Christina Pishiris's Blog

If you’ve picked up my book Love Songs for Sceptics, you’ll have seen that each chapter is named after a song. It was a lot of fun coming up with hits whose titles matched the theme of each chapter. Some came to me immediately, while others needed a little more thinking time. Each one has a bit of a story behind it so I thought it might be fun to explain the reasons for choosing the three that I think work the best.

The First Cut is the Deepest This was my immediate choice for chapter one bec...

I got a book deal. It still feels a bit surreal but I’m slowly getting my head around the idea that the characters that I’ve been carrying around my head for so long are finally going to go out into the big wide world.

I wrote about the long gestation of this novel in a previous post. (Click here if you’re interested.) But now I’d like to write about how the deal actually came about as I always love reading about other authors’ road to publication.

My first big break was sending my opening to S...

Janet Evanovich’s first Stephanie Plum’s novel from 1994 is probably an odd choice for ‘romantic novel’ because it most definitely sits on the crime shelf in book shops. It won a Crime Writers’ Association award for best debut, and the sequel, Two For the Show, won a CWA award for best comic novel. Janet Evanovich is a triple threat: she can write romance, comedy, and also intricately plot a crime caper.

But Evanovich’s first career was writing romantic fiction, and she can’t seem to resist suffu...

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Getting a book published is a hard slog. And I don’t mean the nuts and bolts of publication – involving cover designs and copy edits or the weeks of contract negotiations – because all that heavy lifting is mostly done by other people. I’m talking about how difficult it is to start with a blank page and end up with a finished book.

It’s like climbing a mountain, never sure whether the next rocky outcrop will take you to the blue-skied summit. (Spoiler alert: there’s always another peak to crest...

Writing is a lonely job. Sure, you can go on research trips, or let plot points bubble in your subconscious while you’re sorting your sock drawer, but a book won’t get written unless you sit at your desk and churn out words till you’ve got at least 80,000 of them. (In more or less the right order.)

Spending so much time alone means you can never really be sure if what you’re writing is any good. So, there comes a point where you have to take a deep breath and dip your delicate writerly toe into ...

Picture credit: RNA

Last month, I went to my first RNA Summer Party. The night also marked another debut – it was the first time the event was held at the Ashmolean museum in Oxford.

The Romantic Novelists’ Association is a rather lovely organisation, championing romantic fiction and its writers. And how lovely it was to be in a room full of romance writers sharing the space with classical statues that one or two of us might have glanced at and thought: hmm, maybe the next hero I write ought to ...

I read all sorts of novels. I love a good murder mystery, a clever crime caper, anything that makes me laugh, and of course, a great love story. Romantic fiction is the one genre that I go back to again and again. When I look at the books I’ve re-read the most, it’s always the ones with a great love story at their heart. The same goes for other forms of story telling. The TV shows that have captured my imagination, and have kept pulling me back – even when the show goes dangerously off the rails...

Last week, I went to the London Book Fair for the first time. It’s a trade event, aimed squarely at publishers, but I was impressed with the number of seminars pitched at writers. There were even dedicated stands – ‘Authors HQ’, and the neatly named ‘Writers’ Block.’

The most anticipated event was ‘The Write Stuff’ where six brave authors pitched their books to a panel of five agents – in front of an audience. It was billed as a dragon’s den for writers and rightly so. Authors had three minutes...

Before anyone can be a writer, they first have to be a reader.

I feel very lucky that I was given the opportunity to fall in love with reading as child. My mum happily took us to our local library, and I remember being amazed that there were people out there who let you take books home and trusted you to return them. And it was free! The library of my youth has changed locations, but it still exists, thank goodness. And having just checked, I’m pleased to report it’s open 7 days a week. (Thank ...

I used to think I could never write while listening to music. But last year, I decided to give it a whirl, and now I can’t believe I didn’t try it sooner. Now, I don’t sit down at my desk without first loading up some playlists on Spotify. (I’m writing this listening to a mix of Bon Jovi ballads – no judging till you re-listen to Wanted Dead or Alive, please.)

I didn’t dive into full-on power ballads, Nope, I had to dip my toe in gently so I started with a bit of classical music – piano and orch...