STAMFORD PEOPLE
Kate Bateman Nicholas Rudd-Jones went to meet with Kate Bateman at her family’s auctioneers, to hear about her move into writing historical romances
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HE Batemans epitomise a family business, with a strong family core and loyal, long-serving staff. The day I went down to the auctioneers to interview Kate, I was greeted by her father, sat down in a comfy sofa with a cup of coffee by his daughter Kate and introduced to her ever-animated brother Greg, who now runs the business. Greg’s vivid and enthusiastic descriptions of a piece of taxidermy and its provenance had one dreaming of starry Indian nights in the desert; and his research into a homing pigeoncounter, which no-one could identify for several weeks, put one in mind of a dedicated pigeon-fancier lovingly counting his homing pigeons in and out. What the family all posses in equal measure is charm, the enthusiasm to find out the history of an object and to convey their enthusiasm for it, to tell stories and bring the past to life. I suspect one always leaves a Batemans encounter feeling the better and merrier about life. Kate’s father Ron is a fine artist who in his spare time started to dabble in antiques. He set up an antiques shop in Oundle, and Kate used to help out in her holidays. Eventually he suggested to her she ‘go and learn about the small stuff’ (e.g. silverware, porcelain, jewellery…) whilst he focused on the furniture and paintings. In due course the family started to run auctions in the Corn Exchange in Broad St; and the business really took off as they embraced the internet and moved to the current premises in Ryhall Rd; they now hold regular auctions that reach an international audience through their online capability. Kate’s life meanwhile took a new direction as her husband’s job took the family to the midWest of America and, with three young children, she started to look for a new activity that could be done flexi time from home. She was worried that she ‘would go stir crazy’ if she didn’t do something and, on telling her husband that she had just read a historical romance and thought she could do much better, he bet her £1 that she couldn’t. Never one to turn down a challenge, she set to work immediately. Well. Here we are only a couple of years later, and she has been commissioned by the mighty Random House Publishing in New York no less to write a trilogy. The first one, ‘To Steal a Heart’, in which Kate brings Napoleonic France to life as a master spy and a beautiful thief find
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Tips for aspiring writers:
take the plot forward at a pace, whilst enjoying all the historical detail that also comes so naturally to her. And does she plan her stories out in detail before she writes them? “Ah, the ‘plotter vs. the ‘seat of the pantser’ dilemma!” as she sums it up so neatly. Well, she declares herself to be a ‘pants-er’, although she does always have a clear idea of the overall arc of the story. “And there are certain conventions in a historical romance which readers expect,” Kate told me. “Susan Elizabeth Phillips so rightly says that if your hero is a fire-fighter, your heroine had better be an arsonist! But I always like to have happy endings!” What makes her work in particular stand out? “Well I like my heroines to get out and do things – they tend to be code breakers or counterfeiters. And I like to do my historical research well – of course the room settings – the texture and colour of the chaise longue my heroine sits on is very important!” Being Kate of course she is still very active in antiques, returning to the business regularly but also continuing to be a well-known face on the TV programmes Flog It and Bargain Hunt. She always tends to tell it as it is, again her natural communication skills coming to the fore. We wish her all the best. The books can be found and ordered at Amazon online.
1. Join a writers’ club - in Kate’s case it was the American Romance Writers of America (RWA) local chapter 2. Study craft books on ‘how to’ write; Kate learnt a lot from ‘Save the Cat’ by Blake Snyder and Debra Dixon’s ‘Goal, Motivation & Conflict’ 3. Enter writing competitions 4. Be authentic – many of Kate’s storylines, even the more outlandish ones, are based on real life observations 5. Go full throttle at it
love and intrigue in each other’s arms, is just out on Kindle and is proving to be a roaring success. She expects to publish the other two within the year. In many ways Kate comes to the genre with many advantages; she has a degree in English and has always enjoyed writing; she hails from a family that loves storytelling and understanding historical provenance; and she positively brims with energy and ideas, which enables her to
STAMFORD LIVING JULY 2016
22/06/2016 12:23