Quesnel author makes work audible

Christine Clark didn’t start writing until she was 55 years old.

She’d always wanted to, but she didn’t know what to write about. It wasn’t until she was forced to take a year off from her job as a teacher, when she lost her voice following a botched medical procedure on her thyroid, that she found her voice, so to speak.

All of her peers were working, but it was next to impossible to teach in silence. Barely able to speak louder than a whisper, Clark, now a four-time published author under the pen name C.B. Clark, decided it was time to try her hand at the one thing she’d always wanted to do.

There was just one problem: she didn’t know what to write.

Instead of giving up, Clark forced herself to sit down and put pen to paper.

“So I just started,” says Clark. “And the first page was a pain, just getting it out. And every day after that I’d say, ‘Don’t worry about it, just write.’ And then, I got hooked.”

A long-time reader, Clark started to spend most of her time thinking about plot lines and story ideas.

When she finished her first manuscript, a 360-page romantic suspense story, she says, “I was so proud of myself.”

It wasn’t long before she mailed it off to publishers, receiving rejection after rejection in response. Now, she laughs about it. “It’ll never see the light of day,” she says.

More manuscripts followed over the next few years, each rejected. But the rejections were accompanied by encouraging words the more she wrote, so Clark kept writing.

In 2013, she won the Music City Romance Writers’ Melody of Love writing contest and was offered a publishing contract by the Wild Rose Press, a small romance publishing house run out of New York.

Clark, who is now retired, writes every morning. She works from a desk in her son’s old bedroom, away from windows and with the quiet sounds of Johnny Cash and other old-school country music playing in the background.

She wakes up at six or seven and writes until around 11 a.m., before setting about the rest of her day.

While working on her soon-to-be-published fifth novel, Secret Betrayal, Clark says she suffered from writer’s block for about a month. She doesn’t start a novel with a plot, preferring to let the story — and the characters — surprise her as it unfolds. The writer’s block came when the story went a direction that simply wasn’t working.

To get over it, she took the same advice that she had given herself years before, when she was starting out. “I just started writing. You just have to do it,” she says. “And if you write five pages, you’ll probably come up with something you can use.”

Clark says she used to feel embarrassed to tell people she wrote romance. “There’s this attitude of, ‘Oh, it’s not real. Genre fiction isn’t real literature,’” says Clark.

While Clark agrees to an extent, she says romance is the most popular genre of book out there — and that every good action, adventure, and mystery novel always has a little bit of romance mixed in.

As the publishing industry changes and audio books grow more and more in popularity, two of Clark’s own novels have been selected for the new format. Her third novel, Bitter Legacy, has recently been released as an audible book, with her fourth, Broken Trust, soon to follow.

Secret Betrayal, her fifth novel, is set to be released in early 2019. Secret Betrayal is a romantic suspense novel about two people who have to join forces to solve a decades-old murder and track down two killers who are out to get them.

All of Clark’s novels are available locally at Books & Company, as well as online through Amazon, iTunes, Nook, Kobo and Google Books.