Cathryn Hein talks Fair Dinkum Aussies

A South Australian country girl by birth, Cathryn loves nothing more than a rugged rural hero who’s as good with his heart as he is with his hands, which is probably why she writes them! Her romances are warm and emotional, and feature themes that don’t flinch from the tougher side of life but are often happily tempered by the antics of naughty animals. Her aim is to make you smile, sigh, and perhaps sniffle a little, but most of all feel wonderful.

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Transcript:

Sarah Williams:            G’day and welcome to Write with Love. Today I’m chatting with my all time favorite Aussie river romance author, Cathryn Hein. Thanks for joining me today.

Cathryn Hein:                    Thank you, that’s a bit [inaudible 00:01:02]. I’m very flattered, thank you.

Sarah Williams:             So I met you in 2016 at the Australian Romance Readers Association book signing event. Do you remember that.

Speaker 2:                    My goodness. Where was that?

Sarah Williams:             That was in Adelaide.

Cathryn Hein:                 Adelaide, yeah that was fun.

Sarah Williams:             That was. And I remember going up to you because I’d already read all the books I wanted to get from everyone and I asked for Rocking Hill-

Cathryn Hein:                  Rocking Horse Hill.

Sarah Williams:             Rocking Horse Hill, yep. And you didn’t have that one. And I said well what is your horsiest book? Because I love horses. So you gave me Promises and signed it and I went home and I read that. And I loved it.

Cathryn Hein:                 Thank you, thank you.

Sarah Williams:             Yeah it was just beautiful and we’ll talk about that book in a minute but first, can you tell us your story and how you got into being an author?

Cathryn Hein:                    Well like many authors, it’s something that I’ve always wanted to do. I wrote short stories mainly when I was younger and then in my 20s I really tried to write novels but between study and work and more study, it’s very, very difficult and I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t understand any of the craft. I was just an avid reader and this is going back quite a few years before the internet had everything. Information wasn’t as accessible I guess so I just kept on plodding along. I’d write 10,000 words and then get completely stuck, put it aside, start something else when I had the time and I just couldn’t get anything done.

Then in the early 2000s we moved overseas and I wasn’t working and in the third year we were there I said this is my opportunity. If I don’t make the most of this spare time that I have and sit down and actually write that book that I’ve been wanting to write for so long, the this is a huge opportunity that I’m just letting go. So I did. Instead of treading off to the markets every morning as I tended to do, I sat down and I would write every morning and eventually ended up with 130,000 word monstrosity of a book which I still adore but it has an awful lot wrong with it. It had some really fun characters and it had some really cool things in there but just finishing that book for the first time, that was the end of me. I knew I’m doing this now.

I don’t think that’s an unusual thing for a lot of authors. The thrill of actually finishing a book is so huge and it’s so addictive too. And how many people do you talk to who say I’m gonna write a book one day. Well I did. Then we came back to Australia, I write another one and I joined the Romance Writers of Australia and I started entering the books in the writing contest that I have and I learned an enormous amount. I started going to the conferences. I started reading the newsletter hearts talk cover to cover for the craft art. I started listening to everything that was written in the online forums and just grew and grew from there. I probably written five or six full length manuscripts and I hadn’t really submitted anything. I made a few half hearted attempts with what were looking back now quite unsuitable publishes, mainly in the UK.

Because once I had those first contests that I entered with the RWA, I actually realized how little I knew and how bad the manuscripts were. I’m a really terrible perfectionist. I want it to be perfect before I start sending things out. I continued to go along that line and it just so happened that fellow romance author Karly Lane had posted on one of the RWAs forums that a publisher had seen her book trailer for one of her real romances that had just come out with another publisher and they had actually contacted her and asked her if she had anymore like that. She had already signed with Allen & Unwin but I read that with great interest and I thought I write real romance. So I emailed her and said can you please, please tell me. You don’t have to tell me the editor, at least tell me the publisher and it turned out to be Penguin.

I then looked at my pile of manuscripts and chose what I thought was the best one and sent it off and waited five months and I got an email back that said this is not quite what we’re after, do you have anything else. I’m like, do I have anything else? I had [inaudible 00:06:31] strike back with the next book and that turned out to be Promises. So it all happened very quickly from there and I was lucky enough to get a two book deal so those first two books were Promises which is now called The Horseman’s Promise and the second book called Heart of the Valley.

What’s interesting about Heart of the Valley is that those initial early works that were so bad pretty much unpublishable, I took all the good bits out of those works and stuck them in. The really best bits got in. All those manuscripts I wrote in the past, I’ve picked the best characters and the best plot points and the most emotional bits out of them and used them in subsequent manuscripts. So nothing’s been wasted at all from those.

Sarah Williams:             That’s really awesome, I love that. So you’ve got country roots and that’s why you write rural romance I’m guessing, yeah?

Cathryn Hein:                    Yeah, I’m from rural south Australia right down the southeast of south Australia. Everyone says you’re from south Australia, Adelaide. No, 400 kilometers from Adelaide. All my family’s still down there. Obviously I go down quite a bit to see everyone. Or as much as I can which is not as much as I’d like. And also just to soak up the atmosphere because I tend to set a lot of my stories in that region because I adore it so much. It’s a bit different to a lot of the other stories which you see are real outback and this is agricultural sort of operates … Australia’s very, very [inaudible 00:08:10] agricultural operations and climates so it’s nice to have something like that there. [crosstalk 00:08:17]

Sarah Williams:             I always find with your characters they’re gritty. I’m gonna call them gritty. They’re not overly romanticized like a lot of other authors do. They’ve got their faults and their highs and their lows as well.

Cathryn Hein:                    Perfect people you just wanna hate.

Sarah Williams:             That’s true.

Cathryn Hein:                    We all have our issues and so forth so I try not to … I try to make them as realistic as I can. I think I’m getting a lot better at it. I got asked a very interesting question that day at a panel I did just the other week about creating characters and whether they are like me and I think in the initial stages that might have been so. It was certainly a lot of myself and actually in Promises one of the incidents that happens quite early in the book where a horse bolt … She’s working for a race horse trainer and the horse bolts on her. That actually happened to me and I did exactly what she did which was kick the horse because that’s what my dad, who was a jockey, told me to do if that ever happened.

There’s certainly stuff that’s been used in my life as characters but I don’t … I think I’m getting much better at creating unique characters so I tend not to rely on that as much, although my dad was very funny about the country girl. When he read it he said that’s you. He was talking about Tash, the heroine and I said no it’s not. He said no, no, that is you.

Sarah Williams:             Well Tash is an awesome character. I absolutely love the country girl. So that one came out earlier this year. Let’s just talk about it because it is just an awesome book. Tell us the blurb for that one because everybody who hasn’t read it just needs to go out and buy the Country Girl.

Cathryn Hein:                    Yeah it’s really Patrick’s story in a way. He’s the hero. His fiance’s been traumatically injured in a riding accident and is lost all communication, needs 24 hour care. He’s young and everyone is trying to tell him to move on but in his eyes, he and Maddie were going to get married and he can’t move from that because he made her a promise. And then comes along Tesh whose moved home. She’s a hugely popular food blogger and she’s moved back to the farm because she’s got a contract to write a cookbook. It’s like the world’s happiest girl meets the world’s most miserable man. But he’s not miserable, he’s just trying to cope with the new situation he’s in. She’s quite fun because she just runs rings around him. She won’t tolerate him being angry. She just won’t put up with him being the way he is. Turns him around. It’s a wonderful love story I think.

Sarah Williams:             Yeah it is. It’s beautiful and I remember at RWA last year, I think it would have been. They were talking about we need to make the books a bit more modern and a bit more yeah, social media and that sort of thing. So when you did this one and you were talking. I’m pretty sure she uses Facebook and Instagram. Even if you don’t specifically name it. And actually reading that book I was thinking, oh what’s my next book gonna be about. So my next book has an aspect of social media-ness to it as well. I just loved that. I thought it was perfect timing. Country and the technology of today. Loved that book. Definitely people go out and buy it.

Cathryn Hein:                    If you’re writing contemporary stories there’s sort of no way you can avoid it. The biggest problem you’ve got with those sorts of things is stuff dates rapidly. Anything to do with technology dates books. I think I included mentions of Facebook but I was quite careful about mentions of any other thing because it could go the way of MySpace.

Sarah Williams:             Yeah, exactly.

Cathryn Hein:                    You just don’t know what is really cool today, no one uses it tomorrow.

Sarah Williams:             Yeah that’s it. Taking photos on their phone and who knows it might be taking photos on a watch in five years.

Apart from rural romance, you’ve also tried your hand at writing slightly differently as well. So the French cries is something else you’ve had published.

Cathryn Hein:                    I just really adore that story. When we lived overseas we were in the south of France in Provence and the history around that area is just incredible. The town I was living with founded by the Romans. I bought so many books and tried to learn so much about the history of the area and I came across this wonderful story. We were going trip up three south France heading up to the Louvers and I came across this wonderful story about [inaudible 00:14:06], comes from the legend of Orlando. It’s like an Excalibur type legend. Anyway he’s fighting off the serasense and he’s got his magic sword and he throws his magic sword and it lands into the cliff base at Rocamadour and is just an unreal village that tumbles down a steep hillside. It’s on the [inaudible 00:14:30] and you can actually still see the sword which is fake but planted into the cliff base and that just stayed with me. I loved that story. I just warmed eventually a narrative out of it. I thought oh wouldn’t that be cool.

I actually had planned a whole bunch of these kinds of stories because it would be a really great way to have tax deductible overseas trips. I had written another one, it was called the Color Code but I haven’t published it yet. I’m still quite working out … Not sure if it’s in. I do home that it’s going to come out one day. That one’s a lot of fun. The French Five was a lot of fun too. I got to write about France and I got to write about the food and all sorts of wonderful things so it’s very cool.

Sarah Williams:             Oh that’s awesome. So you got the rights back on some of your books and you’ve decided to go hybrid so you self published some of them as well. Tell us which books in case we read them in the old name.

Cathryn Hein:                    Okay. Promises which my debut publication with Penguin is now called The Horseman’s Promise. Heart of the Valley and Heartland are Rocking Horse Hill and The Falls. I was going to rename The Falls to the Falls Farm but it’s just much easier to stay with the original titles. All those are not … They’re exactly the same books. I modernized a few things where it was needed but I put them out on mine now. I’ve also got a number of novellas that I’ve self published. They all, well not all of them but most of them are sticking in the same area as Rocking Horse Hill was set which is around a town called Levenham and it’s got this extinct volcano. Quite a dramatic landscape.

Sarah Williams:             Oh fantastic. So you’ll continue to put out the novella and self publish? So tell us what are you working on now?

Cathryn Hein:                    Right now I’m working on a novella called Itty and the Show Queen. It is a sequel to my previous book Chrissy and the Burrows Boys. This is all part of that Levenham love story series. These are really fun. These books are full of a lot of humor and they’re just really sweet, funny love stories where the men have to work hard to get the girls and they’re not ashamed of embarrassing themselves to get there. I’ve just written a very funny scene where the hero has to wear a tutu to the pub. His leotard doesn’t quite fit. That’s great.

Sarah Williams:             Oh I love it, it sounds awesome. Brilliant. Well where can we find you online to find out about all of your books and what’s coming out next?

Cathryn Hein:                    Best place is my website at cathrynhein.com and if you sign up to my newsletter you’ll also get a couple of free stories to enjoy over a cup of coffee and you’ll be the first to know when any of the new releases come out as well. Otherwise I’m on the usual social media suspects which is Facebook and Twitter.

Sarah Williams:             Yeah, until they get behind the times. Well thank you so much for today Cathryn, that was great.