The one with publication day for Sunshine After the Rain and a lovely promo trip to the Lake District
It’s publication day today for the fourth book in my Escape to the Lakes series – Sunshine After the Rain. This is new character Mel’s story and the most emotional of the series so far as she’s had a lot of rain in her life; so much that she thinks the only way to escape from the dark clouds hanging over her is to leave her beloved Willowdale behind and start afresh. Seven years on, feeling out of touch with her family, she’s questioning whether that was such a good plan after all. When an unexpected job opportunity takes her back to the Lake District, she hopes to finally start the healing process.
Although it’s book four, it can be read as a standalone as I do provide snippets of relevant backstory for characters introduced in previous books and I’ve also included a list of characters from the previous books for context (and a reminder for those who’ve read the books). As with all series in the same setting with recurring characters, the richest reading experience is always reading in order.
Early reviews for Sunshine After the Rain have been really positive, which is encouraging and a big relief as it doesn’t matter how many times I’ve done this, I still get nervous for new releases. Several readers have proclaimed this as their favourite book of the series. Of course, you can’t please all the people all the time. I’m always transparent with the highs and lows of being an author but I won’t share any negative comments today as they’d give spoilers and the book is only just out today. In my head, I’m already constructing a blog post about an issue that has cropped up in this and previous books so watch this space… she says mysteriously!
Back to publication day, Sunshine After the Rain has started its 10-day 30-stop blog tour organised by the fabulous Rachel Gilbey of Rachel’s Random Resources. I see lots of familiar names on the tour but also a couple of newbies to my tours so it’ll be particularly interesting to hear their views. Thank you in advance to everyone who has taken part.
Hubby, Ella (our 9-year-old sprocker spaniel) and I went to the Lake District last week on a research/publicity materials trip. A key story element in Sunshine After the Rain involves the boat house in the grounds at Willowdale Hall. If you look closely at the book cover, you can see a boat house in the background so the plan was to find one in the Lakes in front of which we could record a publication day video and take some photos.
We knew this would be a challenge because boat houses are usually on private property and therefore not accessible on foot and we didn’t want to hire a boat or clamber onto a paddleboard (as if!) to get close to one from the water. There’s a highly-photographed one on Ullswater which is a holiday let (and looks gorgeous) but the photos are taken from a busy road so we couldn’t safely record a publication day video there.
There’s a boat house converted to holiday accommodation on The Lingholm Estate by Derwent Water – the inspiration for Willowdale Hall – but that’s also on private land too. A few years back, we walked round Grasmere and had come across an old boat house there so we booked ourselves into The Glen Rothay Hotel by Rydal Water specifically with the intention of taking the low-level walk round Rydal Water (which is opposite) to Grasmere (the two bodies of water are very close together) and doing the publicity bits by that Grasmere boat house. (This is a photo I took of it on a visit in August 2021).
We couldn’t check at The Glen Rothay until late afternoon, as is the norm, so we stopped at Ambleside first. In Sunshine After the Rain, Mel is a conservation architect and a lot of her work has been on large old estates. Although she loves working on big houses, she is equally fascinated by tiny ones and she specifically mentions the famous Bridge House in Ambleside. So I had to take some photos there.
In Rothay Park, there’s a miniature golf course which we’ve played on several times and one of the holes includes a miniature Bridge House. There was nobody playing that hole when we walked back to the car so I managed to grab some photos on the mini version too.
We left Ambleside and checked into The Glen Rothay which visitors to the area might better know by the pub name – The Badger Bar. More on that in a moment. We we're staying in a room in a converted cottage (bottom right on the first photo).
The weather had been lovely so I grabbed my paperback copy of Sunshine After the Rain and we set off round Rydal Water (the access to which is immediately opposite the hotel, over a wooden bridge and a short walk by the river). We hadn’t gone far along the lakeshore when I spotted a boat house on the other side (the same side as the hotel and road) which we could use for the video and photos rather than walking all the way to the Grasmere one, which was quite a relief as I’d done something to my right foot and was struggling to walk. Evening was drawing in and the blue sky had faded to grey so we decided to do that the following day when sunshine was forecast.
I said I’d come back to The Badger Bar. It’s called that because there’s a badger sett in the area and badgers emerge from it to feed in a grassy area by the car park every night. There are a couple of stuffed badgers in the bar including Bertie with whom I took my selfie. I’ve never seen a living badger before so what a treat it was to see a pair on our first evening. We nipped out of our accommodation for the time we’d been told they’d probably appear but ended up waiting an hour. I was standing on a sloping gravel drive – not the most comfortable, especially when my foot was in pain – and was on the verge of giving up when they appeared. As it was dark and there were people on the bench in front of me, the view was limited but it was still a special moment. Guess what I’m now planning to write about! Just need to get the publisher’s approval and somehow fit it into the schedule but you saw it here first. Badgers. Me. The cogs are whirring.
The following day, armed with a bright sunshine forecast, we set off walking along the road (or limping in my case!) and found a pathway down to the boat house but the sunshine didn’t come out so we grabbed some photos with a dull sky before retracing our steps and going round to the other side of Rydal Water to record my publication day video with the boat house in the background.
Next on the agenda was a first-time trip to Rydal Mount which was just a few minutes’ walk from the hotel. Rydal Mount is where William Wordsworth moved to with his family from 1813 until his death in 1850. I mention Wordsworth and specifically his poem I Wandered Lonely As A Cloud… often better known as Daffodils in The Start of Something Wonderful and I made a mental note to collect my paperback when we stopped off at our room after shooting the publication day video. Of course, I completely forgot to collect it.
The house was worth looking around but I was most captivated by the gardens. On several levels, they were really lovely to wander round and only £6 each to access the gardens (an additional £6 for the house). We’d sadly missed the large daffodils patch but there were lots of other lovely flower and shrubs in bloom. My favourite part was a bench on the lower gardens with a view of Rydal Water through the trees. You can see the view in the fourth photo below where I'm by a stone wall.
Just down from Rydal Mount is Rydal Hall, built by William Flemming in 1600, which we’ve never visited before either. After several changes of ownership and use, it’s now let to the Diocese of Carlisle and used as a retreat. There’s a huge range of accommodation – bunkhouses, camping, holiday cottages and bedrooms in the hall itself – as well as extensive gardens and a tearoom. We had a wander round the gardens and lunch on the tearoom patio overlooking Rydal Beck.
The hubby was aware of ‘The Grot’ in the grounds as a popular photography spot so we sought that out. It’s a lovely grotto built in 1668 to frame and enjoy Rydal Falls but a large group arrived almost immediately after us so we didn’t get to stay for long or take as many photos as I might have liked. But we did have a brief peaceful moment there to admire the view.
We fancied having our tea at a pub we love in Waterhead, which is at the northern tip of Windermere where the boats stop for Ambleside visitors and, as it hadn’t taken us nearly as long to complete our morning visits, I suggested we get the boat to Bowness. We like Bowness but find it a bit too peopley in busy periods. Across our many, many visits to Ambleside, we’d never seen it so quiet as it was the afternoon before so we figured (hoped!) Bowness would be quiet too. There were people about but nothing like we usually see there so we had a quick wander round the town.
Disappointingly, the sun barely broke through the clouds and the sky remained grey most of the day so, with a slight chill in the air, we sat inside on the boat back to Waterhead. We were a little early for tea and neither of us were particularly hungry at that point. Rather than hang around for a couple of hours to work up an appetite, hubby suggested we go to a supermarket and get some bits in for a picky tea back in the hotel room. Mmm, love a picky tea. A trip to a supermarket meant either driving back to where we’d just been and visiting Booths in Windermere or going to Booths in Keswick. It didn’t make sense to drive back to the area we’d just come from by boat so we went to Keswick, slightly further away. And do you know what happened? The moment we passed Grasmere and the fells surrounding it, we were in bright sunshine! The sky was blue and it was absolutely gorgeous. We then both realised we’d checked our weather apps for Keswick thinking it was close enough, when it clearly wasn’t. Lesson learned for next time!
By the time we’d shopped and returned to Rydal Water, it was late in the day but the sun had finally broken through so we returned to the boat house to grab some photos with a blue sky although this wasn’t ideal as the sun was in the wrong place for the ones right next to the boat house. The ones from a distance were gorgeous, though.
As it had taken me several takes to record my publication day video, I decided to accept it would have a grey sky rather than attempt to record it again.
The following morning we checked out and drove to Keswick where it was fortunately another beautiful day. We went to the beach at Crow Park by Derwent Water then moved round to the beach below Lake Road where the boats round Derwent Water launch, then nipped into the town for a quick wander before heading home.
It felt we’d been away for way longer than two nights. Ella loved being in the Lakes and, as ever, it’s our happy place. We’ve been away to the Lakes for the Easter fortnight for the past three years for bookish research purposes but we didn’t go this year as our daughter’s currently taking her A level exams and we needed to stay home for her to revise. We really missed not being there this Easter so it was lovely to manage a few days away.
Every time we visit the Lakes, we have a conversation about moving there and whether we’d love it as much as we do when we’re just visitors. The reality is that, unless Netflix come calling with an enormous deal (pretty please!) we can’t afford to buy a house there, but it’s still a fun discussion to have.
For publication day today, I’ve mainly been doing pub-day-related activities like sharing visuals and writing this blog post. I had a hair appointment this morning and hubby and I went out for lunch but it’s otherwise a day of trying not to refresh the Amazon charts every hour. Sunshine After the Rain was #10 on the overall Apple Books chart first thing, which was fabulous to see, and #4 on the Fiction & Literature chart. My publishers always put it in as Romance and, for some reason, it always defaults it to the Fic&Lit category. At the time of writing, it has climbed up to #216 in the UK Kindle Chart and #112 in the Audible one. I’m therefore pretty hopeful of an Audible Top 100 placing but we’ll just have to see about Kindle. The algorithms don’t work how they used to and a large number of pre-orders don’t push books up the chart in the way they used to. I’ll edit the post if it moves up later.
Thanks to the hubby for some of the photos and to my amazing Jellycat amuseables for posing so well! Oh, and if you were wondering how my foot is, it's fine. I have absolutely no idea what happened to it. I can only assume I'd been sitting with it twisted in a funny position in the car and trapped a nerve or something. I could hardly walk on the first evening and it hurt the following day but some ibuprofen and the support of a decent pair of hiking boots seemed to improve it. By the morning of our last day, it was about back to normal. Really odd!
Thank you to anyone who has pre-ordered or bought this book today in any format, or who will do in the future. Your support is so very much appreciated and means I can continue writing more stories that bring sunshine after the rain.
Big hugs
Jessica xx