From Louise Wise

Sunday, 25 November 2012

ROCK-ROMANCE - A MADE-UP GENRE!


by
Pam Howes

Oddly enough I never intended to be an author. When I began to write it was never meant to be fiction. I thought I might do articles based on the 60's music scene in my home city of Manchester and try to sell them to Mojo magazine or the NME. I'd always had a creative bent and spent a long time running my own Interior Design business. But a change of lifestyle and circumstances in the mid-nineties kind of threw me in the direction of writing and once I started I found it hard to stop. But the factual music-scene-book I'd thought myself destined to write actually turned into more and characters began to develop. Suddenly I had a tale flowing and the more I wrote the more I enjoyed the process of weaving a story around fictional rock band The Raiders, and their lives and loves. That original story Three Steps to Heaven was re-written God knows how many times until I was happy enough to let people read it. The trouble is it was hard to class it in a genre.

Amazon.UK
Amazon.com
It wasn't really a family saga, although it featured families and it was a saga! It wasn't, strictly speaking, romance, although there are romantic passages throughout, nor could it be classed as historical, as the sixties isn't quite that yet, or so I'm told. It could be drama - well maybe, there's plenty in it and I'm told it would make good TV viewing. It wasn't chick-lit, no fluffy girls in it, just rock chicks! And although there are a few sexually explicit scenes between the drummer and his girl, I wouldn't describe them as erotic. So what the devil to class it as? It was certainly a problem. Then it struck me - I'd have to invent my own. And so, the genre of Rock Romance was born. Amazon, of course, doesn't recognise it as a genre, and my books currently sit in sagas and romance, but it's how I promote my work. I now find it easy when someone asks me what type of story I write. It always provokes a question and answer session and with most people having a feel for a bit of nostalgia for the sixties, I can usually make a sale or two.

Since that first novel I've written two further books in my Rock'n'Roll Romance Series and am about to publish the fourth in December. I love writing in this made-up genre. I love my music and my fictional band. I've really been able to get involved and create lives and ongoing happenings for all my characters and I've taken them from late teens to men just bordering sixty years old. They're still rocking and romancing the ladies though. There's little slowing down with my lot. Love and romance is not just for young characters. Middle-aged guys like to enjoy life too and so do their ladies.

Last year I had a slight change of direction and wrote a sensual romance based on a true-life love story. This also had a music theme. I'm looking forward to expanding this series of sensual romances next year.

I totally enjoy writing, I'm lucky enough to be able to do it full time and it’s taken over my life. My head is constantly filled with scenes and conversations, sometimes to the point where I wish they'd all go home for the night and leave me in peace! I don't think I'd ever want to do anything else now though.


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Pam Howes was born in Cheshire. She is a retired Interior Designer who loves creating stories, but only started writing seriously about fourteen years ago. 

The idea for her first novel, set in the sixties, came from her time as a teenager, working in a local record store and hanging around with the musicians who frequented the business. That first novel evolved into a series. Three Steps to Heaven, is the tale of rock'n'roll band, The Raiders, and their lives and loves. The sequel, 'Til I Kissed You, featuring the same characters, is set in the eighties. This book sees the reformation of The Raiders after a spell of retirement. The third novel, Always On My Mind, set in 2001, is now available on Kindle and in paperback. Pam is a big fan of sixties music and it's this love that compelled her to write the series. 

A stand-alone sensual love story, Fast Movin' Train, set in the nineties, was published in early 2012. Pam is mum to three, grandma to seven and roadie to one musician partner. She still lives in Cheshire and also writes short stories, which have appeared in charity anthologies and online e-zines, and poems, many of which are published.







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