway
Then just before Christmas, a few months later, suddenly things began to change. I do welcome the intuitive part because I’m sure in the past it stopped me from having what could have been a nasty accident.
In particular, I was driving one day on the motorway and I had a massive Scania lorry to the left of me – I think it was a Spanish truck – and an English lorry on the right of me. I was sandwiched in the middle and we were going around this bend on the motorway. It was six o’clock in the morning, pouring with rain, pitch black, and the Scania driver, whether he looked at his phone or looked at his directions, veered into my lane, lifted the back of the car up and dragged us into his lane.
Usually my husband drives. I don’t drive anywhere as much as him. He is a much more confident driver than I am. But something kicked in and before I knew it, the Scania and our car were parked up in the lane at the side where, if you have an accident, that’s where you pull over to. Whatever my body did automatically stopped us being pushed into the lorry on the other side. If that happened, we would have totally turned instead of slightly skewed and it could have been horrible.
So, I go by my instincts. I’m one of those people that say, well, I can’t prove it, but it’s never steered me wrong.
Jenny Wheeler: How are you going to go with research for the coming book? I’m sure you’ve got heaps of information stored up there in your computer of a brain, but how has the pandemic affected you?
Current ‘Work In Progress’ is set in Positano
Lucy Coleman: It hasn’t really affected me because I already had two other books where I’d done the research a whole year before. Those were the books that I then wrote. I am only now writing or have written and are just coming out, the books where we did that intensive spell of research.
The current work in progress is set in Positano. I know Positano very, very well, so what I said to my husband was, although we could probably venture over there, I didn’t have time. The kids are back to school so I spent a lot of time babysitting. I wanted to enjoy them even more because we’ve had some restricted times, and it was like, no, the kids come first. I’ll get it done somehow.
For Positano, I said to Lawrence, download all of our photos. I think our last trip was about three years ago, and it will all come flooding back. And it did. In actual fact, writing has saved my sanity during these last two years. As authors, I think we’re so lucky to have something we can do from home, something that takes us away from what’s happening in the world.
I do try and keep up with everything that’s going on and it is very hard to keep up this positive projection, because it’s true what they say – you manifest what you think and you manifest what you say. We have to look forward with positivity, because I firmly believe there is a lot more good out there than there is bad. We have to remember to be kind to other people.
Keeping kind and positive in all weathers
Just because they have a different problem to us, their problem isn’t any less serious than our problem. If you think, well, if I had that problem, I’d lick it into shape and it wouldn’t be a problem – that’s the whole point. You don’t have that problem.
You’ve got a different one. I think in a way it’s made us a little bit more compassionate, made us appreciate our families and the freedom of having time with them a lot more.
I’ve certainly capitalized on it this summer. It’s like, I’m going to fit in as much time as I can, and still write. Even if I got to write later in the day, it doesn’t matter.
Jenny Wheeler: It’s interesting that you mentioned negativity, because I was going to ask you about that. Summer in Provence has an interesting set up.
You’ve got a couple who decide they’re going to take a “marriage gap”, like a gap year in their marriage, because they inherit some money and they both have very widely differing ideas about how they’d like to spend this money.
One of them, the husband, wants to go off backpacking in Australia and to the wife that is just anathema, that’s not a nice holiday for her at all.
They agree that for this year, they’ll do completely different things and of course, potentially, there are quite negative aspects to that. I wondered how you go about balancing the negative, because you need the conflict for a good story, and the positive. How do you do that?
The deep truth of opposites attracting…
Lucy Coleman: I will be honest with you. When I write, I don’t analyze in that way. It’s all about the story. It’s all about what the characters tell me. My husband and I met when we were very young and I think with this book, at the heart of it, what I was trying to get to in a slightly different way, is that my husband and I are very close and very similar in lots of things, and then very different in some other things.
For instance, I don’t like heights. I’m terrified. I can’t go on roller coasters. He did drag me up a Scottish mountain a couple of weeks ago when we went up to Scotland to do some research. He got me partway up Ben Nevis in gondolas, and then we did the walk to the little mini peak. When we got to the very top of it, although it was a wide plateau, I almost froze and grabbed onto the rocks. You silly woman, what are you doing? There’s 12 feet between you and the edge. Yes, I know. But it’s calling to me. I’m that sort of person.
Also, he is Formula One mad and the minute Formula One starts, yes, I want my favorite driver to win, but I go down for the last lap because I can’t stick the whole thing through. We have our differences and it was really an extrapolation of that. I think the seed in my mind was, what if you’ve got two people whose interests are poles apart on some things although family wise they’re on the same wavelength.
When a devoted couple want different things…
Suddenly you get this influx of money. You are holding that person back because he would love to climb to the very top peak. What would you do? Would you sacrifice? Would you say you’ve always wanted to do that?
I can’t go on a boat. I can’t go on a plane. Obviously that’s part of the story. It’s the big reason why. It’s not just that she’s pandering to her fear. It goes deeper than that. But because of that, she feels guilty. She doesn’t want to hold him back. She knows he wants to backpack, so she says to him, right. Well, in actual fact, he raises it and she doesn’t think it’s a very good idea because she sees that as distancing them, in a way. Then she turns it around and the guilt kicks in and she thinks, well, he deserves that. What can I do then?
She has always wanted to paint, so when they go off, the idea is that they share each other’s experiences and talk about it every day. Which they do, but it tails off a bit because he arrives at the airport expecting to do some sort of charity work first of all. He flies into Australia and he ends up going opal mining. He meets these guys and they say, we’re going to this opal mine. You can make a bit of money. Although they paid off their mortgage and helped other people out, they decided on a set budget. They weren’t going to be silly. He wanted to do some humanitarian projects as well.
‘The Haven’ an artist’s retreat so real one reader wanted to go there….
She went to this place in France where she is partly paying for her stay, but she can learn to paint and be surrounded by people who were like-minded, and he’s doing his travel.
It was her giving him his freedom, knowing that when they got back together, the ideal plan was that, because they’ve been married for a couple years, they would then start a family and after that, who knows when you can travel next or have your freedoms.
That was the idea behind it. I feel like it was an extrapolation of me, that little seed of, what happens when you’ve got major differences and there’s nothing you can do about it. You don’t want to stop the other person having fun.
I wouldn’t dream of stopping my husband commandeering downstairs for half a day for three days with the pre-race and taking over everything. I beetle away and leave him because that’s his joy. And he is the same with me, with the things I like to do that he doesn’t enjoy.
Jenny Wheeler: That place where she stays, it’s like an artists collective and once again, it sounds like a wonderful environment. I noticed one of your readers commented online something like, oh, I wish the Haven was real, I could spend my life there. Did you actually stay in something similar to that or was that all your imagination?
Lucy Coleman: I never put the correct names in. If I go somewhere like, obviously the monastery and certainly with France because we’ve been so many times I know the place well, but I don’t usually name it. (In Summer in Provence) the property, the descriptions of the building, was a manor house we’ve stayed in numerous times and that’s more in Northern France.
Lucy Coleman’s idea of the ‘perfect way of living’
But the actual idea probably harks back to something that would be my idea of a perfect way of living. It would be to set up a little community, whether it’s family, family and friends, or whatever, where you grow your own produce, you all have your own space, you have community space where you come together and you share your skills.
It’s my idea of utopia, and if I was going to put it somewhere, we’ve had so many wonderful holidays in France. Prior to that, I suppose the seed was sown about 25 years ago. We booked this gîte for two weeks holiday with the boys in the summer. When we got there, it was a very elderly English couple who had only been over there about two years. They went online and bought, you know, you can buy a French village. Well, it was a French village and judging by what they paid for it, they should have known that there wasn’t going to be much to it.
Basically, there was an old farmhouse that was run down. There were lots of outbuildings and they managed to convert one of the gîtes, but they were in their 80s at that point and he was struggling with cancer when we arrived there. We stayed in their perfectly renovated little gîte, they had loads of ducks everywhere. You couldn’t leave the door open because the ducks would waddle in, and it was their dream life.
The popularity of Christmas stories…
Unfortunately, shortly after we came back, the wife got in touch with us and said that the lump in his throat was throat cancer and he died a few months later. I said, what are you going to do? And she said, I’m going home. Then a few weeks later she wrote and said, I’m staying. Local people are helping me, and some people are going to band together. I think that was the initial seed and it stuck in my head. I thought, gosh, that’s lovely.
Jenny Wheeler: Yes, that’s lovely. And funnily enough, at the end of the Andalucía book something similar happens. It obviously is the theme that you enjoy.
Lucy Coleman: I know. I keep coming back to it. I’m going to manifest it, aren’t I? If I say it enough, it’s going to happen.
Jenny Wheeler: We’ll move on to talking about the Christmas books briefly because we are running into time, but why are Christmas stories so popular? Obviously it is a thing, isn’t it, Christmas stories. People love them.
Lucy Coleman: Do you know what, the minute Christmas day is over, I’m planning for the next Christmas. It’s like 364 days to go. For me, it’s the time of the year that brings out the best in so many people, and it’s a time of the year when there’s a lot of sadness because people are on their own. It’s a time of the year when you look around and you see people giving without thinking about the receiving. All of those things make Christmas a magical time.
Lucy Coleman – one of life’s ‘Christmas-aholics’ – it’s a magical time
Regardless of what your religion is or what you believe, any time in the year when someone gives without thinking of receiving, stands for hours in the kitchen, whether you’re a chef or not, cooking for their family, slaving over the stove, wrapping up little presents for the kids.
It’s not about the amount of money or the number of presents you buy. It’s the little bit of thought you put into it.
I live in perpetual Christmas. My husband always says, no, you can’t trim the tree until December. I’ve dragged him back into part way through November now, and my aim is 1st of November because a month isn’t long enough to have the trimmings around me and feel festive.
I want it for two months. But the minute it’s over, then I’m planning for the next Christmas.
I think particularly when you go through times when there are a lot of bad things going on in the world, you need to keep your spirits up and you need to remind yourself that there are lots of good things.
They just don’t make it into the news. Bad things make it into the news, but what about all the wonderful things people are doing? All the kindnesses. I was a Christmasaholic before I started writing. It’s part of my childhood. It came from my mum. I’ll always be a Christmasaholic, so I don’t care what time of the year it is, I’m writing a Christmas book.
At any time of the year. Lucy Coleman is writing a Christmas story
The first one in the Aysbury series I wrote in the very first pandemic and it was wonderful for me because I couldn’t see my family, I couldn’t give them real hugs. We did Zoom meetings and cried. Every meeting ended in tears because we missed each other so much. The kids would be crying, I’d be crying. That was a bit of a disaster, and I’d absorb myself in Christmas mode. It saved my sanity and got me through that very first hard lockdown.
I think lots of people will always like Christmas books for different reasons. But there are also people who won’t read Christmas books too early. I’m on a blog tour now for A Christmas Wedding in the Cotswolds and all of those lovely bloggers, 33 of them, read it in July or August. That’s asking them an awful lot. One of my favorite bloggers, Grace, she is really lovely, said, it made me go out and buy my first Christmas bauble. I thought, okay, that’s fine.
Jenny Wheeler: You’ve got the double whammy there because you’ve got Christmas and a wedding.
Lucy Coleman: Well, they didn’t want a Christmas wedding. Immi saw herself – and some of it is impractical because there are rules around where you can and can’t get married – but her dream was to be married in a cornfield with three or four people, the main people in her life around her, and then a big party for the whole village. Carte blanche. Anyone can come along. It didn’t work out like that. She’s like me, she’s a workaholic. She takes on too much and she won’t let anything slip, so she has to get it all done.
Sometimes personal experience is reflected in the stories
Also, it’s not that she was a reluctant bride. It was my experience. I wanted to marry my husband but I would have happily trotted off, just the two of us, and got married with two strangers as witnesses. I didn’t want all the things that went with it, so my mum did everything and we just turned up on the day. We were the first to leave the reception. My husband and I were like, is it too soon to go, would it look too bad? I think we got to about eight o’clock and I said, no, we’re going.
We had bought our first house together. We were so very young, 18 and 19, and we had been working on it because it was a bit run down. We’d been working on it for about six months, working every day and we wanted to get back and enjoy our little nest. I didn’t give much thought to any of the bits and pieces. My mum did it all and it was lovely. Everyone had a good time, apparently. But Lawrence and I wanted to be at home together because it was the first time we’d actually lived together. In those days that’s what you did. You stayed at home at that age.
That’s why Immi wasn’t a reluctant bride, but she couldn’t visualize because she’d only ever had men in her life. Her mum wasn’t around and her grandma died quite a few years before. She couldn’t see herself slipping into gowns. It wasn’t her dream, so someone else had to come and rescue her.
Lucy Coleman’s other penname – writing as Linn B Halton
Jenny Wheeler: Before we move on to talking about some other things, like what you like to read, tell us about your other pen name and those books. We haven’t covered anything about those.
Lucy Coleman: I started writing under my real name, Linn B Halton. What happened was I always told myself I would write one day, but it would be when I retired. My first career was in finance for 20 odd years, which I’m very grateful for because it gave me an awful lot of IT skills I wouldn’t have otherwise had.
Then I got my dream job. Because we’ve moved 16 times, as you can tell there must be something in the process that I love. Well, I love painting. I love doing all the detail work. My husband loves doing the building work and then I love dressing the house, and each house, when we move on, we usually sell all the furniture that goes with it because it’s designed to match the house.
We got about 12 houses in and this property developer happened to see some of my work. I had done a little job for someone. I did it unpaid. Someone would say, can you come in and make over this room? It was friends, so I did it, and he got to see it. He said, could you do me a mood board for a four-bed executive show house? I said, of course I can. I went away and did a mood board. I had to go back, did a presentation and he said, you’ve got the job.
Lucy Coleman’s ‘dream job’ – dressing houses for sale
He said, the only thing is that you have to buy everything within two weeks, store it somewhere and then probably about a week later, when the house is finished, you have to come in with your team and install everything over a weekend because we want to open on the Monday. I thought, no problem. I can do that. It ended up my mum, my husband, myself, going to my favorite shop, buying all the bedding, towels. We had to buy beds. But I can do that. I’ve done it on all the houses we’ve done because we always start again. So that wasn’t a problem.
Within the two weeks I had it all, it was all in storage, and then the developer said, the house isn’t ready. We had this long delay, which was a bit of nightmare. Then all of a sudden I got the phone call. Okay, we’re ready to go. I had a few friends on standby and the daughter of one of our friends who wanted to do interior design, so I said, baptism by fire. Obviously I’ll pay you but if you come in, you can help with the unpacking. I’ll be there telling people where to put things and you can see the process.
The long and short of it was he offered me a full-time job, so I said goodbye to my long-term career. I thought, I’m going to go for it. This is fun. It was wonderful. I did it for three years and then all of a sudden my intuition was telling me my mum was ill. I could see it. My brothers couldn’t see it. Everyone thought I was crazy and I thought she’s hiding something.
A heart-breaking but also magical time with dying Mum
I said to my husband, I’ve got to spend some time with mum because I was so busy that we were only getting a bit of time at weekends and phone calls during the week. I gave up work in December 2018 and she died at the end of March 2019. Two weeks after I gave up work, she fell and broke her arm and her hip and came to live with us. We had some traumatic times because I’m not a natural nurse and it was hard and it was daily care.
We had a little cottage in our garden. We lived in an old hunting lodge at the time and we had converted this massive garage thing in the garden into a little bedroom, a kitchenette, bathroom, for friends to come and stay. I lived out there with mum for the last few weeks of her life. It was a wonderful, magical time. Very heartbreaking, very hard.
Afterwards it took me a long time to come to terms with it. I was so distraught. My husband said, sit down and write. Mum would want that. You’ve always wanted to do it. For my 50th birthday, I’d given myself a present. My present to me was as soon as dinner was over in the evening, I went up to the study and I thought, right, you’ve been telling yourself all this time that you’re going to write a book. Sit and write. I wrote, I think it was 130,000 words, and the book never saw the light of day simply because we had an accident, water damage and the hard drive was taken somewhere to get everything downloaded and it got stolen.
Personal loss became the gateway for creative expression
So the book went. But it didn’t matter because it proved to me I could do it. I didn’t know how long a book, so I wrote it until it was finished. I think it was about 135,000 words. Nothing happened for several years until my mom’s passing and then I sat down and I started with a blank page and I wrote five manuscripts back-to-back without stopping.
It got me through the probate, clearing out her property and lifted my spirits. It got me through it. Then I googled, what do you do when you’ve got a manuscript, how long should it be, should it be in a set genre? It’s like, oh dear, I think I’ve done it a bit wrong.
Jenny Wheeler: Those were under that other name. Tell us what that name is.
Lucy Coleman: Linn B Halton. Each of the first five books I wrote are slightly different because there’s quite a bit of my intuitive side in there. One of them was a little bit of a test ground. While they are all uplifting and talk about similar issues, the first one is very tongue in cheek.
It starts with this young lady, she’s in her early 20s and she’s somewhere laid on a bed. She sees the light and follows it and suddenly she’s inside someone else’s head and she can see what’s going on in their house. She’s like, what’s going on here? It’s a very funny, tongue in cheek, and it goes full circle story.
Getting the book production line started…
That was what I was writing, getting through the biggest part of my mum. It was almost like mum was there and she was laughing at me and the light on the desk would keep flickering. I can still see it now. My writing desk was in the little property in the garden that mum had slept in and stayed in and the light would flicker and keep flickering. I would sit there and I’d say, you’re here, mum, aren’t you? You know what I’m doing? You’re happy, aren’t you? And it would every now and again flicker.
I don’t know. It might be all hoping, but if I believe it and it gives me comfort, then I think it’s fine. From there on in I did four or five titles and they were all slightly different, all great fun to write. Then I wrote two Lucy style books, visiting Greece, Italy. Then I started writing as Lucy as well. It developed from there.
I also had some self-published books. I have recently taken them down and once I get through to the end of December, I’ve got a little gap in my schedule. I’m going to be going through those and editing them because they were the first books I wrote. Hopefully, relaunching them because there’s a romantic comedy in there. It’s The Quintessential Gemini and Quintessentially Yours.
As you can tell, I write from real life. I’m a Gemini. I don’t live my life according to my daily horoscope, but this woman does. She gets up and the first thing she does in the morning is read the email she gets from her astrologer, and it gives her focus for the day.
What Lucy likes to read – her favorites at the present time
Again, it’s funny. It’s a romantic comedy and it’s about how you deal with the little problems that come up every day and get in the way of your bigger picture, and misunderstandings. It’s dedicated to a very famous astrologer who died quite a few years ago now. There were parts in it that I couldn’t believe. As I was typing, I thought, I don’t believe I’ve said that. But great fun.
Jenny Wheeler: We are starting to run out of time, so turning to Lucy as reader. This is The Joys of Binge Reading and we like to tap a little bit into your reading experience. Tell us about books you’ve enjoyed and ones you might like to recommend to people who are listening.
Lucy Coleman: At the moment, unfortunately, I’m a binge writer not a binge reader. It has been like that for a couple of years now. I do occasionally read books to do reviews, but it has to slot into a gap in my itinerary, and it’s really difficult at the moment. But if I could take six months off and do nothing but read – and that’s not going to happen – I would begin with some of my old favorites. When I was a binge reader, for instance, when I first got married and the boys were young, they’d come home from school and I’d be in the kitchen. I’d be reading, and as I was reading, I’d end up burning something and having to start again. The number of times. It was just crazy.
Ken Follett, Serge Golon both big inspirations for Lucy Coleman
I would want to revisit the books that inspired me to write in the first place. Ken Follett was always a great inspiration because I love the historical side of it. I don’t know if you’ve heard of Sergeanne Golon. These books are ancient, but I managed to get hard copies of the entire series, except for the last one. Serge Golon was the man and Anne was his wife. He did the research and she did the writing. The series is written by Sergeanne (so it looks like one word) Golon and it’s the Angelique series.
That starts off in France and Versailles and then goes off all round the world, various trips. I think it starts in the 17th century. It’s an amazing series. I have to say that while there are loads and loads of readers I love, that series was the series that put in my head, one day you will write a book. I wanted to write a book that someone can curl up in a chair when they’re having a bad day with a cup of coffee, cup of tea, slice of cake, biscuit, whatever is their thing, and escape, but feel that the writer is taking you into their life and you’re their friend sitting next to them telling you the story of their life.
Nowadays there are so many, brilliant books out there. It’s like people who love Christmas books. You can read one Christmas book and then go through probably 20 or 30 Christmas books and feel you’ve had a complete experience and it doesn’t matter they’re all in different styles and all by different writers.
Other favorites among Lucy’s romance genre colleagues
Nowadays, the sort of writers I would be looking at would be Sandy Barker, for instance. She’s over in Australia. Who else would I recommend? I keep a list of all the books I read and review.
(Editor’s note: Sandy Barker in on the show in the first week of December – so look out for her!)
Jenny Wheeler: Was Sergeanne Golon originally published in French and translated?
Lucy Coleman: Oh yes. They’re absolutely massive books. My shelf is probably three feet long and I’ve got them in French as well, although my French isn’t good enough to read them, but my husband bought them for me as a romantic present. I love hugging them because you can’t get them for love or money nowadays.
I’ve recently read, to give some snippet reviews, The Spanish House by Cherry Radford. That’s an absolutely delightful read and it’s a Spanish adventure.
Rachel Ryan’s Resolutions by Laura Starkey. That was amazing and had some truly laugh out loud moments in it. I think in that one, most women will recognize a little bit of themselves in the main character, Rachel.
Another one is Endless Skies by Jane Cable. She’s a lovely writer. She’s has several books now.
Jenny Wheeler: That’s fantastic. Circling around and looking back down your career, if you could change anything, if you could go back and redo something, is there anything you would change, and if so, what would it be?
Lucy Coleman: I will be honest. I wouldn’t change a single thing because my journey has been the journey I was supposed to take. If I had started writing in my thirties, I wouldn’t have had the life experiences I needed.
A full life. From finance, to home design, to being an author
I missed out between my financial career and my home design career. There was a little gap period of a couple of years when my husband and I did nothing but renovate houses. We would live in it, renovate it, sell it. I think we did three in two years. While we were doing that, we didn’t have an income, which was quite a brave thing, so we both took part-time jobs in a little nursery that sold flowers and plants. He worked in the plant section, so he was the tender, chopping and watering, and I worked in the gift shop.
Even experiences like that give you a wealth of ideas. All of the 16 properties we’ve lived in, we’ve lived in an old, converted stables that had been converted in the 80s and the old woman had died in the property just before we viewed it. I walked through the door and being intuitive I knew she was still there. My husband couldn’t feel it, so it was fine. It hadn’t been updated since the eighties so it was 30 years out of date.
We moved in there, we extended it, we renovated the whole thing. She was very happy, and then she left as soon as the property was finished. She left and we left. That was in a tiny little hamlet community. And certainly, my Linn books for instance, like Coming Home to Penvennan Cove, and the second one is due out next month and I’m halfway through the third one – the basis for that sort of community feel was informed by living in that little hamlet.
Lucy Coleman – There have been hard times, but no regrets
We also lived in Arningham, which is on the edge of the River Severn. That was a tiny little community that, whenever there was snow, you were snowed in. To live together in a very small community where you have to help each other out – the wealth of experience that gave me.
I wouldn’t have had a lot of that if I’d started writing any earlier. I probably would have written, but it would have been totally different.
I honestly think there is nothing I would change. Every mistake I’ve ever made, every wrong thing that I’ve had to discover and discover more than once, has taught me so much. It’s priceless, so I never live in regret.
When I’m facing something that doesn’t feel fair or is really arduous, I think, right, what’s the way to get out of this and get myself back to where I want to be?
I have had a lot of hardships in my life because I’ve lost four babies – two before one son and then two between that and having my second son. There have been not very pleasant times that my husband and I have had to get through somehow.
Obviously losing my mum and then losing my dad. I was the one who had the main involvement with that. I was the one there holding my dad’s hand when he died, just me and my dad on our own. With my mum, I was the last one to see her and she chose to die a few hours later. Then I went back and I was the first one to sit and hold her hand, which was wonderful. That was her choice.
Where readers can find author Lucy Coleman online
All of those things have shaped me and it will filter through into my writing. Because I’m not a planner, because I go with the one-liner when I sit down, obviously a lot of that will come from my experiences. I don’t plan the plot. It goes where the characters want to take it. I feel in a way that they lead me, but obviously it’s what’s in my subconscious. It filters into their plot.
Jenny Wheeler: We have come to the end of our time. I imagine that you enjoy interacting with your readers. How do you go about that and where can they find you?
Lucy Coleman: On social media, Twitter is my main thing. I do go on Facebook on my two author pages to post things, but I’m a bit of a disaster on Facebook. That’s a bit hit and miss. All the information about my books will be on there. I do have two websites. I have a Linn B Halton website and a Lucy Coleman author website. But certainly Twitter, anyone can always contact me and also on my website, there’s a contact page.
I get an awful lot of emails from people. Sometimes I read an email and think, I can’t believe someone has said this. Based on Summer in Provence, a lovely lady wrote, this was during lockdown, and said that she and her friends were so fed up and they were having Zoom meetings. They said, right, we’ve always said we’ll plan a trip together. We’re going to go and do a girls’ thing. I think their kids are about early teens. She said, we’re now going to do it.
Nothing more affirming than positive reader feedback
We have read your book. We’re just going to go off together and we’re going to do it. We’re not going to put it off anymore. She said, as soon as we are out of lockdown we are going to book something so we can’t chicken out of it. It was reading that story and feeling that lift. If you do something to make a change, it can take you to a totally other place. All your worries are suddenly shared and you come back and start to see things in a slightly different way.
Three weeks ago, we went to Scotland for a week to do research for a book I’m writing sometime next year. We went right up into the Highlands and it was absolutely wonderful. At the time I thought, I’ve got deadlines, I should be writing, but I’m going to go. And while we’re there, there won’t be time for me to write, although I did slot in one day writing, but we had so many things to see and photograph.
Do you know what. The peace! We stayed in a hotel on the edge of Loch Awe and there was nothing there. On a 44-acre estate there was just this hotel and it was wonderful. Intuitively, I knew I had to go. I couldn’t spend a lot of time writing. I couldn’t spend any time on social media while I was up there. I was supposed to rest and I did, and I came back and what a shot in the arm that was.
If you liked Lucy you might also like….
I think these tales of exotic places, even if people are ill – and a lot of my readers have serious illnesses and are armchair readers because they can’t go anywhere – at least I hope it makes them feel like they’ve been there.
Jenny Wheeler: I’m sure they do, Lucy. Thank you so much for your time.
Lucy Coleman: Thank you so much, Jenny. It’s been a delight and it’s such fun to speak to you today.
If you liked Lucy you might also like Hazel Gaynor’s historical Riviera romance or …..Lorrie Holmgren’s cozy travel mysteries or
Thanks To Our Technical Support:
The Joys of Binge Reading podcast is put together with wonderful technical help from Dan Cotton at DC Audio Services. Dan is an experienced sound and video engineer who’s ready and available to help you with your next project… Seek him out at dcaudioservices@gmail.com or Phone + 64 – 21979539. He’s fast, takes pride in getting it right, and lovely to work with.
Our voice overs are done by Abe Raffills, and Abe’s another gem. He got 20 years of experience on both sides of the camera/microphone as a cameraman/director and also voice artist and television presenter. Abe’s vocal delivery is both light hearted and warm and he is super easy to work with no matter the job. You’ll find him at abe@pointandshoot.co.nz
It was such fun talking to you, Jenny, and a wonderful array of questions! Like sitting with a friend… so a HUGE thank you and wishing you, and your readers, a healthy and joyful holiday this year!
Thanks so much for the warm response Lucy – so encouraging… That’s what I hope for with the show – that authors will feel like they are talking to a friend!! You have a great Christmas too!!! Warmest Greetings Jenny