Category Archives: Dorothy Says

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Every Smile You Fake.

Enjoy!

EverySmileYouFake-extract

I’ve got a new podcast! It’s called The Big Reveal and it is all about helping you to find your next favourite read, watch or listen. Have a listen to the trailer here: The Big Reveal Podcast

This podcast is all about sharing the love on the things I consume in the hope that it will help you to find something brilliant, too.

It’s also a way for me to fullfill my dream to start a book club and give a boost to my favourite reads.

If you’re not already, sign up for my newsletter to be kept right up to date on what I’ve been reading, watching and listening to as well as what my book club choice is.

Hope you’re able to join me on this fantastical journey. It’s going to be so much fun.

Dorothy

6-minute read

Can a hater help you? One of mine did. I’ll tell you how in a minute or two because today we’re talking about the outside world and your writing.

No matter where you are in the publishing process – just starting to send your stuff ‘out there’ to agents and publishers, just about to give it to readers if you’re self-publishing, about to be published for the first time, or even if it’s your 10th book/story to hit the shelves – you are going to find a lot of people will be commenting on what you produce.

And, fair warning, it won’t always be positive.

With my first two books – The Cupid Effect and The Chocolate Run – the first time around, hardly anyone knew about them. And because of their relative invisibility, while I got a few nice (and cherished) emails and letters, no one had anything particularly malign to say about them. (Apart from everyone rejecting The Cupid Effect – twice, but that’s for another letter.)

However, my third book, My Best Friend’s Girl, made quite a splash when it hit the shelves, and with every iota of success and praise it brought my way, there seemed to be a huge sting of negativity and vitriol to go with it.

People seemed to be lining up to diss my book.

At that point, I used to read ALL of my reviews and the bad ones hurt. A lot. They seemed personal, targeted and just plain mean. For NO REASON!

How did I cope – except sobbing into my giant bag of Maltesers (I could eat gluten back then)? Well, I asked a few trusted people what they really thought of the accusations levelled at my books.

These were the people – including my editor and my agent – who I could really rely on to be honest with me, even if it was not what I wanted to hear. And they told me they believed in the book and me.

Around the same time, one particular hater wrote a review saying how my book was so bad that when it came to them getting a book published, they’d have no trouble.

That’s when my upset turned to side-clutching laughter. That person had no clue what it took to get published! No clue! ‘Good luck with that,’ I thought, then laughed myself sick and got on with my published writing life.

Thank you hater! Now go away, OK? I’ve surrounded myself with the right people and you’re not one of them.

Thing is, not everyone is going to like what you do. That’s a fact.

But I know that every one of my books is ‘out there’ because I have tried my hardest. Some people might not like them, but there is nothing I could have done to make it better. I may privately acknowledge someone’s lack of love but I’ll also shrug my shoulders because I know there’s nothing I can do to change their (wrong) opinion.

I should also say: no matter how tempting, no matter how goady, I rarely respond to negative feedback from ‘out there’. I may privately re-evaluate what I’ve done and see if they have a point. If they do, I’ll remind myself for next time, but I won’t get involved with arguing back, nor do I try to get other people to bully those who are critical of my work.

I know, it will ALWAYS makes me look bad.

Long after people have forgotten how nasty the reviewer or publisher or agent or whoever was to you in the first place, they will ALWAYS judge you as the over-sensitive author who can’t take potentially legitimate feedback. Hopefully, among the people who are around you, you’ll have someone who’ll tell you to stop, rather than encourage you to continue to behave badly if you do ‘bite’. (I have in mind one particular person who is currently doing irreparable damage to their reputation when I write this. Please learn from their horrific example and DON’T DO THIS!)

So that is how to deal with your work being out there: surround yourself with the right people.

When I say surround yourself with the right people, I don’t mean your parents, siblings or your best friend from school. They won’t want to hurt your feelings and they should like everything you do as a default.

The right ones are the people who want you to succeed and will be – gently – honest. If you don’t have an editor or agent, try setting up an online or in-person writing group where you meet and share your writing. If you do this, though, make sure you all agree beforehand:

• that you only want the best for each other and will celebrate everyone’s success even if your success hasn’t arrived yet
• that you will only offer constructive feedback
• that some things will not be for you, so if you can’t offer constructive feedback, you’ll say nothing
• that you won’t writing shame people who don’t manage to hit their targets
• that you’ll always be supportive.

So, this week’s writing prompt is this: Check if you have the right, supportive people around you. If you haven’t, how can you change that?

Really looking forward to getting your word count/writing news.

Talk to you soon.

Dorothy x

(Please excuse typos – I’m only human!)

PS Don’t forget: you can pre-order a signed copy of My Other Husband here and unsigned copies here and here to make sure it arrives in your life as soon as possible after it’s released.

5-minute read

Hello you.

How are you? Sorry to have missed you last week. And I did miss you, if that doesn’t sound too sentimental.

I missed last week’s newsletter because I had to go to hospital for a procedure (I’m totally fine, please don’t worry) and newsletter-writing time got away from me.

Going to the hospital in these times (COVID times, basically) I was only allowed to bring the bare minimum with me, which meant, for me, no physical books.

For someone who spends her life in books, you’d think I’d have flipped out, wouldn’t you? Well, I didn’t because it was fine. Yes, honestly, because I could just dive back into the book I was reading via the Audible app on my phone.

No physical book allowed, no problem. Well there was one, because I forgot my headphones but you know what I mean!!

Anyways, imagine my surprise when I opened up TikTok the other day to find, according to lots of people, I wasn’t really reading when I was listening to an audiobook. I was actually committing some kind of sin because I wasn’t using my eyes to consume my latest read.

Can you imagine! That’s what is being put out there now: listening to an audiobook is some kind of deviant act.

Wow, I thought, wow.

I’ve been listening to stories since I was tiny. Put aside the audiobook for a moment, when I was little, my older brother used to read to me as did my parents. When I was older, I used to love going to book events so I could hear the author read from their books. And even now, my husband gets me to read to him whenever I can because he loves it so.

I love being read to, just like I love listening to audiobooks.

And do you know what? Research from across the globe shows that reading to children helps improve literacy skills, increases vocabulary, and builds a strong connection between the reader and the child. Some of the best books I consumed as a child got into my brain and imagination via someone speaking them to me.

I’ll admit, despite loving being read to, I was a late audiobook adopter. Simply because I thought once I started down the audiobook route, I wouldn’t pick up a book again. Well, it turned out to be the opposite to that – when I’ve got an audiobook on the go, I’ll have the eBook and paper book to hand, too, and will move between them all. This was how I pleasantly read all those books on my list for the Women’s Prize – I very easily utilised the different formats to immerse myself in the novels.

And, this may be TMI, but when I’m doing my cleaning of a Sunday morning, I stick an audiobook on with my rubber gloves. When I’m doing one of my epic cooking sessions, I stick on an audiobook while I’m chopping, stirring, simmering and not following the recipe. When I’m waiting to go be operated on, I stick on an audiobook (well I would, if I hadn’t forgotten me headphones).

I can’t see how this can be seen as disrespecting the act of reading; I think I’m actually honouring it by doing what our ancestors did – learning through listening.

I was about to launch into a big long list of reasons why audiobooks are great and why we shouldn’t dunk on those who use them and then I remembered there really is only one reason: it’s not my business how anyone else legally consumes books.

That they can continue to buy and enjoy books is enough for me.

Reading words is good. Listening to words is good. Touching words is good.

Basically, it’s all good. And if you’re a true book lover, you’ll know that. : )

Three audiobooks I enjoyed listening to recently are:

• A Million Aunties by Alecia McKenzie

• The Lies You Told by Harriet Tyce

• The Khan by Saima Mir

Do you audio? If you do, what have you enjoyed? If you don’t, might you give it a try? Do let me know.

Talk to you soon, lovelies.

Dorothy x

(Please excuse typos, I’m only human.)

PS Don’t forget: you can pre-order a signed copy of My Other Husband here and unsigned copies here and here to make sure it arrives in your life as soon as possible after it’s released.

5-minute read

Hello you.

My dog Fufu is small. And MIGHTY. And hilarious. 

Jollof, Fufu’s physically bigger sister (they’re from the same litter), only really barks at people in the street who get too near to us, and bigger animals in the garden and the sounds of people sitting in their back gardens enjoying themselves (she thinks they’re coming for us). 

If Jollof wants to go out to the toilet, she’ll just stand next to the back door and stare at us until we open up. If she wants food she’ll paw at her food bowl until I fill it, and when she wants cuddles she’ll climb up beside me and paw-paw at my hand until I give her what she wants. 

Fufu, on the other hand . . . she will come and bark at me until I feed her. She will sit in my husband’s eyeline and bark until he takes her for a walk. She’ll stand at the back door barking until you let her out. She’ll come and bark at me until I relocate to the sofa so she can sit on my lap. She’ll dip her head down, raise her bottom in the air, wag her tail and bark until I play fetch with her. And when another creature comes into the garden . . . Fufu will bark so furiously her whole body raises off the ground. 

The thing is with Fufu, it doesn’t matter if it’s one of the family of mahoosive foxes that has claimed our garden or the tiniest Blue Tit, she will bark her head off at it to go away. She will bark and bark and bark, come over to me to tell me that this thing is in our garden, then run back to bark at it some more. 

She keeps the same energy for something big as something small. I admire my little girl for that. She doesn’t allow anything to ‘get away’ with blithely wandering into her yard. 

I’m not sure it’s the best way to be – I’ve seen enough variations on ‘don’t sweat the small stuff’ to know that sometimes you’re supposed to let insignificant things go. But isn’t it standing up against the smallest slights the way to get the courage to enter into the bigger fights?

Isn’t not allowing people to take liberties on a small level the way you realise that you can’t let things slide on a bigger scale? There are so many incidents from my working and personal life that have involved some sort of disrespect and sidelining that eventually require me to unleash the Dorothy people rarely see. 

After the dust settles and I look back at where this incident really began, I can almost always pinpoint it to somewhere in my shared history with that person where they did/said something that I just brushed off rather than confronting them. 

Like the time someone – let’s call them Z – trash-talked me to the CEO of a company expecting him to stamp on me because I’d asked Z to not do something detrimental to my career. Z was slagging me off not knowing that I had many, many, many receipts of their bad behaviour so when I showed a few of them to the CEO, he quickly made what I requested happen, and only just stopped short of apologising (probably because he didn’t want to admit liability in writing). 

When I looked back, the inciting incident was when Z was rude to and dismissive of me in front of others and I simply brushed it off. I mean, I stewed over it, but I didn’t confront Z at the time because, I rationalised, it was a minor incident – a baby Blue Tit in what turned out to be the gargantuan fox of their bad behaviour. 

Had I been Fufu, I would barked my head off that little incident and we probably wouldn’t have ended up with the bigger incident. Had I been Fufu, I would have totally sweated that small stuff.

As I get older, I’m getting more and more like Fufu. I’m speaking up straight away at the time of the incident rather than letting it snowball. The results are varied but mostly good and effective in the short term, and are likely to be even better in the long term. But either way, I don’t think I could go back to the way of letting the Blue Tit land in my garden without comment now if I tried. And I think that’s OK. 

Are you a Fufu when it comes to the little things? Or do you let things slide? Which way works for you?

Speak to you soon. I hope you are well. 

Dorothy x

(Please excuse typos, I’m only human.)

PS Don’t forget: you can pre-order a signed copy of My Other Husband here and unsigned copies here and here to make sure it arrives in your life as soon as possible after it’s released.

5-minute read

There’s this face I make when I’m writing sometimes. It’s hard to describe (yes, I am aware of the irony of a writer writing that) but it’s a bit like this emoji: 😩

That’s the face I make when I realise I’ve written myself into a corner.

I do it all the time. ALL. THE. TIME.

With All My Lies Are True, I wrote myself into several corners. I knew the story and where it was going and where it needed to end up, but whew! Trying to get Verity and Serena and Poppy to do what I wanted them to was a difficult task.

With My Other Husband, it was the entire ending that looked like one giant corner I would never escape from. For the first time ever, I didn’t know where I needed to end up and a few days before deadline, I turned to my husband and said: ‘So how am I ending this again?’

To clarify, I knew how it should end, but it didn’t seem to be faithful enough to Cleo and Heath and Wallace and Lola and Trina and everyone else I had come to know and love.

Anyways, I realised at that point, like I do with every book, that I had written myself into a corner. My task was – and always is – how to get myself out of it.

So I did what I always tend to do: I put it to one side and ignored it.

Yes, it’s the equivalent of creating a big old mess and walking away from it and pretending it doesn’t exist, but after 18 books, I’ve come to accept and embrace that it’s the best way.

I simply activate the square brackets [ ] and fill them with [WRITE MORE]or [SORT THIS OUT] or [MAKE MORE INTERESTING] and write something else in the book.

Obviously like any big old mess – I have to come back and sort it out at some time, BUT it’s not so scary and frustrating by then. Because once I’ve written more of the book, I can usually see where that particular scene needs to go. Or if that scene needs to just go completely.

And I can do that because I’m not restricted to writing what happens next in the story. I write what’s in my head at that time and if that leads me to a corner, then so be it. I will get there, make the face and get the hell out of there till next time.

With My Other Husband, I got out of that particular corner by reading (notediting) the book again and discovering that the corner wasn’t actually there – I just needed to be brave and do what needed to be done with those characters, even if it was to make a devastating choice.

If you’re the type of writer who always has to write chapters in order, that’s excellent. But if you’re in a corner, you don’t know where to go next or your plan doesn’t really chime with who your characters are turning out to be, try leaving it for now, and writing something else. Write the very end and see if it gives you the much-needed boost to get back on track.

Can’t promise it will 100 per cent definitely work for you but it’s better than just sitting there making the 😩 face, surely?

So, today’s writing tip:

If you’re in a writing corner:

• Leave it to come back to at another time.
• Write the very end of the story to see if it loosens where you were in the story.
• Go back to where you were before things went wrong and see which path your characters could take instead.
• Ask yourself what would be most realistic for the journey your characters are on.

Speak to you soon lovelies.

Dorothy x

(Please excuse typos, I’m only human.)

PS Don’t forget: you can pre-order a signed copy of My Other Husband here and unsigned copies here and here to make sure it arrives in your life as soon as possible after it’s released.

6-minute read

Hello you.

It’s Word Count Wednesday and today, we’re talking character traits. I’ll be coming back to character building more than once, because I think when you’re writing fiction, character and plot are the two most important cornerstones to sucking readers in and then keeping them reading.

For what it’s worth, I think character is just as important in non-fiction, too. Getting readers to care about the people in the book is what makes one non-fiction book stand out from another.

In one of my earlier emails (the one about Saturdays in Sydney) I mentioned how I often weave experiences from my own life into my stories as a way of giving characters depth and the whole story more authenticity.

How I do it is, I think about who my character is, where they live, what they do, what their role is in the story. Then I think about something that has happened to me that could be relevant to that story either as an integral part of the character is or as a backdrop/context for the story.

Some of the things from my life I have woven into the personality of my characters:

• I was bullied in sixth form and this helped shape Kamryn being extremely cautious of people in My Best Friend’s Girl and showed why Adele’s betrayal hit her so hard.
• Elements of my obsessive nature when it comes to television shows helped spark Ceri’s story in The Cupid Effect. She’s obsessed with Angel and Oprah – as was I at the time – and makes some unwise decisions based on her love of those shows.
• My hormone-aggravated asthma is translated into Amber not being able to take The Pill in The Chocolate Run, which in turn causes complications in her relationship with Greg.
• Before having to go gluten-free, my favourite chocolates were Maltesers. This becomes a bit of a theme in My Other Husband with main character Cleo and her need to dunk them in coffee.

And examples of how I’ve used elements from my life as a backdrop to my stories.

• In Tell Me Your Secret, Pieta is reintroduced to Ned who bullied her at school. Her experiences of surviving being bullied are, we find out, what help her to survive what happens to her with The Blindfolder.
• I moved to Brighton many years ago and knew about three people, same when I moved to Australia years ago, too. This backdrop of feeling lost and alone comes through in a few books but most acutely in The Friend where Cece is desperately trying to find her feet.
• My experiences in the worlds of magazine and book publishing are used as huge backdrops for Cleo’s writing journey in My Other Husband. Some of the passages remind me very much of how I have felt at various points in my life.

I could go on, but you get the idea.

Just to be clear, I am NOT – let me say that again – NOT writing about me in my novels. These aren’t my life stories, or a sneaky way to write my memoirs. All my characters are fictional (even the ones based on people who’ve done me wrong that I make horrible things happen to). All my characters start as two-dimensional beings that have a role and purpose in the book I’m writing. I add to their personalities and situation by plucking certain things from my life and lending it to them. They then go on to become their own separate entities with shades of a shared experience.

What experience could you weave into your story?

Were you bullied? Did you overpluck one eyebrow just before an important event? Do you have asthma, anxiety or another health condition you can explore through your character in a secondary way? Have you developed a crush on someone completely unsuitable? Is there a word you just can’t say or makes you cringe every time you hear it?

Today’s writing prompt: Think of at least 3 quirks, traits or experiences that you personally have. Write these down in your note-taking medium of choice (Notes app on your phone, notebook, Word document on your computer, etc) and when you’re next writing, add this trait/experience to your character.

That’s it for this time, lovelies.

Talk to you soon.

Dorothy x

PS Don’t forget: you can pre-order a signed copy of My Other Husband here and unsigned copies here and here to make sure it arrives in your life as soon as possible after it’s released.

4-minute read

Hello you.

‘For two days she sat on the sofa in the window, waiting for you to come back.’

That’s what I was told about my biggest little dog when I got home yesterday.

Poor Jollof honestly lay on the back of the sofa looking out of the window all day Friday and Saturday, waiting for me to return.

I knew she’d notice I wasn’t there, after all this was my first time away from her overnight since she and her sister, FuFu, came to live here in March 2020. But I didn’t think either of them would pine for me until I got home.

Where did I go?

To take part in the internationally renowned Hay Festival up in Wales. It was the first time I’d gone there – either as an attendee, and certainly as a panellist.

So was it worth it?

I’ll admit, when I was the only masked up person squashed up against several tipsy football fans as we all sweated our way from Hereford to Newport, I did not think it was worth it. When I finally escaped the hotbox and stood on the chilly platform, knowing I was going to be waiting there for my next train for more than half an hour, I did wonder what I was thinking taking myself up there in the first place.

But once I was home and showered and warm again, I did think it was worth it.

It was totally worth it, but not only because it was another event to add to my list of literary endeavours. But, because it was also a bit of a moment of recognition.

You see, authors like me – commercial writers, indeed, commercial Black writers – are very rarely invited to ‘serious’ festivals like Hay. We popular fiction writers are generally seen as not ‘literary’ or ‘crucial’; essentially not good enough in their cultural eyes.

I mean, I KNOW I’m good enough. The amount of readers like you – especially you – buying my books, and reading my emails and replying to me, tells me that I’m good enough; that my plot-driven, character-reliant novels are just as wanted, needed and important as the ones winning the big serious prizes.

Which is why it was good to go. Good to do. Good to remind myself and those in that sphere that I am just as relevant and important as the other people invited.

I was at Hay via my connection as one of the 2022 judging panel of the Women’s Prize. The Prize works to elevate women’s writing voices, and they certainly did that for me in this instance.

Why? Because everyone who went through the festival booklet, who came to my sold-out event, who bought a book afterwards could see that my books – the books that you love – are a vital part of the literary landscape.

So yes, it was worth going to Hay.

Anyways, safe to say, that when I walked – bedraggled and hungry – through the front door yesterday evening, Jollof and FuFu come running out to greet me and pretty much licked me into submission.

And it was wonderful to see them. I may never leave them overnight again…

What have you been up to, gorgeous ones? Do let me know.

Hope all is good with you.

Speak soon,

Dorothy x

(Please excuse typos – I’m only human!)

PS Don’t forget: you can pre-order a signed copy of My Other Husband here and unsigned copies here and here to make sure it arrives in your life as soon as possible after it’s released.