Margaret Nyhon has dreams about Kennedy, the smoulderingly handsome hero of her latest novel.
Fortune Smiles As Love Divides came out in July. It’s a complex love triangle between university friends who become wealthy through cryptocurrency.
But while Kennedy, Lily and Reece are on the book’s cover, Kennedy’s looks appear to disappoint Nyhon.
"He’s not the guy in my dreams. I pictured him much different, but my publisher chose the cover images."
Fortune Smiles is the 77-year-old Mosgiel author’s 16th book since 2016. The sequel, The Stolen Girl, should be out in mid-January.
Her first book, de Marisco, grew out of family tree research, which she says shows she is a distant cousin of Henry I (William the Conqueror’s son).
When you meet this larger-than-life, effervescent woman, with her flame-red curly hair and blue fingernails, somehow such an unlikely connection doesn’t seem so surprising.
Nyhon comes in from her flourishing cottage garden. On the front lawn, the Shaun the Sheep figures she picked up from Riverstone are getting wet and the southwesterly is bothering her penstemons and lilies.
Seventeen books in less than eight years is no mean feat. So what’s her secret? Has she got any tips for aspiring writers of historical and romantic novels?
Writing seems to come easily to Nyhon. Not for her the agony of many writers, who struggle to find the right words, or lose them amid other swirling thoughts as soon as they try to recall them.
Nyhon says she started writing as an antidote to husband Kelvin becoming ill and after she lost her painting mojo.
"I just needed an outlet. I hadn’t written before in my life and certainly didn’t know if I could write a book."
"I was an artist, a painter. These are some of my paintings," she points to the walls of her dining room. "I started off doing scenery, and scenes, and then I got into the abstract. I love the colours. Acrylics are the best for these sorts of things, they dry the quickest."
She never sketched her paintings before launching into them. As it turns out, her writing style is much the same.
"I’ve got paintings everywhere, all the hallways are full of my paintings. But I gave up painting and took on writing. There was a reason for it. We had a terrible four years when Kelvin’s mother died and I just couldn’t paint any more. I don’t know why. It was just the end of an era."
After reading "a lot" of inspirational writing, Nyhon learnt how to meditate and now starts every day with a half-hour stint, followed by 10 minutes tapping her pressure points.
Her regimen has cleared her mind for thinking and writing but becoming an author was not on her to-do list, she says.
"The de Marisco book I tried to put into a story because I didn’t want just the family to read it. Now I get royalties from all over the world. If anyone is doing research on their family tree and de Marisco is in their line, as soon as they go online up pops my book and they buy it.
"It’s the book that has sold the best, with many hundreds of copies but, in terms of royalties, I wouldn’t survive off them. I do it because I love doing it."
She estimates each book has cost nearly $4000 to publish and the royalty cheques through sales on the Amazon website are nowhere near that, "sometimes $17 or $24". For every $14 or $16 book sold on Amazon, she receives about $3, and with the $4 or $6 e-books she gets $1.
Every author has their own way of working. Is she a disciplined scribe, who sets herself a target of writing say 2000 words a day? Does she plan out her books, their plots and characters and chapters methodically, with moments of jeopardy and crisis spread throughout?
Turns out Nyhon’s creative process is nothing like that.
"I’m naughty. I don’t know what I’m going to write when I get up in the morning, but I just sit down there and it just comes to me. And you’ve got to keep twists and turns coming to keep it interesting.
"A lot of people that want to write a novel run out at about 40,000 words, and then they just drag it out, but you’ve got to keep that momentum going.
Nyhon doesn’t write like it is her job or allocate a specific time for writing.
"I try to write most days but, no, just any spare moment, because I have things in my brain. I don’t know with Kelvin quite where I’m going to be or what I’m going to do, so I just pick it up. At night I often write while Kelvin sits and watches the telly.
"They say you should write down your characters, but I don’t. But I have learned with writing that you don’t give every character a name — the barman’s a barman, the gardener’s a gardener. Because you can confuse people with a lot of names. I’ve read books where everybody was named and I’d be thinking, ‘now who does that name belong to?’."
Her print-on-demand novels are generally between 60,000 and 65,000 words long.
"I’ve done two this year, which is pretty prolific, because some people take five years or more to write a novel."
She doesn’t have a favourite novelist, nor does she read a lot, although she loves inspirational writings. Neither did she enrol in any writing courses.
But she was top of English at Alexandra District High School for several years.
Out of the goodness of her heart she invited him in and put the kettle on. When she brought the coffee to the table, he was staring, and his gaze never left her.
She felt a bit uneasy so asked if he was alright.
"No, I’m not Lily. I don’t know if you have noticed, but I’m in love with you." This took her by complete surprise.
"Don’t be silly Kennedy, I love Reece, we are engaged," she told him.
"I want you Lily, I don’t go out with girls anymore. I’m waiting on you to belong to me." This put Lily in panic mode.
"Please go, this is not right, go now."
"No, Lily, I’m not leaving. If I can’t have you ..." — Fortune Smiles As Love Divides
"I am modest with sex scenes as at my age," she says, "I don’t want to shock readers.
"Kelvin always says to me, ‘now what have you written today?’. He never reads my books, but I read them to him as I’m writing. And then, because every story’s got to have a bit of love in it, I get to that bit and I skip it, and he says, ‘now come on, you’ve got to read what you’ve written’.
"There are certain words I can’t use when I’m writing love scenes, and I just do it very diplomatically and make sure it’s nice and there’s nothing there that’s offensive."
Certain subjects require a good deal of research, such as the cryptocurrency angle in Fortune Smiles, she says.
"I wanted to do something on what’s going on in the world today. That’s when I decided to write that one on bitcoin and NFTs (non-fungible tokens) and virtual reality — I’m really into that now.
"I spent night after night on the computer researching. Really the Bitcoin aspect came about after a guy rang us about investing, and then when I saw what happened to Bitcoin and read about the chap Beeple who did his painting and put it on the NFT trading for $100 and sold it for $69 million.
"And then all the film stars and the rich people started buying them, but you get nothing, they’re just something on your computer."
Before all that, the Nyhons received a phone call one evening from a man wanting to sell them Bitcoin for $150 per Bitcoin.
"We decided, yes, we would. So I said we’ll spend $1000, just for a start. He gave me his bank account, and I put the money into his account, and then I get a phone call from him saying ‘the money hasn’t gone in, it’s been declined’.
"That was strange, because I knew what was in our account. He said, ‘it doesn’t say insufficient funds, just that it’s been declined. Would you put it through again?’. So we put it through again and we got another call from the guy saying it’s declined again.
Nyhon also took on the tricky subject of Covid-19 in her book Coronavirus — A Novel. It was "close to the wind" but she just wanted to write something controversial, even though she says she isn’t sure why.
"I wanted to write about how I thought the coronavirus started and a bit of it has ended up true. I got really caught up in the story. And I love the story. Unfortunately, Amazon said they would do it as a print book, but they wouldn’t do it as an e-book, for fear of retaliation from China, because it’s damning.
"I said how it was in the laboratory in China and how I thought it got around the world. I followed it up with The Whistle-blower’s Severed Link."
Nyhon has no shortage of life to draw on, including a near-death experience when she was in her mid-20s that she says has made her unafraid of dying.
She and Kelvin have spent much of their married lives in Central Otago but also ran holiday resorts along the Queensland coast.
As managers they had to deal with some of the worst behaviour of spoilt holidaymakers one could imagine. They also discovered there were members of the drug underworld living at one of their resorts.
"Different things went on and in the end we clicked. Kelvin was pulling the curtains in one of the units one night and he looked across, and their whole bench was stacked with money.
"I’d get the lift up to our second-floor apartment and quite often there’d be a girl crouched down in the lift. We thought she had a drink problem, but she was drugged and she was going down to the beach with her backpack at night burying the drugs in the sand, and people were collecting them."
Life in a Mosgiel retirement village is considerably less scary. With two sons and a daughter, and two grandsons, she and Kelvin are closely involved in family life.
She spends as much time as possible in her garden, although she is limited by being on crutches after a hip operation that went wrong.
As the village’s author, she is also a driving force behind its newsletter, writing monthly profiles of residents there.
"I get a lot of things put on me here in the village. People here always say to me, ‘Margaret, you’re never any different from one day to the next’. I don’t have mood swings. I can cope with whatever.
"I just carry on, and nothing gets me down."
