Catherine Robertson writes funny books about intelligent strong women, and it’s got her into trouble with people who think humorous women’s fiction should never veer from the pink and fluffy.

Hi there I’m your host Jenny Wheeler and today Catherine talks about escaping labels, her new book Gabriel’s Bay which gives men a bigger voice, and bridging the gaps between ‘literary’ and genre fiction.

Six things you’ll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

How many complete MS she wrote before she published one

Why the 'chick lit' category makes her mad

Being a cheer leader for creativity

The incredible value of critique groups

Why she loves stroppy women

What she'd do differently second time around

Where to find Catherine Robertson: 

Website: https://www.catherinejrobertson.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/nzcatherinerobertson

Twitter: https://twitter.com/cjrauthor

What follows is a "near as" transcript of our conversation, not word for word but pretty close to it, with links to important mentions.

Jenny: But now, here’s Catherine. .  Hello there Catherine and welcome to the show, it’s great to have you with us.

Catherine: Thank you Jenny, it's really nice of you to invite me.

Jenny: It's really nice to have a fellow countryman or countrywoman, because most of these interviews have been done with people overseas. So we wanted to have a little bit of balance with it!    Beginning at the beginning - was there a “Once Upon A Time" moment when you decided you wanted to write fiction?  And if there was a catalyst, what was it?

Catherine Robertson, author

Catherine: I think I had always thought about writing fiction much in the same way as I'd thought about winning lotto. I hadn't actually found anything about it, like buy a ticket or indeed do any creative writing. I had children quite young, and I was self employed when I was 26.

There never seemed to be enough time to do anything, like writing. But when I moved overseas, the family moved overseas in 2000 and I found myself out of a job because we'd gone to work for a Dotcom and just at the time the market tanked. My husband still had a job, but I didn't. The children were at school, and I suddenly had one of those 'now or never' moments; I looked up creative writing courses and found one at a local community college. So I started that, and that is when it started. That did give me the confidence to keep going.

Jenny: Fantastic. So that was in California?

Catherine: It was, that's right. It was in Marin County, just out of San Francisco.

Jenny: So your first book- how long did it take you from doing that course through to producing The Sweet Second Life of Darrell Kincaid, which was the first one we saw published?

Catherine: That's exactly right. Probably too long. I never want to put people off, but between that time and getting The Sweet Second Life published, I probably would have written eight full length novel manuscripts and had them all rejected; some of them more rewrites of previous ones that I'd done. I probably didn't start writing really seriously until- we moved around a bit, came back from England and again I didn't have the time to keep writing and reestablish business, all that useful stuff like earning money. I started writing probably about early 2005, so it was five years of solid effort before I got The Sweet Second Life sold to a publisher.

The Sweet Second Life of Darrel Kincaid

Jenny: That is amazing. I mean there's so many people that I talk to- there is an apprenticeship time where you find yourself developing in confidence and you obviously went through that in quite a real way.