When I write my starting
point is almost always the character of my heroine. Strangely, when I get to my
first draft that’s also the thing I feel
needs most work. Megan McLeod, heroine of my second novel, No Time Like Now, is
no exception. So here are some things you should know about Megan…
1.
She’s an only child of two
only children, has fallen out with her father and her mother is dead. That
leaves her struggling with a desire to be loved and cherished — a desire which she doesn’t quite trust.
2.
She has a very conventional upbringing. Daughter of a church
minister in the West of Scotland, Megan was taught that a girl should be a
nurturer, someone who looks after others. And while she holds to that up to a
point, she’s come to believe that she
has a right to do what she wants, up to a point. In other words, as long as she
doesn’t hurt anyone else.
3.
But has she hurt anyone else? Megan begins the book suffering
from amnesia, a few weeks in her past that she doesn’t remember which somehow cast a shadow across the rest
of her life.
4.
Given her severe religious upbringing, she’s a surprisingly passionate woman. It wasn’t unit lee went to university that she fell in love.
She learned a lot about herself then, as well as about her lover, Tim Stone.
Maybe she feels a little guilty about that, too, deep down in her soul…especially because there’s so much of what happened between her and Tim that
she doesn’t regret.
5.
She’s on the run. Not from the
law, but from herself and from the secret that she lies in her past and which,
if she really wanted to, she could uncover. But ignorance is bliss for Megan…until Tim comes back.
6.
What she wants and what she needs are diametrically opposed.
She wants to be free of her past by leaving it behind. She needs to face up to
it before she can be free of it. And while she’s prepared to take some steps towards reconciliation,
it takes a twist of Fate and some very unpleasant characters to bring her face
to face with her memories.
7.
She’d love to be a blonde.
Maybe that’s because she doesn’t like what she is, or maybe it’s because her gorgeous rival in love is blonde. Either
way, like most beautiful women she isn’t
happy with what she is.
There’s much more I could write about Megan. She likes cats
and sunshine and beautiful beaches, bright colours and ice cream. But all of
these are the trimmings. The deep heart of her character is the need to be
herself and to be loved.
Read the book and see if
she makes it…
Excerpt
The facts were plain and inescapable. It wasn’t Tim himself who was the problem, even though
he had been so at one point in my life. But I was over that. The problem was
that he belonged in a part of my life where I had been unhappy, where I didn’t get on with my parents, a time when my mother
had died too soon, so that I had left harsh
words unresolved between us.
There was no doubt that it was his unexpected
arrival which had stirred me to try to write once again to my dad. And it was
equally obvious that once I’d got
that letter written — the
right letter, not like the ones I’d sent before but one which deserved and received an accepting and
forgiving reply — then I
wouldn’t give a toss whether Tim was there at all. He
wasn’t the thing which was wrong with my life, but
only a stark and painful reminder of it. So — I ticked these points off on my fingers one by one, as if they could
be quantified — it wasn’t a question of evolving a strategy to deal with
what I felt for him (which was nothing), but of tackling the things he reminded
me of (which were hell).
In the meantime, I still had to deal with his
presence, and until I’d sorted
the rest of it out it was best to avoid him. If I explained that much — but no more— to Domenica, she’d collude
in keeping me out of his way. I could stay in the kitchen and Cat could get out
there among the kids. Neil Walker could take charge of the bar, or we could
just sell them the crates of beer straight off and they could split the bill
any way they liked.
On the positive side, it was likely that he
would prefer to avoid me, too — surely
the best outcome. After all, he hadn’t exactly looked pleased to see me.
I must have sat there for half an hour, flicking
the pages of Pride and Prejudice without
reading them and looking at the photo with tears in my eyes. At last, when the
roughness of the limestone became even more uncomfortable than my thoughts, I
put the book down, stood up, and stretched. The sea warped the sunlight into
colors from indigo to turquoise as I looked down the coast towards the centre,
then turned and looked the other way towards blissful remoteness. I was used to
remoteness. I even thought I liked it.
The wind stirred the pages of the book. From
between them, the photo crept out, turned over, and bowled slowly along the
beach. I took off after it, teased and tormented by it, until I trapped it
under my foot and picked it up.
‘Got you!’ I said in triumph to the false image of my perfect family. Then I
took a look along the beach.
I’d thought I was alone. I’d deliberately chosen a spot where I could be. So it was with a touch
of irritation that I realised I might have company.
At first, I wasn’t sure. The thing that caught my eye, about a hundred yards away at
the far edge of the beach, looked like a piece of wreckage washed up by the
waves. And it was a moment before I realised that it was a person. I looked
past and then back again; my interest caught. Because something about the
sunbather looked wrong.
Naturally curious, that’s my problem. And anyway, I had nothing else to
do with the morning since Miss Austen had failed to engage my attention and I
wasn’t keen on risking my peace of mind back at the
centre. Clutching the photo between my fingers, I crunched my way along the
narrow strip of beach. Just a few yards along, it dawned on me that what I was
looking at wasn’t a
sunbather, that it wasn’t even
actually on the beach but washed by the shallow sea.
The pebbles spitting under my feet, I broke into
a run and, even before I got there, I knew that I’d found a body.
About No Time Like Now
Hiding away from a disastrous past, Megan McLeod is getting along
nicely in her job as housekeeper at a university field centre in Majorca. But
the arrival of geological researcher, Tim Stone, throws everything into
disarray — because Tim was the father of the baby she lost
some years before and the two of them had parted very messily indeed.
As if having Tim on the scene wasn’t bad enough, he's there with his new partner,
Holly. But when in the course of his research he comes upon something extremely
nasty along the cliffs of north Majorca, he’s forced to turn to Megan for help.
Buy it from
Tirgearr
Publishing
Amazon US
Amazon UK
Smashwords
About Jennifer Young
Jennifer Young is an Edinburgh-based writer, editor and copywriter.
She is interested in a wide range of subjects and writing media, perhaps
reflecting the fact that she has both arts and science degrees. Jennifer has
been writing fiction, including romantic fiction, for a number of years with
several short stories already published. No Time Like Now is her second
published novel; her first novel, Thank You For The Music, is also set
on the Balearic island of Majorca.
Find me on
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@JYnovelist
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