C.L. Taylor

It’s publication day for THE FEAR and I couldn’t be more proud of this book. I’ll freely admit that I struggle with endings – I find them the hardest part of a book to get right – but something almost miraculous happened as I was writing the first draft of THE FEAR and I suddenly realised how to tie all the threads of the story together as I hit 85,000 words. I’m also proud of this book because, as a Goodreads reader said, it isn’t just about a dark and disturbing crime it’s also about sisterhood and strong women. If THE LIE was about women turning against each other THE FEAR is about women discovering their lives share a common thread and…well, that would be giving too much away.

My publisher, Avon HarperCollins, commissioned the most amazing book trailer for THE FEAR and I’m thrilled to be able to share it with you now. Make sure you have the sound on to experience the full, spooky effect!

And here’s a video of me reading the first chapter (how funny is that freeze frame?!):

As for the ‘tattoo’ in the title of this post. Well, here it is.

If you bought my first book, THE ACCIDENT, you might recognise it. It’s the illustration from the front cover of the original version. That’s not my leg by the way! Whose leg is it and how does it tie in with THE FEAR? Well you’ll have to buy a copy and read the dedication and acknowledgements to find out!

I’ll be spending publication day writing the first draft of the next novel (28,000 words in and counting) and taking my son to karate grading (which is somewhat ironic given the storyline of THE FEAR…). Tomorrow though should be a much more relaxing day. I’ve got a hair appointment in the morning and my first book launch in nine years (mostly out of choice) in the evening. I’m very excited about celebrating the launch of this books with friends and family. A huge thank you to everyone who’s trekking to Bristol to raise a glass with me.

If you live in the UK you can order your ebook copy of THE FEAR from:

Amazon.co.uk

Google Play

iBooks

Kobo

And the paperback from:

Amazon.co.uk

Waterstones

WH Smith

You can also buy paperbacks from the following supermarkets: Tesco, Sainsbury (where it’s just £2.99 for the first two weeks after publication), Morrison, Waitrose and ASDA. It’s also available in WH Smith Travel and High Street and most branches of Waterstones . Select independent book shops also stock copies and if they don’t have it to hand they’ll definitely be able to order it for you.

If you live outside of the UK and The Fear is not available in your country you can buy it from the The Book Depository (free worldwide shipping).

Earlier this year I was invited to the Specsavers Nielsen Bestseller Awards to receive two silver awards for The Acccident and The Lie (for sales of over 250,000 copies).

It was SUCH a glamorous affair. The wonderful Mariella Frostrop was the MC and so many amazing authors were honoured with awards including Paula Hawkins, Maggie O’Farrell (I had a bit of a fan girl moment when I realised I was standing behind her in the queue), Peter James, Phillipa Gregory, Dougie and Tom from McFly, Jill Mansell, Clare Mackintosh and so many more. It really was a ‘pinch me’ moment and one of the most magical nights of my career.

Here’s a selection of photos from the official website and by my friend Rowan Coleman who came with me,

And here’s a video of me being interviewed after I received my awards (terrible freeze-frame!).

Not long now until THE FEAR is published (22nd March). I have been so chuffed with the reaction from authors and readers who’ve received advance proofs and am excited and nervous about the book coming out.

I’ve just started writing my sixth psychological thriller and life is becoming increasingly hectic as I try and balance writing the first draft with  posts for the blog tour, articles for magazines and websites, and answering Q&As. I need more hours in the day.

Plotting a novel: if all else fails – draw little stick men and women to try and make sense of your idea. It works for me (sometimes).

It’s a question that comes up in interviews a lot:

‘What inspired your novel?’

It’s always a difficult question to answer, not least because it’s normally at least 12 months since I wrote the book and 18 months since the first spark of an idea.

The more novels I write the more I realise how much an idea twists, squirms and transforms after the initial spark. THE MISSING was originally going to be about two boys who run away in different circumstances and their stories intersect when boy 2 finds the dead body of boy 1. Why didn’t I go with that idea? I honestly can’t remember. It’s that squirming thing I mentioned at the start of this paragraph. An idea is a bit like a piece of plasticine. It appears to be to be a certain shape but when you try to find out more about it – when you prod it a bit – it changes shape.

I am currently prodding an idea for my sixth psychological thriller (to be published in March 2019). The initial spark was an eight word sentence in an email of three or four different premises I ran by my agent. Maddy liked it. More than that she got excited by it, so did my editor, but it wasn’t really an idea. It was a setting. Over the last month or so I have been mulling it over in my head. I’ve got the setting but what’s the plot? Who are the characters? What’s the twist?

I’ve swung, pendulum-like, between different possibilities – some clichés, some tired, some ridiculously OTT. I’ve felt lost, panicked and frustrated. What is this book? What is it that I am trying to say?

In a recent newsletter to members of the C.L. Taylor Book Club I admitted that an author often doesn’t know what inspired a novel until years after it’s published. Hindsight allows you to draw parallels between your novels and your life – parallels you couldn’t see at the time because you were too enmeshed in the day to day.

That doesn’t help me now as I try to pull together the threads of a story to create something that will hopefully be gripping, addictive, unpredictable and original with characters that are fascinating, flawed and three dimensional. I don’t mind admitting that I’ve been struggling. Each time I prod this idea it changes into a new shape or else shoots across the room and completely evades me. But I love this stage of the process. It might be frustrating and terrifying but when all the pieces start to fall into place (to continue the analogy – the plasticine begins to take form rather than looking like an amorphous blob) there’s no feeling quite as thrilling.

And I might just have a had a little break through yesterday…

(Thank God)

Before I go – if you haven’t read THE TREATMENT or THE ESCAPE they are currently just 99p across all ebook platforms. But not for long.

Also, THE FEAR has had some amazing reviews from my fellow authors. Check them out here.

Last week I shared the cover for my next psychological thriller on social media but, if you missed it, here it is!

THE FEAR is a book I’ve wanted to write for a while. I had the first inkling of the idea after I finished THE LIE but it wasn’t fully formed so I tucked it away in my brain and wrote THE MISSING instead, then THE ESCAPE.

Earlier this year, after I finished writing my YA thriller THE TREATMENT, I had roughly six weeks before I had to start writing again. Normally I need about three months to research an idea and plot and outline it but I didn’t panic. I’d had the basic idea for THE FEAR swirling around my brain for a while. Six weeks was plenty of time. Wasn’t it?

Turns out it wasn’t.

I spent most of the six weeks scribbling in my notebook, trying to pull the different threads of the idea together but the more I pulled the more unwieldy the story became. There was an element to the story I desperately wanted to keep – about the power play between prisoner and captor – but the back story was all wrong. And then it came to me – my main character wouldn’t be confronting the man who was responsible for her sister’s disappearance eighteen years earlier. She would be confronting the man who groomed and seduced her as a teenager and convinced her to run away to France with him. The idea immediately appealed. It was so much more personal, more powerful and – importantly to me – unusual. I ditched the sister angle and started plotting the new back story but ran out of time before I could write an outline. When I started writing all I had to guide me were two pages of bullet points and four semi-formed characters.

For someone who wrote a 12,000 word outline before drafting THE ESCAPE and a 5,000 word outline before drafting THE MISSING it was a scary experience. It took me three attempts (and 6,000 deleted words) to get the first couple of chapters right but then it began to fall into place and the characters came alive.

THE FEAR is the first of my books that doesn’t have one of my fears at its heart and writing it was a challenge but, by not plotting it to the nth degree before I started, there were so many wonderful surprises and twists along the way (not least Wendy who is definitely one of my favourite ever characters). Publication day is 22nd March and I can’t wait.

Here’s the blurb…

Sometimes your first love won’t let you go…

Lou Wandsworth is used to being headline news as, aged fourteen, she ran away to France with her 31-year-old teacher, Mike Hughes.

Now 32, Lou’s life is in tatters – and she resolves to return home to confront Mike for the damage he has caused. But she soon finds that Mike is unchanged, and is focussing his attention on 13-year-old Chloe Meadows.

Determined to make sure that history doesn’t repeat itself, Lou decides to take matters into her own hands. But Mike is a predator of the worst kind, and as she tries to bring him to justice, it’s clear that Lou could once again become his prey…

The million copy Sunday Times bestseller returns with a taut, compelling psychological thriller that will have you glued to the edge of your seat.

Pre-order from Amazon.co.uk

Pre-order from Google Play

Pre-order from iBooks

Pre-order from Kobo

A week tomorrow my first young adult novel  THE TREATMENT will be published. It’s a thriller, about sixteen year old Drew Finch who tries to rescue her brother Mason from a residential reform academy after a stranger gives her a note saying that the students are being brainwashed.

The first inkling of the idea came to me in 2011, when I was pregnant with my son. I wrote 20,000 words of what I thought was a middle grade idea about a bunch of kids who develop super powers after a trip to the Hadron Collider goes horribly wrong. The government gather them up and do experiments on them and yes…I know, it’s basically the plot of X Men. What can I say, pregnancy hormones do weird things to your brain. Anyway, I ditched the words I’d written and wrote The Accident instead but something about the idea continued to nag at me. I still wanted to write about kids who were locked up and had to try and escape but I had to ditch the superpower element and come up with something more realistic.

Over the last couple of years the idea for The Treatment gradually came together. I wanted there to be a Prison Break element and there had to be some kind of ticking clock – a reason to hasten the escape. How about something along the lines of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – a treatment that would forever change the inmates? But why?

Writers work in isolation but we can’t block out the outside world and, as I was mulling over ideas, I became increasingly worried about how right wing the UK was becoming. I became genuinely concerned that UKIP could end up running the county. And what then? Tighter immigration control, banning the Burka, a ‘social attitudes’ test? Those were the policies UKIP were admitting to but what, I wondered, might happen if an even more right wing party got into government? A reintroduction of national service, the death penalty, a police state?

I began researching social compliance and control and my research lead me to a website on the brainwashing and mind control carried out by the Chinese on American prisoners of war during the Korean War. Those kind of practices are outlawed now but what if a right wing government secretly used them to ensure that wayward teenagers were no longer a drain on society’s resources? And that’s when the final part of the puzzle fell into place.

Don’t get me wrong, The Treatment isn’t a political book by any means. It’s an out and out thriller about one girl’s attempt to rescue her brother from ‘prison’ but I wanted the ‘bad guys’ to be people who could exist. If not now then in the near future.

It’s a book I felt I HAD to write, regardless of whether it got a deal and, as I wrote it I fell in love with the characters – Drew, Mason, Mouse, Israel and the rest. I put a lot of myself into Drew. I drew on my own memories of being sixteen – of wanting to be in control of my own life, of questioning authority and feeling like an outsider. I remembered how it felt to be bullied, to be lonely and to be scared and then I made Drew a whole lot cleverer and braver than me.

There’s no romance in THE TREATMENT, no love triangle and no hero that swings in to save the day. The hero of my book is a sixteen year old girl. And I loved writing her. Why did I write a YA novel? I couldn’t not.