This week sees the release of my new short story, How to Get Hitched in Ten Days. It features a disastrous Valentine’s proposal, and it got me thinking… I wonder what fellow Carina authors have got to reveal – good or bad – about their past Valentine’s Days?!

Anabelle Bryant

Worst Valentine’s Day story: Many years ago I shopped in a store not realizing my then boyfriend was also shopping for Valentine gifts. From afar I saw him purchase a few things, candy, card, stuffed animal…but never received them when Valentine’s Day arrived. Needless to say he turned into an X shortly after.

Oh no, poor you Anabelle! You did the right thing!

Kathleen Mcgurl

Year 2000, first Valentine’s of the new millennium. I thought I knew what we were doing – had arranged for us to go to Cheshire the weekend before to visit some friends, then on V-Day itself (a Monday) I had a restaurant and babysitter booked. Not to mention several meetings at work. But behind my back, my husband had cancelled everything I’d booked, sorted me some time off work, and booked a long weekend in Athens. I knew nothing about it until about 3 hours before the flight when he asked me to go and pack – and I still didn’t know where we were going until we checked in at the airport! 

Oh wow, that is amazing!

When I first met the man who became my husband, before we even were going out together, I sent him an anonymous Valentine’s card which I sent first to my Granny in Newcastle and asked her to post it for me, so the postmark would be Newcastle. It was about 10 years later, when we were long since married, that I fessed up to that card being from me. It had puzzled him for years.

Ha ha! Good old Granny!

A year after moving into our current house, Valentine’s Day came round. We went out for dinner with our electrician and our builder and their wives. That said something about what our first year in the house had been like!

Oh dear!

Aurelia B Rowl

I got engaged on a Valentine’s Day and then married on the following Valentine’s Day

Valentine’s also plays a huge part in my YA novel Popping the Cherry 

Aw, that is romantic!

Kierney Scott

I had an emergency appendectomy on Valentines Day when I was 19. I got more flowers and chocolate that year than any other before or since.

Oh no! The gifts were some small recompense, I guess!

Raven McAllan

I got a very pretty card with roses on it. Oh, I said, I had one like that in my card box. Hubby grinned… Yeah he’d forgotten and our daughter had to remind him…

Oops!!

Jill Steeples

I opened a valentine’s card from a boyfriend to find that he’d recycled a card sent to him from a previous girlfriend, by sticking a blank piece of paper over her written message. His reason – he liked the picture and the sentiment of the card so much he thought I would too! Needless to say, he didn’t last much longer after that. Eejit!

Oh no Jill – what a loser!

A L Michael

I went to an all girls school so when we were teens we used to get together and have anti – Valentine’s Day – we watched girly movies (and judged the heck out of them) listened to angry girl rock and ate a lot of pizza. Years later we added the cocktails

Links well to my book, My So-called (Love) Life where they basically do that as grown ups. 

I love that!

Kerry Barrett

When I’d just graduated and I was working in an admin job, I arranged to meet my then boyfriend on Valentine’s Day. I waited for him outside Chancery Lane tube for about an hour – possibly more. It was before everyone had mobiles and there was no texting or anything. I remember watching everyone going into and out of the station in couples, clutching bunches of flowers and chocolates. When he eventually turned up, he gave me a sheet of A4 paper folded in half. On the front he’d drawn a heart (badly – like how hard is that?!) in marker pen, and inside he’d scrawled a question mark. Romantic, eh? He was NOT a keeper.

Good grief!

Well, I hope anyone reading this post feels a bit better if their Valentine’s date doesn’t go to plan this year – you aren’t alone!!

So, other writers may disagree with me, but here are my top tips for writing a novella…

Firstly don’t add in a complicated subplot or more than one subplot. In my full-length novels there is a lot more than the main story going on. Game of Scones, for example is about career-girl Pippa trying to decide what she really wanted to do with her life – stay with boyfriend Henrik? Continue to be an executive in London or become a baker in Greece? Alongside this is another meaty plot regarding a small Greek village struggling to cope with the recession. And then there is her childhood friend Nico who is harbouring some secret.

However, in How to Get Hitched in Ten Days, there is really one meaty story – Dave makes a disastrous Valentine’s Day proposal to Jasmine, and her best friend Mikey helps turn the situation around. Of course, there is more to it than that. We do spend the book trying to work out who is the object of Mikey’s secret unrequited love –  you still don’t want the story to be completely linear – but don’t surround the main plot by lots of smaller stories. You just won’t be able to give them the necessary depth with this amount of words.

Secondly, reduce your cast of characters because, again, you won’t have space to develop them fully and therefore they could become confusing to the reader. Game of Scones has quite a large cast of quite significant characters, from a Greek village. How to Get Hitched in Ten Days mainly focusses on Mikey, Jasmine and Dave.

Thirdly, you haven’t got the space to set the story up in the first three chapters. In my view the bones of it need to be there in the very first chapter. By the end of the first chapter in How to Get Hitched in Ten Days we know that Dave has messed up and kind-hearted Mikey has agreed to help. We have been introduced to the main characters. We know where the story is heading.

Fourthly, don’t over complicate the settings or have too many. You haven’t got the pace of a normal book to enable readers to keep up with everything that’s going on and clearly build up images in their mind. Still keep your settings interesting and vivid – my novella often features a delicious 50s diner – but just be aware that too many different settings could make the reading intense for this length.

Finally, have fun with it! I LOVED writing this short story. The plot felt really tight as I wrote it and it was very satisfying, for a change, to concentrate on a smaller cast.  And I do hope this fun transfers to the page!

So if you fancy a funny, sometimes poignant, and romantic Valentine’s Day read, why not preorder this short story for a bargain 89p on Kindle or Kobo!