Lee Welch's Blog

My new book ‘Mr Collins in Love: A Pride and Prejudice inspired m/m romance’ is out now!

The story is told from the point of view of young clergyman, Mr Collins, the character from Pride and Prejudice who is generally considered to be one of the most odious characters in English literature.

I reckon Jane Austen completely misunderstood him.

Mr Collins in Love features:

Autistic Regency clergymanHis gardenerFriends to loversOne sex scene (no touching)Excellent boiled...

If you like Pride and Prejudice, you probably remember Mr Collins? He’s the odious clergyman who asks lovely heroine Elizabeth Bennet to marry him. She refuses.

He’s one of the most ridiculed characters in English literature. Jane Austen portrays him as dull, foolish, toadying, awkward and pompous. He makes inane remarks (“what excellent boiled potatoes”) and can’t dance. The woman who eventually marries him, Charlotte Lucas, does so not out of love but because she’s fast becoming an old maid...

If you use generative AI to put words on paper, I want you to know it’s recently been reported in the Atlantic that at least one tech company – Meta – developed their AI using pirated books and pirated articles. It’s likely other tech giants have done the same.

More, I want you to know that at least one company – Meta again – used pirated copies of my books to train their AI.

How do I know? Well, you may have heard that George R.R. Martin, Jodi Picoult, and a bunch of other authors in the ...

The other day I held a paperback book I wrote for the first time. It felt damn fine. I stroked the paper. I smelled it. We opened a bottle of champagne.

Now in glorious paperback! Three books by Lee Welch.

I had held a paperback I wrote a few years ago when the French publisher of my first book, Salt Magic, Skin Magic, sent me a complimentary copy of the translation. That was a very nice feeling. But it was, of course, in French. I couldn’t read it. It was my book but it wasn’t my book.

...

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role emotion plays in writing, probably because it confuses the hell out of me.

Currently, I base most of my writing decisions on feelings. I’m always asking myself: Is that exciting? Is there chemistry between these characters? Is this moving or a bit twee? Does this scene make me feel anything?

Emotion is how I choose which stories to tell. It’s how I decide whether to abandon a manuscript or stick at it. I do ask other people for critique someti...

Money’s been on my mind lately, brought into focus today because I filed this year’s tax return for my creative writing income.

Hooo boy.

Detail from Death and the Miser by Hieronyous Bosch.
Image shows an old man reaching for a big bag of gold coins he keeps hidden in a chest. The bony gentleman in the winding sheet is at the door. You can’t take it with you, folks, but all the same, you don’t want to run out before you die…

For those who don’t know, I work for a big organisation three d...

Last year I started writing a book. I did the research, I did the planning, I dreamed up the characters and gave some thought to the themes and what I wanted to say. I started to write. I realised I hadn’t planned as well as I thought, and that the power dynamic between the two leads wasn’t what I wanted. I re-thought, re-wrote. I shared some early chapters with my writing group, who gave positive feedback. Great. I wrote on.

It was a struggle, but who said writing was easy? The struggle is p...

It’s that time of year when authors talk about the last 12 months – the challenges and triumphs, the books written and published. Amongst their posts, you’ll see quite a few that read like this:

‘Not a very productive year; only twelve books published, but then I had Covid twice and my third child was born. Oh, and we moved to Siberia to start our new business. Never mind: will do better next year’.

And, depending on your state of mind, you squint in pain at the audacity of the humblebra...

You know that Talking Heads song? The one that goes ‘You may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife; You may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?’

I often ask myself that question. Not because I have a particularly beautiful house, or a beautiful wife, but because I have other things I never seriously dreamed of having. I have a husband. I have a dog! My own dog. I have two cats and two children. Yep, two of each! I can drive a car and often have one at my disposal. I ha...

Back near the end of 2021 a few kind people let me know that ‘Mended With Gold’ – my m/m romance novella about imperfect heroes, comics, and wild New Zealand beaches – was no longer available to buy.

I contacted the then publisher, MLR Press, got my rights back, and in November 2021 I self-published the book AND the epilogue ‘Out Loud’ in one edition, using the same beautiful cover art by Aud Koch that I’d used for the Italian edition.

The self-published edition of Mended With Gold + Out L...