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Adrienne's Transita Home
Irish-born subscriber Adrienne Dines,
46, has found a home for her writing with a fiction imprint
aimed at women aged 45 or over. Irish-born subscriber Adrienne
Dines, 46, has found a home for her writing with a fiction
imprint aimed at women aged 45 or over.
Transita, launched in 2004 (WN Dec 2004), published
Adrienne's first novel Toppling Miss April, £7.99,
last August. Her next book The Jigsaw Maker, £7.99,
is out next month and a third, Soft Voices Whispering,
is planned for later in the year.
An English teacher and mother of three boys, Adrienne only
started writing seriously eleven years ago when she accompanied
a friend to a creative writing class and had her imagination
caught by the exercises. She was so enthused by her first
story, Soft Voices Whispering, that she kept on writing...
until she reached 143,000 words.
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The family
moved from Aberdeen to Weybridge and a friend (Meg Gardiner,
one of Hodder & Stoughton's top crime writers) took Adrienne
along to the American Women of Surrey Writing Group, 'a
serious writing group'. 'They told me my chronology was
all over the place and I needed to hone my skills as a writer,'
she said. Some re-working helped secure an agent, who said
the story might be hard to market. 'He suggested that with
more sex it may do better,' she explained, adding, 'but
it was about a nun for goodness sake.'
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Adrienne knew she had a good
story but didn't want to 'flog a dead horse' so she walked
away from it.
She also thought 'If I'm as good as I would like to think
I am then I should be able to do this more than once so...
øgo on prove yourself, girl.Ó'
Piqued, she started a murder story and as she wrote, a secondary
character, a priest's housekeeper called Bernadette, grew
legs and marched away with the book ¨ it became Toppling
Miss April. Fearing further rejection, this book was
shelved too as Adrienne started working on yet another story.
'I saw it as some kind of relay race and I had to pass the
baton on.'
Then, on hearing that a new imprint was looking for 'unlikely
heroines' Adrienne was encouraged to send the manuscript off
to Transita whose editorial director, Nikki Read, made contact
straightway. A contract followed shortly after.
With Transita's blessing to be a 'range' writer as opposed
to a more marketable 'formula' one, Adrienne is enjoying the
freedom to write without constraints. Now 25,000 words into
the sequel to Toppling Miss April, Polishing
Off the Cherries, she says she is not writing to make
money, although she hopes the books do well. 'I am writing
because I absolutely love it.' |
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