We haven’t had an author article in a while, so I jumped at the chance to have the lovely Chrissie Manby tell us about the inspiration behind her fabulous new novel Kate’s Wedding which is out this week! Do grab a copy if you can, it’s so much more than a chance to cash-in on the Royal Wedding (as many people perceive it to be) and is very much worth a read! Take it away, Chrissie!

One of the first questions people like to ask a writer is ‘where do you get your ideas from?’ When I started out as a novelist, I found plenty of inspiration in my flat-sharing life as a temp in London. Later, bad boyfriends provided plenty of unfortunate fiction fodder. A couple of years ago, however, life seemed to settle down. I had my writing career, my sweet little house and had finally met a man who would not make sashimi of my heart. On a personal level, that was great. On a creative level… what the hell did I write about now that my life was so wonderfully sorted and dull?

The answer came when I got engaged. At thirty-eight years old, I was thrown into a world I could never have made up: the world of the bride-to-be. A week after I got the proposal, I found myself in a bridal shop trying on wedding dresses. I was the oldest bride by at least a decade and the shop assistant didn’t pull any punches as she evaluated my saddle-bags and back-fat. As I stood on a stool in the middle of the salon and she tutted over my low-slung breasts which were spoiling the line of a frock, my only consolation was that one day I would put it all down in a book.

I started making notes about the wedding planning process. There was no shortage of weird and wonderful moments over the next few months. An afternoon at a wedding fair, where I was cornered by a Prince Charles impersonator, was particularly traumatic. And I was astonished by how expensive everything was. Bunch of roses? Ten pounds. Bunch of roses for a wedding? Try a hundred. The best day of my life was fast looking like a stressful rip-off. I had to try to find a book in all this horror to pay for the wedding cupcakes (roughly more expensive per ounce than gold).

So, I soon had a series of vignettes about my wedding hell but how would I turn them into a novel? The idea for the story that would pull everything together came on the day Prince William and Kate Middleton announced their engagement. The run up to their wedding, together with the royal wedding of 1981 and Princess Diana’s tragic death in 1997 provided a time-frame for my heroine’s story. My own made-up bride, Kate Williamson, of course shares a great many things in common with me. I was nine years old in 1981 and the fairytale fantasy that was the royal wedding was a key feature in my development as a hopeless romantic. Likewise, Diana’s death marked a moment when I was at a particularly low ebb, having broken up with my first real love while all my friends were getting hitched. Kate Middleton and Prince William’s engagement seemed like an opportunity for national optimism, corresponding with my own increasing optimism about the years ahead.

My book, Kate’s Wedding, is, I hope, a story that will have relevance outside the run-up to April 29th 2011. I wanted to poke a bit of fun at the wedding industry but also to write about the things that really matter when it comes to love and marriage. One thing I’ve learned is that a big white dress really isn’t important at all.

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