Ten books, nine proposals

ADELE PARKS is a very organised writer. None of this waiting around for the muse to inspire her. “I’m incredibly disciplined,”

she says, explaining her ten books in ten years, including the just published Men I’ve Loved Before.

“I don’t believe in waiting for the muse to visit. It’s a very nice concept and one the Byrons of this world are able to live by, but I don’t have an income,”

she says. “This is my job, so I’m very structured.”

We’re talking at Newcastle City Library where she’s doing a Meet The Authors talk. She’s sold over 1.5m books and they’ve been translated into more than 15 languages. It’s an impressive record and one that results from careful planning.

“Every novel is started in September, which coincides with the school year,” she explains. “Initially – because it was before I had children – it was because of that going-back-toschool, kind of academic ready for a new challenge feeling that goes with September. Now it’s much more practical because when my nineyear- old goes to school, I’ve got some hours to myself.”

From September to April, she writes. Then she sits on it for a month, not letting anyone see it. “I just think about it, chew it over and then give it to my editor. And while the editor’s looking at it, I start working on the promotion for the last book.

“So it all works out and folds into itself. So now I’m coming to the end of promoting one book, then I’ll start promoting the next but, would you believe, I’ve nearly actually finished next year’s book.”

PARKS tends to write during school hours when son Conrad is out of the house, although she’ll stop for lunch (“I’m not a slave driver”) with her husband who’s also in publishing and works from home. More and more, she has admin work to deal with and keeping in touch with readers through blogging and social network sites.

She likes the way new media makes her more available to readers.

“A generation ago authors were very inaccessible. I wouldn’t have known how to write to an author, I suppose you’d have written to the publishing house and hoped the letter got forwarded,”

she says.

“When I started with Playing Away nine years ago, I did receive old-fashioned fan mail through my publishers. That’s very rare now. The vast majority of my fans love the fact they have instant access. I made a pledge and do follow that pledge that anyone who contacts me, I’ll reply to.”

Parks was a relative latecomer to writing. She worked in advertising after university, but had always said she wanted to be a writer – “to myself, if not anybody else because it’s a very personal thing and I didn’t know if I had it in me”.

She was in her late 20s when she realised “that life is short and you can’t just keep talking about doing it”. She began writing as a way of passing the time when travelling on planes, urged on by the thought that the rash of Bridget Jones-type books that followed the success of Helen Fielding’s novel “weren’t quite speaking to me”. She set out to write something that she wanted to read.

“Then, on the eve of my 30th birthday, I took it to an agent, the only friend of mine I’d confided in. I got on a train to come back to Teesside to celebrate my birthday with my family and when I got back there was a message on my answering machine saying, ‘I really like this book, can I see the rest?’.

“The frustration wasn’t getting published, the frustration was the ten or 15 years it was in my head where I kept saying ‘I’m going to get started’ and didn’t get started. Now I would always say to people who want to be a writer to get writing.”

Her Teesside background has percolated into her novels. Some have been set in the North-East while her second, Game Over, told of a Southern woman taken out of her environment after falling in love with a guy from Whitby. “I loved writing that part of the book set in Whitby,”

says Parks. “I love it when fans say, ‘I’ve never heard of Whitby but I went there after reading the book’.

People do that kind of thing, go and visit the places.”

“There was also a time – and I have to be very careful because I have a son and a husband – when people said to me that all my sexy heroes were Northerners. Then I realised I was married to a Southerner. I really had to adjust that, to make a conscious effort.”

Her latest book, Men I’ve Loved Before, is about a woman looking back on past loves and wondering if she took the right path or would one of the men she rejected have made her happier? Naturally, says Parks, you use your own experiences, although she draws on inspirations from around her too. Which brings us to the national newspaper article in which she owned up to receiving nine marriage proposals.

‘YES, I had a few,” she admits.

“The point of the article wasn’t to say I was the most desirable woman in the world – far from it – or that I write in the romantic genre because I’ve had nine proposals. It was a quite serious article about the fact that when I was younger, I wasn’t at all as confident as I am now.

“The first proposal was at 16. I moulded myself into what I thought that boyfriend wanted. Men are more romantic than women give them credit for and in those early days if you appear the perfect woman they want, then of course they’re going to propose – particularly as I was 16 and said I wasn’t going to have sex until I got married.

“One I’d never so much as held hands with. He was Italian, which kind of lets him off the hook, because they have a completely different way of looking at it.

“I don’t make light of it because I’d say that out of those proposals I suppose three of them, including the one my husband was forced into, were actually very serious ones.

“There’s a message behind the article to be yourself because you’re never going to find the right person if you’re moulding yourself to what their ideal is. You’ve got to be comfortable with yourself and then find the right person.”

■ Men I’ve Loved (Headline, £12.99)

Golden rules for swimwear shopping

1 Splash out. Spend as much as you can on a swimsuit, good quality fabrics with lots of Lycra will sculpt your figure.

2 Never leave swimwear shopping till the airport – this is fine for suntan lotion and insect repellent, but not for figure-flattering bikinis.

3 Check your rear view. How you look from the back is important too. You may intend to spend most of your holiday lying flat on a sun lounger, but sooner or later you’re going to have to go to the bar or venture into the pool.

4 Spend time trying on lots of different styles until you find the best fit.

5 Buy more than one – you wouldn’t wear the same underwear every day, would you?

6 White is for tanned bodies, sunbathing and Liz Hurley only.

Remember: once it’s wet, it’s see-through.

7 If in doubt, you can’t beat the classic black one-piece for poolside glamour.