{"id":5534,"date":"2014-12-28T19:28:12","date_gmt":"2014-12-28T19:28:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/janetgover.com\/?page_id=5534"},"modified":"2014-12-28T19:28:12","modified_gmt":"2014-12-28T19:28:12","slug":"the-story-behind-the-story","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/johnhocking.net\/jg2025demo1\/977-2\/bring-me-sunshine\/the-story-behind-the-story\/","title":{"rendered":"The Story Behind The Story"},"content":{"rendered":"

As many of my stories do, Bring Me Sunshine<\/em> started as a writing challenge to myself.<\/p>\n

When I wrote Girl Racers<\/em> \u2013 my challenge was to write a book set over just 7 days. Okay, I cheated by putting in some flashbacks \u2013 but the action of the story takes place over a very limited time frame.<\/p>\n

Having down that \u2013 I wanted to write a book where the setting was limited. I wanted to lock all my characters up somewhere small and see what happened. A cruise ship seemed a good place to do it \u2013 and a tropical cruise was certainly a romantic setting.<\/p>\n

It was also a good excuse to watch (for the umpteenth time) one of my favourite films An Affair to Remember<\/em> (1957) with Deborah Kerr and Cary Grant \u2013 just to rediscover the whole concept of shipboard romance<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

\"An<\/a><\/p>\n

Then my sister-in-law and her amazing elderly mother went on an Antarctic cruise. Wow \u2013 I thought \u2013 THAT\u2019s the setting for a book.<\/p>\n

I normally like to visit places I write about \u2013 to get a good feel for the place and to make sure I write about it accurately. I\u2019ve never been to Antarctica, and a real Antarctic cruise was a bit beyond my budget.<\/p>\n

I had spent a fortnight in Iceland, however with my day job. I\u2019d been on a glacier and I\u2019d met some icebergs, <\/strong>and I know what it feels like to be very, very cold.<\/p>\n

\"Me<\/a>
Me on an Icelandic Glacier<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

A cruise ship, however, was a very different matter. I had never been on one. It wasn\u2019t that hard to talk Webmaster John into a cruise \u2013 although like Jenny in the book, I think he may have imagined somewhere warmer. Instead, we flew to Norway and boarded a ship heading even further North \u2013 around the top of Europe, with nothing between us and the North Pole but open water.<\/p>\n

It was a wonderful trip. We saw the Northern Lights. Drove a dog sled across a frozen lake. And, got very, very cold.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
The lounge on the Trollfjord<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Even more importantly, from a book research point of view, I experienced life on board a cruise ship. The fabulous crew on board the Trollfjord even allowed me to visit behind the scenes, places a passenger wouldn\u2019t normally go.<\/p>\n

Sometimes it\u2019s easy to come up with the title for a book. But for this book, the title eluded me. For a very long time it was \u2018the boat book\u2019. My editor and I talked about titles for a while \u2013 before the idea struck. It’s a book about a dark and damaged hero and the girl who brought the light back into his life\u2026<\/p>\n