Author Interview: Rhoda Baxter

Today is the start of another busy week on the blog, first up it's my pleasure to welcome Choc Lit author Rhoda Baxter back to the blog to talk about her latest book Please Release Me.

Can you tell us a little bit about yourself?
Hello! I’m Rhoda and I haven’t had a cake for… oh hang on. Wrong group. Ha Ha I could also be a founding member of this group ;-)

Let’s try again.

I’m a former scientist who now writes romance with humour and a touch of cynicism for Choc Lit. I’m still a geek at heart and can witter on about science and Dr Who for hours. I’m a big fan of The Big Bang Theory, Firefly and The Octonauts. I firmly believe that toilet roll should be fed over the top of the roll.

I’m a bit of a cake fiend, although I am trying to quit ... well, cut down anyway … oh who am I kidding, pass the Battenberg.

Although I have interviewed you about Please Release Me before, can you give us a little refresher as to what the book is about?
It’s about Grace, who is slowly recovering from losing her parents, Peter, who is living from day to day while he waits for his wife to wake up from a coma (he doesn’t know IF she will ever wake up, or even if she’ll be the same person if that happens) and Sally, who is in a coma, but can hear what’s going on. I once read a book where the hero had a wife in a coma, but it was totally okay for him to sleep with the heroine because the wife didn’t really love him and trapped him by pretending she was pregnant etc etc. He seemed to have no remorse about sleeping with someone other than his wife. This struck me as a bit weird. Surely, you’d feel bad.

So Peter feels terrible when he realises he has feelings for Grace. Sally isn’t a nice person, but when Peter comes to visit, she has no choice but to listen to him talk to her and she slowly starts to get to know this man she married and by degrees really does come to love him, in her own way. Then she comes back as a ghost that only Grace can see. Both women are lonely and they need each other. I started off writing a rom com set in a hospice and ended up writing a book about friendship, grief and betrayal. Go figure.

What inspired you to set this story in a hospice and how much research did you have to do to enable you to portray the realities of living and working in a hospice?
I visited Martin House Children’s hospice and spoke to staff and families there. Actually, it was going to the open day there that made me think about using a hospice as a setting. The actual hospice in the book is made up. In my head, it looks a bit like the old Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford - from the outside at least. I did a lot of desk research on comas. In order to sense check what I’d written, I spoke to @ZGoodacre, who works in the NHS. She gave me a few pointers about palliative care and intensive care in hospitals vs hospices. I made a few changes to Sally’s condition based on her feedback.

The best thing about using a made up private hospice was that I could have them provide different levels of care which would not always be found in the same place. So, the floor that Sally is on is quiet and has patients who need long term specialist care. Further up there is a floor for people like Grace’s Mum and Margaret who need a bit more care than a care home can offer, but not full medical support.

Author Interview: Rhoda Baxter

Today it's my pleasure to welcome Choc Lit author Rhoda Baxter to the blog so that we can find out a little more about Please Release Me which was published as an eBook earlier this month.

Can you tell us a little bit about your latest novel?
Please Release Me follows the lives of three people – Sally, who is in a coma; Peter, whose life is on hold because he doesn’t know if his new wife will wake up or not; and Grace, who has been a carer for a long time and is struggling to get back to a ‘normal’ life. It’s a romantic comedy set in a hospice. I will be donating half my royalty earnings to Martin House Children’s Hospice.

It started with a single image of two women who were ‘frenemies’. One of them, a bride, was a ghost.

What inspired you to write about the stages of consciousness of someone in a coma? How much research did you need to do?
Once I worked out that Sally was in a coma, rather than actually dead, I did some research into comatose patients.  I found out a lot of stuff about the Glasgow Coma Scale and assessment of levels or awareness.  I put some of it in the early drafts, then figured out that, whilst interesting, they didn’t serve the story, and took them all out again.  Once I had a second/third draft, I asked a @zoegoodacre, who works in the NHS and knows a ton of stuff about palliative care, to beta read it. She picked up a few points that weren’t quite right – like how long a person would be kept in a medically induced coma and a bit about the parallel planning side of things. [Parallel planning is when the family have to think about  several care plans – one where the patient wakes up, one where they don’t  and one what happens when they die– the plans (often nothing more than a conversation) run alongside each other, so if a change occurs you can switch from one to the other. Peter mentions it to his mother at one point].

I also asked a couple of people who had been long term carers to beta read, just to check that I hadn’t done anything insensitive.  

If you had to describe Please Release Me in one sentence, what would it be? 
Ghost meets Mean Girls.

Guest Book Review: Rhoda Baxter - Doctor January

Reviewed by Tanya Phillips

If you keep looking back, you might miss what's standing right in front of you...

Six months after a painful break-up from Gordon, Beth's finally getting her life back on track. She has faith in her own scientific theories and is willing to work hard to prove them. She's even beginning to see Hibs, her dedicated lab partner, as more than just a lousy lothario in a lab-coat and goggles.

So when Gordon arrives back from America without warning and expects to be welcomed back into Beth's arms, she's totally thrown. She also quickly begins to see that Gordon isn't the man she thought he was - Hibs has always held a candle for Beth, but he can only wait so long for her to realise there's more to life than being patronised and bullied by the one who's meant to love and protect her.

Will Beth forsee the explosive nature beneath Gordon's placid surface before he destroys everything she's worked for, both inside and outside the lab?

Amazon links: Kindle or Paperback