But right now, you can download the opening either as a pdf or as an audiobook. (Or both!)

I hope you enjoy it!

Song and dance prologueDownload

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I don’t have a cover to show you yet, but I’m delighted to say that The Charleston Scandal will be available on 24th November in Australia (and worldwide as an ebook)! So it will be in your local or online bookstore in time for Christmas!

London, 1923

Kit Linton, a privileged young Australian aiming to become a star, arrives in the city to find the Jazz Age in full swing. Cast in a West End play opposite another young hopeful, Canadian Zeke Gardiner, she dances blithely into the heady lifestyle of English high society and the London theatre set, from Noel Coward to Fred Astaire and his sister, Adele, and Talullah Bankhead.

When Kit is photographed dancing the Charleston alongside the Prince of Wales, she finds herself at the centre of a major scandal, sending the Palace into damage control and Kit to her aristocratic English relatives – and into the arms of the hedonistic Lord Henry Carleton. Amid the excesses of the Roaring Twenties, both Zeke and Kit are faced with temptations – and make choices that will alter the course of their lives forever.

And here is a gorgeous sketch of the main character, Kit Linton!

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Or, should I say a reimagining of A Christmas Carol, with Barbie telling the story to her younger sister – but in this version, it is about a vain, selfish singer in Victorian London who is causing hardship to those she employs (she runs a theatre as well as being a singing star). Mostly particularly, to her best friend the costume designer.

Now, I have to admit, I was not keen to watch this film. I have never been a Barbie girl, nor lived in a Barbie world. And, as an author, my blood chilled to think of one of my books being remade over in Barbie’s image.

And yet… as I watched it, I found myself noticing something unusual. All the big speaking roles in this movie are female. All of them. There’s a notional love interest for the best friend. There’s a few lines said by the juggler at the theatre, and another couple of lines from the director of an orphanage. Every other word spoken (including by the Spirits of Christmas Past, Present and Future) were said by women or girls. Try to remember the last time you watched a movie like that. It was probably Steel Magnolias (1989).

Female-driven movies are vanishingly rare, and even in those women rarely speak more than 60% of the dialogue, according to a large analysis of Hollywood movies. A film with 95% of the dialogue by women? Not happening in Hollywood, but alive and well in Barbieland.

And who are the main characters in this film? Two women with successful careers, running their own businesses (in Christmas Future, when the singer is abandoned and in poverty due to her hardheartedness, the best friend has become an acclaimed designer).

The singer, of course, has been brought up to believe ‘in a selfish world, only the selfish succeed’, by her aunt (the replacement for Jacob Morley), and repudiating this certainly plays into a ‘be a good girl’ script. But then, so does Scrooge’s redemption.
The centrality of female friendship to a happy life was the subsidiary theme.

Barbie movies are very popular.

It makes me wonder about this coming generation of girls. The ones who grew up on Elsa’s defiant acceptance of her power in Frozen. Talk to an average five-to-ten year old – they want to be Elsa, not Anna, the bumbling, endearing ‘main character’. They want to be the one with power.

And the overt messages of Frozen? Don’t reject loving advances from your sister (as in Do you want to build a snowman?). Things go badly when you try to please other people by not being yourself. Don’t be afraid of your own power – as long as it’s wielded with love, it’s great!

These girls, pushed into being pinker than any generation before, are also being served up with role models I would have killed for as a child.

So, would Dickens have liked the Barbie version of A Christmas Carol? I doubt it. But I suspect his three daughters would have loved it!

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Hmmm.  If you knew the flower we call a rose was called a ‘skunk blossom’, would you really perceive its scent as piercingly sweet, as redolent and seductive, as achingly nostalgic?

Frankly, I doubt it. It’s why companies spend millions of dollars on getting names of brands right. It’s why people who are about to have a baby spend hours – no, days! – online, looking at the baby name sites.

The people who have the most trouble with this are teachers and ex-teachers – no matter what name they think of, they can remember some horrible child they taught. (I know this because all of my siblings are teachers, and I can remember the agonies they went through trying to name their children).

And this is the problem which faces novelists every day: what do we call our characters?

Not only do we have to have a name which we and our readers will feel comfortable reading (too long names are out, outlandish names are out unless they have some part to play in the plot, anems of famous people are out), but we need a name which fits our character.

Sometimes, it’s easy. I knew from the very beginning of even thinking about The War Bride that my main character’s name was Margaret. Why? Because what happens to her was based on a real person, and her name was Margaret. Easy-peasy.

And the last name for my main character in A Letter from Italy was easy, because I knew she was the daughter-in-law of a character from The War Bride, Valentine Quinn.  So she was Mrs Quinn (Senora Quinn, in Italy).

In contrast, her first name went through several changes.  Originally she was ‘Edwina’, but that didn’t quite work – the character had a very modern outlook, thanks to a suffragette mother, and Edwina seemed a bit too old-fashioned for her mother to have chosen.

Then I tried Alexis, which was a nod to my sister, Janet Alexis. But that seemed too modern. The book, after all, was set in 1917.  The name needed to be timeless.

When you want timeless names, you can’t beat the Bible.

So I looked at Biblical names.  Elizabeth (my niece Liz thought not), Anne (very common at the time, in both senses: Annie was a lower-class name, and my girl was definitely upper-class),  Susan (not used much at the time) and, finally, Rebecca.

At this point I thought I’d found my name, but I stopped and wondered. My publisher is Rebecca Saunders. Would she object to me snaffling her name for my character’s use? Fortunately, she was delighted, and so there my character was: Rebecca Quinn, a blonde, intelligent journalist who thought she had a happy marriage.

Then I had to go through the same process for my main male character, only in Italian!

Right now, I’m trying to tie down the surname of my main male character in my next book, The Desert Nurse. He has always been William in my thoughts, but his last name has varied widely, and I couldn’t make up my mind. Not having millions of dollars for a focus group-led research study, I asked my Facebook friends to give me suggestions…. They came through wonderfully, but so many choices! Have a look below.

At this point of the process, William’s last name is Brent. But I can’t promise you that if you read The Desert Nurse when it comes out next year that it will still be Brent.  He’s gone through Boyd, Hunt, Clarke and Barton already!

And I’m happy to take any of your suggestions – there’s still time to get in before the name is set firm!

ps  The keen-eyed among you will note that my name in these posts is Pamela Freeman, which is the name I write under for children’s books. You’re welcome to be my Facebook friend (as Pamela Freeman) or like my author page (as Pamela Hart).

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Although most of the action in A Letter from Italy is set in Brindisi in 1917, the last section is set in Venice.

All cities changes over time, even historical centres like Venice, and I wanted to be very sure of my descriptions. Fortunately, I stumbled over (well, all right, I rigorously researched until I found) the Visualizing Venice project.

This is a collaboration between Duke University, the University of Venice and the University of Padua, and is a digital recreation of some parts of Venice, showing the changes to the city over time.

Fortunately for me, one of the main sites of my story, the piazza outside the church of SS Giovanni e Paulo (Saints John and Paul), was one of the their first projects, and 1911 was one of the years they picked to focus on. Perfect!

You can see the changes over time to this important part of Venice (which not only has the church, but also the hospital where the wounded were taken in WWI).

I love historians, especially when they make their work so easy to search for and understand!

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