Guest post: Not All Research is Equal by Carole Matthews

Today I’m welcoming my first ever guest blogger to One More Page; the fabulous Carole Matthews, whose new book Wrapped Up in You is out this Thursday.  One More Page is Carole’s first stop on her Wrapped Up in You blog tour! Welcome Carole!

Readers often ask me how much research I do for a book and, I guess, the easy answer is that it largely depends on the book. For The Chocolate Lovers’ Club, I ate lots of chocolate and put on a stone in weight. I went paintballing and got shot in the back for The Chocolate Lovers’ Diet. I do, sometimes , suffer for my art! For Welcome To The Real World, I spent a year working with the Welsh National Opera and it’s fair to say that I never want to see Madame Butterfly ever again.

Sometimes the books are set close to home and others I try to set in more exotic locations to give a bit of variety. For my latest book, Wrapped Up In You, I wanted to show a contrast to a typically British Christmas and I thought that the landscape and heat of Africa would provide an excellent backdrop. It would also give me the opportunity to have a very different type of romantic hero  as  Dominic, is a fully-fledged Maasai warrior! From the comments I’ve had already from readers, it seems like everyone has fallen in love with Dominic just as my heroine, Janie, did.  I even had a phone call from my mum who was reading the book and was very worried about him. She couldn’t bear to wait until the end to see if it all turned out well for Dominic and Janie!

The research was like a dream come true. My dearly-beloved, Lovely Kev, and I spent a week in the Maasai Mara in Kenya on safari. The deal is that I do all the note-taking and Lovely Kev takes all the photographs so that I can remember all the wonderful things we’ve seen when I’m back in my office in downtown Milton Keynes!

I always try to do as much as I can, while I’m there. Although I have a rough outline of my plot, I’m never entirely sure what I’m going to use and you can’t just pop back to somewhere like the Maasai Mara! We spent time in a Maasai village talking to the people and getting an insight into their way of life. They are such lovely people, warm with a quiet charm. Their life is so hard and sparse compared to ours that I thought it would be interesting to bring Dominic back to an English village to see the contrast.  We joined in with a Maasai traditional dancing and jumping ceremony which features in the book and bumped across the dusty plains in a truck as Janie does. I hope that it adds to the colour of the story and I try to be as accurate as I can. If a place is truly inspiring then I think it can really add to the plot and the flavour of the novel.

We did glamping – posh camping – but, at the end of the day there’s still just a bit of canvas between you and a startling variety of wild animals. There were a couple of hairy moments – we had a hippopotamus eating right outside our tent in the dead of the night, so close that you could hear its tummy rumbling and the roar of the lions coming closer and closer as they went out hunting was enough to set the heart racing!

Africa is such a vast and beautiful country. The Maasai Mara is just spectacular. If you can possibly get there, please put a trip to the Maasai Mara on your ‘to do’ list. In Wrapped Up In You, I hope I’ve given you a taste of its magic.

Thank you Carole. Wrapped up in You is out on 27th October. Please stop by on Thursday for my review and do check out the other stops on Carole’s blog tour!

You can find out more about Carole and her novels at: http://www.carolematthews.com/