I WROTE A ROMANCE NOVEL BASED ON MY LIFE
Dreams of the Scottish Highlands by F.L.Everett (Bookouture) is out now...
Something I’ve always dreamed about happened recently: I was interviewed for a Sunday magazine about my novel. In my fantasies, the admiring, slightly star-struck journalist would open the piece, ‘As we sweep up the curving drive to Everett’s sprawling manor, I see her butler has laid tea out on the lawn for us…’. and the accompanying photo shoot would feature me, several years younger and a size eight, lying on a vintage tiger-skin rug (lace dress, YSL, price on application). In reality, we did the whole thing on Zoom in under forty minutes, and my husband Andy took the pictures on a Sunday walk, so I look like the Michelin Man’s wife, bundled into several layers of sensible knitwear.
All the same, it was a thrill. And it came about because after writing three Edie York crime novels, my new one is a romance set in a Scottish castle, and stars a city girl who ends up in the West Highlands, which… is quite similar to my own story.
‘Obviously, you’re Cat and Andy’s Logan,’ said my friend confidently, after reading a preview copy. ‘That’s VERY clear.’
I argued that it was not ‘obvious’ at all. Cat Hardwick, my heroine, is a good twenty years younger than me, single, and works as a high-end events planner in London. In my early thirties, I was working as a frazzled freelance journalist in Manchester, trying to juggle complex childcare arrangements with an enormous mortgage. Meanwhile Logan, the grumpy hero and heir to Iolair Castle, is a reluctant Laird who likes his market garden and his dogs much better than people. He also has a Mysterious Sorrow in his past, which Cat does her best to winkle out of him during her stay. Andy is not a Laird and he doesn’t have a Mysterious Sorrow (as far as I’m aware. Wait…).
Cat is English, chatty, determined, impetuous, relentlessly energetic and emotional, loves cats and went to a day school in the city. Logan is Scottish, quiet, practical, avoidant, full of deep, unspoken feelings, excellent with spaniels and went to boarding school in a misty Scottish glen.
I mean, yes, fine. Those are admittedly extremely accurate descriptions of myself and Andy, but if you’re going to write a romance, you have to base it in some kind of reality. Otherwise you end up with The Little Pumpkin Spice Inn Down Fluffkin Lane, where Sally Cheerful has inherited the tumbledown inn from her magical grandmother who used to cast spells in the back room, and Jed Brood, the local gourd farmer, is furious because Sally wants to let her magical black cat, Spookwhiskers, roam Jed’s fields of pumpkins. Hold on, I’m just taking notes for my next… but anyway, unlike Logan, neither Andy nor I lives in a castle (though I know a few people who do — they’re pretty much ten a penny in this part of Scotland).
The truth is, as a couple, we are very much rom-com archetypes — in fact, I’m amazed Meghan hasn’t had me on her podcast yet. We are the grumpy/sunshine trope, with a strong underlying theme of ‘let’s just do it, what’s the worst that could happen?’ (Me), vs ‘Have you any idea what a horrific disaster that will be if we even step in its direction?’ (Andy). I was watching the first two Bridget Jones movies the other day, for work reasons. At one point, Bridget wails, ‘you think I’m ridiculous!’ and Mark Darcy snaps poshly, ‘well, you are being ridiculous right now.’
I immediately plunged back in time to the first row Andy and I had after I’d moved in with him. I shouted (possibly shrieked), ‘I bet you wish you’d never asked me to move here!’ And he compressed his moustache like Mr Banks in Mary Poppins and said in a clipped tone, ‘well, I’m afraid I do at this particular moment, yes.’
Reader, I laughed.
I’ve now been here almost ten years, so it’s clear that beloved rom-com tropes exist for a reason. Logan isn’t entirely Andy, he’s just borrowed a few bits here and there (though if I’m honest, the speech he gives Cat about the pine forests is entirely Andy, and it’s based on a conversation we had the first time I visited and waxed lyrical about how beautiful the fir trees were. His lengthy and ecologically sound riposte began, ‘actually, they’re an invasive, non-native species…’). Cat isn’t really me, either, she just occasionally behaves exactly as I would in certain circumstances.
The dogs, however - there are four, as I kept adding them in as I wrote - are very much based on my own two insane spaniels. In one scene small, idiotic spaniel Arran chases a duck into the loch and just… keeps going. That entire passage is based on our youngest dog, Larkin. As a puppy, the first time he saw a duck, it was like Wile E Coyote seeing Road Runner sprint past. There was, quite literally, no stopping him and I thought he’d drowned. Fear not, dog-lovers - no real or fictional dogs were harmed in the making of this novel. It’s a funny romance, not a dystopian Booker winner.
The part of my life here that has truly inspired large parts of the novel, though, is the absolute beauty of the West Highlands of Scotland. Despite having gone to university in Glasgow, I’d never been further North - too busy drinking Bulgarian Country Wine in my tenement flat. I first visited in 2014 when my life and significant relationship were going very wrong. My best male friend had said, ‘come and stay in the countryside with my friend Andy for a weekend’, so I did. The journey took several days (or thereabouts) and when I arrived, I was bedazzled by the landscape and relieved to see that this Andy was friendly and opening a bottle of (nicer than Bulgarian Country from Thresher’s) wine.
Long story short, we had a long-distance relationship for eighteen months, then I moved up for a few weeks with my cats ‘to see how it goes’, and now it’s a decade later and we’ve got a new cat and two dogs and we’re married, with the same phone number, all the same friends, and the same address, as Huey Lewis and the News sang.
Every single day, I’m struck by the beauty of Loch Awe, which I can see from the window, and amazed by the ever-changing weather, the craggy, snow-topped mountains (our nearest, Ben Cruachan, gets a cameo in the novel as Ben Iolair), the canopies of blazing stars in the night sky, the silence, the wildlife, and the ridiculous distance we live from the shops — 15 miles, unless there’s a tree down over the single-track road, in which case you have to go via Inveraray and it takes two hours.
There is, of course, another famous downside to living in this remote, magical place. Midges. So of course, I had to put a swarm in the book, which arrives at a crucial juncture.
Other than that, it’s all made up… except for the bits that aren’t, obviously. I loved writing Dreams of the Scottish Highlands. I hope you’ll love reading it. And if you’d like to interview me about my novel, rest assured, I’ll ask Chivers to set out the Meissen porcelain tea-set on the South Lawn before you arrive.
Read Dreams of The Scottish Highlands On Kindle, Kindle Unlimited, or in paperback.
Marvellous, well done you! What does Andy make of Logan then?
It’s on order at my local indie bookshop!