Spellbound and Swallowed

The book has become a story in its own right – or should that be write? The iterations of it are now in the dozens and the rewrites have left a pile of outtakes that will be enough for a whole new book. But, something more interesting has happened. It has been out to a very broad beta readership and one of the readers is a friend and a film maker. She sees the themes and characters of the book being more successful presented visually.

‘You know how to do it’, she said. ‘Write a treatment for it and we can see where we could go with it.’

I always struggled with writing treatments during my degree and this was no exception, but I it got done along with some storyboarding. Difficult because the central premise is essentially the power of the past to affect the present and how sex can be used to control. Not, I hasten to add, in the Fifty Shades of Grey way, but in subtle, manipulative ways and, also, the learned, internalised dialogues that women experience in terms of worth and cultural expectation in relation to sex and desire and, very particularly how that affected women in the 80s when the book is set.

So, writing sex scenes. Hard enough for the book. Avoiding tacky, sleazy and finding the right balance so that the scenes are evocative and not cringe worthy is hard. I have published one here and that was the result of hours of redrafting and still isn’t right. But, the benefit of film, the visualisation of it, is that the actors can be directed to give the right feeling and emotion and the camera work can directly shape the way the audience feels and experiences the emotions. So, in some ways, it may be a better way of telling the story. I’m going to publish a couple more scenes here.

The book, which has been retitled, Spellbound and Swallowed, now has a new publication date of January 2027 and some of the outtakes will be self-published as shorts under the romantsy genre. Lots happening!