We are very excited to be welcoming Jon Rance and his blog tour for This Family Life today. Jon’s previous novels include Happy Endings and This Twentysomething Life. His new book, This Family Life, is the sequel to Jon’s novel, This Thirtysomething Life and was released recently by Amazon Media (the kindle version is currently only 99 pence.)
Jon joins us today to talk about his new book and he also gives us a sneak preview too. Hi Jon and welcome….
Hello and a HUGE thank you to Novel Kicks for hosting what is the fourteenth stop on my ‘This Family Life’ Blog Tour. If you missed the last blog you can see it here http://hell4heather.com/
So hello again and today I’m going to talk about my new novel ‘This Family Life’. The book is written as a diary from the point of view of thirtysomething husband and new father, Harry Spencer. The book is the sequel to ‘This Thirtysomething Life’ and Harry’s job as a secondary school teacher wasn’t really integral to the plot in that book, but in ‘This Family Life’ I wanted to explore his career a lot more.
In this book, new father Harry realises that now he’s a parent it’s time he started taking his job more seriously, and so when he’s offered a promotion to head of department, he sees this as the chance to prove to his wife Emily, and more importantly to himself that he can do it. I was lucky enough to have a very good friend who’s actually a teacher and is also head of his department, and so he gave me some great inside information on what it’s really like.
The school scenes in the book were some of my favourite to write and I hope I conveyed what it’s really like. Obviously I added a lot more comedy and took some literary freedom with it, but I tried to add it bits of reality in a hopefully a humorous way. There’s a bit when Harry takes the job as head of department and he gets his new schedule, full of meetings, pre-meetings, training, and other tasks and he innocently asks, ‘And when am I going to find time to actually teach?’ and he’s laughed at, but he wasn’t joking. This is one of those moments that I know a lot of teachers have, and I hope that although in the book it’s sort of a joke, it’s something that teachers can relate to.
byNovel Kicks is a blog for story tellers and book lovers.