Talking Cosy Reads with Pauline Tait and Fiona Lowry
In October I sat down for a virtual chat about all things autumn reading and writing with local authors Pauline Tait and Fiona Lowry. Enjoy!
Abi: Firstly, please can you tell us a bit about yourselves for our readers? Pauline, shall we start with you?
Pauline: I’m Pauline Tait, living and writing in our lovely Perthshire, I’m multi-award winning, and I write children’s picture books and atmospheric romantic suspense—so two completely different genres but both great fun—and recently I celebrated being ten years published.
Abi: That’s amazing! Coming to you now, Fiona?
Fiona: I am Fiona Lowry and I also write in Perthshire and am multi-award winning, so it’s a nice group here! I write children’s books to help them grow in one form or another, either self-belief, confidence, resilience, through fun little stories and characters.
Abi: Great! And of course, readers will know that I write articles for this magazine, but I’ve also had some short stories published, and reading is my main pastime. I think all writers read, don’t they?
Fiona: You have to!
Pauline: It goes with the territory, doesn’t it.
Abi: So, talking about reading and writing, how important is the general atmosphere of a book to you?
Pauline: The word atmosphere to me is hugely important, I mean I write my novels under the tagline of atmospheric romantic suspense, so for me the atmosphere is crucial, not just the vibe but the scenery, the landscape, the weather, you can have great fun with that when you’re writing, also I love that when I’m reading. I quite like to read the same genre as I write, and to me, atmosphere sets the mood, it’s tension, it sets pace, it’s just right up my street. Even in my children’s books, I’ve brought weather into them, so the atmosphere, the mood, the teamwork, the friendship and that kind of thing, the messages, it’s a feeling.
In the children’s books it’s very much a physical feeling, whereas in the novels it’s very much about surroundings and tension. So I love the word atmosphere!
Fiona: Atmosphere is super important in a kids book, but as Pauline says, it’s in a different way altogether.
So for me it’s hopefully helping a child feel as though they’ve stepped inside the book and they want to stay there for a while, whether that’s a cosy little corner in a mouse house or through a woodland and they find a secret door that leads them somewhere unexpected, it has to be somewhere they want to stay a while in a friendly, imaginative way. And hopefully they giggle in all the right places as well!
Abi: Yes, humour is definitely part of it as well. Now Pauline, you already mentioned you like to read the same atmospheric genre as you write, is that for the feeling that it gives you?
Pauline: Yes, to read I like romantic suspense with a mystery. I like something that gets my brain ticking away wondering what’s going on, I love a twist and a turn. But I think that when I’m writing, I have this inbuilt need to give my characters a challenge they have to overcome, and I don’t mind how deep that challenge goes, or how severe it is, but when I’m reading I’m a sucker for a happy ending! So I tend to read just slightly less suspenseful than when I write.
I write for relaxation and I read for joy and downtime, so I suppose it’s also a different atmosphere that I’m setting myself.
Abi: Yes, reading often has an element of escapism. How about you, Fiona? Presumably you go for a different genre to what you write!
Fiona: I do! My kids are a little bit older so I don’t have the luxury of reading them a nice children’s book quite so often—although I think no matter what age you are you can enjoy a good kids book—but my go-to is generally non-fiction. I really like books that make me think, or make me question or reconsider something that I thought I might know or feel, or do. I read a book a long time a ago and I thought that I wanted to transfer what I was learning so that kids could learn it too in their own way, or learn, at least partly, skills that will continue through life and into adulthood.
So I love non-fiction and I use it to then create fictional books, to help kids with self-belief and confidence. I find reading a nice non-fiction book relaxing.
Pauline: That’s the thing about reading though, we all love a different genres, but we all get the same goal out of that genre and that’s the joy of reading, isn’t it, and the places you can go.
Fiona: And everybody’s different, so it really doesn’t matter, until you find that genre or the one book you love, you might not realise how much you love reading.
Abi: That’s true. So moving on to some specific recommendations, if you had to read only one book every autumn what would it be?
Pauline: If you’d asked me this last year, I would have said anything by Linda Howard, that’s the sort of romantic suspense/happy ending I enjoy reading. But I’ve just discovered LJ Ross’s Summer Suspense Mysteries series and I devoured book one in two days, and I’ve just started book two and it’s right up my street. The first one is set by the water, and my novels are mostly set by the water on the Isle of Skye, I love the tide coming in, the surging tide, the calm tide, you know you can really set atmosphere with it, and the first book in that series is set on the coast. It’s everything I want in a novel, it has the suspense, it has the female who’s 35+ and has got to overcome something… so at the moment I’m really into those and I’m just going to read them back to back.
It’s the right time of year for me to read them now, I don’t read too much in the spring or summer, in Scotland we might get some nice weather and I’m just outside more, but autumn/winter, that’s when I really read.
Fiona: Yes, it’s that nice cosy feeling when the lights go down. It gets darker at night, the lights go on and you can snuggle with a blanket, it’s great.
Pauline: Yep, a cup in one hand, a wee snack, book, bliss.
Fiona: I have probably one or two books that I constantly come back to, that are relatively old now to be honest. One is The Alchemist, which I’ve read, I think, I don’t know, four or five times easily. And the other one is Jonathan Livingston Seagull, which is either a really lovely story about seagulls, really nicely written, and just a nice simple story, or it’s a spiritual journey, and awakening and how we now see life as humans, how we perceive things to be. So it’s a nice cosy read for me, it’s not for everyone, I get that, but I just love it.
Pauline: This is proving how two completely different genres can be ‘cosy’…
Fiona: Yes, to different people, yes.
Abi. It’s just the feeling the book gives you, and it’s different for everyone. I’m much more of an Agatha Christie style, cosy murder mystery type person myself.
Pauline: I write cosy mysteries for an anthology, and I’ve got to rein myself in, because as I’m typing away in the zone and the words are coming out, I’m putting my character through something traumatic, and then I’ve got to rein myself in and think ‘no, cosy, pull it back, we can’t have this’. I struggle to be gentler and kinder; although my books have happy endings, the arc is much more dramatic.
Abi: Yes, the act of writing to genre can be restrictive in some ways, can’t it, because you do have to deliver what the audience is expecting.
Pauline: It’s crucial, I know I will never write ‘cosy’ as my main genre, because my head just doesn’t go there, I’m too cruel to my characters I think! In a good way.
Fiona: I think it’s probably quite hard to rein it in whatever you’re writing, especially the first draft where just everything comes out, and the whole story can go anywhere, and so then you have to go through each draft and make sure it’s crucial to the storyline, and the readers at the end of the day.
Abi: Probably children’s stories are the most restrictive of all aren’t they, because not only does it have to be age appropriate, but you’ve got quite a strict length in which you have to say what you want to say.
Fiona: It is definitely, but much more fun!
Abi: I’m really curious about how you both approach different seasons and weathers. Pauline, I know in your adult fiction that plays a really big part. Do you decide beforehand what those things are going to be, or do you just let them develop?
Pauline: I let the book develop, but by coincidence they all seem to be set around autumn and winter, because that is the most dramatic time.
For me, I love the dramatic landscape and weather in Skye, I love the rolling mist, that you can’t see the Cuillins most of the time because they’re shrouded in their own weather system, I love that the tide surges in; and if it’s a tense time in the book the weather can be really helpful, like if visibility is obscured, or you’re sneaking around somewhere and the wind is howling past you. But equally, if the character is sitting inside and they’ve got a cup of tea or a glass of wine and they’re looking out, and they’ve got their cosy lights on, it can actually be really soothing. So you can use the dramatic landscape and weather to bring both suspense and calm. It can also help you quicken the pace and get from one scene and another.
Abi: And Fiona, I know some of your books are quite seasonal?
Fiona: Yeah, so my most recent book, Pip’s Secret Door, is probably the easiest for that, because it’s set in the summer time, so at that point it’s that lovely smell, or the crispy grass, clover growing through it, and it transitions into the dandelions turning into fairy clocks. There’s the sunlight that wraps them in a little warm feeling, all of that scene is likely to land through the summertime, because I think that’s when the kids are out playing and can connect with it a little bit more. So it’s the feeling of what the book creates, rather than the specific season or weather itself, through sensations that are described as much as possible.
Abi: You mention the word connect, Fiona, and I think there’s an opportunity through children’s books for them to learn about nature and their environment, and noticing how the seasons change?
Fiona: Yeah, it’s lovely just to have that connection with the countryside from my youth, as well, and I can pull that in to the storylines.
Abi: Can you both give our readers a writing prompt for anyone who’d like to try some writing on a rainy day?
Pauline: I love the idea of a writing prompt. The idea I can up with is to imagine you’re indoors on a really stormy day and there’s a knock at the door. You open the door, and there’s no one there, but there is a soggy parcel siting on the doormat. What’s inside it? Who brought it? Why did they leave it?
I think from there you can go down lots of different routes.
Fiona: It’s really funny, mine is very similar! The biggest and most fun question for an author is: what if. So my question is if you look out of the window tomorrow and there’s something there that definitely wasn’t there yesterday, what is it? What happens when you go to investigate it.
Abi: Wow, yes, very similar! I can see these could tell you a lot about yourself—what do you imagine when it could be absolutely anything. So finally, what are you both working on right now?
Pauline: Right now I’ve got three things on the boil—I’m promoting Wanda the Weary Witch, I’ve got events for that until end of November, then I’ve got my next novel going to the editor on 9th of November, and I’m planning the next few books on Skye. I can feel myself getting really excited about that.
Abi: Are we allowed to know the title of the new Skye book?
Pauline: Yes, you can, it’s Amelia’s Home.
Abi: Fabulous. Fiona, what about you?
Fiona: I have a book tour of Pip’s Secret Door, which is the priority at the moment, and book number two is in draft in the background as well. And what I think will be my last picture book is with the illustrator to come out next year. Which is exciting, because they’re a different style of illustration, they’re all watercolour painted. Aside from that I’m working through a school programme and visiting schools. So there’s a lot happening also.
Pauline: School events are just brilliant fun, aren’t they!
Fiona: So much fun, you just never know where they’re going to go.
Abi: Wow, it’s so interesting with the author life, how you’re always writing the next book while talking about the last one! Thanks so much to both of you for taking the time out of your schedules to chat to us!
Discover more about Pauline and Fiona:
