By Jennifer Litz
Editor
April 11, 2008

Sarah Holland is going places. The author came here, actually, from the Isle of Man. She just finished writing a psychological thriller set in San Angelo; it’s up for auction in New York as we speak. And you may just see Holland pop up on the silver screen soon, if you haven’t already seen her cameos in 2003’s “Love Actually” or 2000’s “Treasure Island” with Jack Palance. She just returned back to San Angelo, where she’s staying with a friend, from a film audition in Austin earlier this week.

“I can’t tell too much about the part,” she says in her deep, British-accented brogue. “I did a casting, screen test [Tuesday] in Austin. And as far as I can see I’ve got the part. But I’m not 100 percent certain, because they haven’t e-mailed me yet.

Holland comes off as an optimist—a dry, witty, hilarious one. “It’s a sort of patronizing bitch mother-type,” she says of the part. “And I’ll have to talk about diamonds a lot, and be very snooty. So I did my British diamond-talking bitch for them.

“If I do get this role,” she reasons, “the film community, like publishing, is quite small.” She thinks this role could lead to others.

Holland should know. Being in close contact with creative field leaders has begotten many of her creative endeavors. For instance, having Harlequin Mills & Boon flagship Charlotte Lamb for a mother certainly didn’t hurt Holland’s chances of conquering the romance novel genre: At 18, she became one of Harlequin Mills & Boon’s youngest published novelists.

Shaky Start

Holland actually started writing because she couldn’t hold down any other jobs in her teens. Epilepsy relegated Holland to the hospital several times a week while she was trying to keep herself afloat in a London flat after her family had moved to the Isle of Man. Eventually, her mother told her to come home, and that she would be taught the writing trade.

Sarah’s mother Sheila Holland—known to myriad fans as “Charlotte Lamb,” who penned over a hundred romance novels—told her daughter to start the novel process writing a single introductory chapter. With her mother’s approval, Holland continued with subsequent chapters, and would knock on her mother’s door whenever she got stuck.

Read Holland’s prose now (she had an article in Thursday’s San Angelo Standard-Times) and you experience the vivid imagery of a born writer. But she credits her powerhouse mother with imparting the basics: dialogue, character, and story structure.

“Obviously you have story points, but what links them are incidents,” Holland says. “Lots of times when people start to write, they tend to not know how to get to the next story point. She also taught me structure, which is the most important thing. If there’s a flaw in the structure, your reader will put the book down. And they might not even recognize that’s why they’re doing it.”

Holland was 18 when she finished “Too Hot to Handle.” She didn’t expect it to be published.

“It’s about a pop star—I was madly in love with Julio Iglesias at the time,” Holland says. “He was very big in Europe. I thought he’d make a good Harlequin hero. So I wrote a story about a young beau that followed [him when he was visiting her city, and they fall in love]. The character was based on Julio.”

Now Holland has penned over 22 romance novels for Mills & Boon—and she has the formula down to a “t.”

Formula for Romance

“If you’re going to attempt to write for Harlequin, you’ve probably already read their books,” Holland sagaciously suggests. “And the formula is evident.”

Much has been written about the romance genre’s devoted following. Many readers, we learn in psych or mass media class, are housewives seeking the fulfillment they lack in their marriages through the formulaic prose of these books.

“You have to basically write 55,000 words [of] contemporary romance,” Holland says, “10 chapters, 20 pages each, which are usually focused almost exclusively on the hero and heroine. The bestselling format is a hero in his mid-to-late 30s, with a young blonde female in her early-to-mid 20s.

“[Harlequin] has a number of different lines,” Holland says. “I can’t remember the names of all of them. Harlequin is modern, with heroes and heroines [having] careers; they probably end up having foresex, though that won’t be described. My mother used to say, ‘we shall have no naming of parts.’[Hence the jokes about ‘heaving bosoms’ and ‘throbbing members.’] They fight their way to the aisle and get married, and—viola!—it’s the end of the book.”

Holland is probably best well known for her romantic novels. She’s been published in almost every language; her writing and research has taken her to over 50 countries.

And then there’s the big stick measure of success: Pokemon.

“All the Harlequin books have been republished as Pokemon cartoons,” she says. “So all my heroines have really big eyes now.”

Semi-Autobiography

Holland has found romance novels a bit too formulaic for her current mood. She’s embarked on a new psychological thriller series. As in many books, romance is featured, but not center-stage. “The Killer Archetype,” the first of what she plans to be a four-book series, is currently up for publisher’s bid.

“My love for San Angelo comes out very strongly in this book,” says Holland, whose recent article for the paper delineated the local sights, scents, and stories that strike the Kent, England, native. “I’ve used my favorite locations—Fort Concho, Beauregard, the Lake, the land, the insects and creatures.

“It begins with murder in San Angelo . . . the actual storyline [concerns] a murder, a serial killer with sexual abuse thrown in.

“A Jungian analyst lives in San Angelo and is a recent widower; he comes to San Angelo to recover. And he is an expert in his field, and famous in the United States for having won a Nobel Prize. And the heroine is British—imagine that!”

Holland explains how she herself arrived in San Angelo. “My best friend of 21 years who I met in London is a Texan, born and raised. She moved here from Austin seven years ago, and I’ve come to visit her ever since. I fell in love with Texas in 1991. I love San Angelo, I think it’s a lovely little place.”

Obvious story basics make Holland’s latest seem a bit semi-autobiographical.

“…So this British girl is living in San Angelo, and meets and falls in love with the Jungian analyst,” she says. “Together they set off to decipher the clues in a premonition dream she’s had about the murder. They’re common—Abraham Lincoln dreamt before he was shot that he was lying in a coffin surrounded by mourners.”

Holland’s heroine dreams she discovers a body in a houseboat on Lake Nasworthy (not autobiographical, Holland assures). “And she realizes her dream has come horribly true,” Holland says. “So they set off to decipher the 10 clues in her dream, which tell her who the murderer is. Along the way there’s sexual abuse and murder and 13 headless bodies.”

Holland says her story hero is based on “the love of her life,” a Danish man named Preben Skott who, besides having been a Jungian analyst and philosopher, was also a World War II resistance hero. “He was trained briefly by Carl Jung himself in Switzerland,” Holland says.

“He worked for the Danish resistance, lived in Africa for 10 years, and he was quite an amazing guy. He died in 1995—he had been given only a few months to live, and so he decided to die in Africa, which was his favorite country.”

Skott hastened his own death via a swallow dive over Victoria Falls. “That’s how he wanted to go,” Holland says. “He had lived an extraordinary life, and he wanted to die as he had lived.”

Epilogue

Holland has a knack for being related to or knowing people who foster her creative process. Currently, it’s her happenstance proximity to one of the country’s biggest news stories that has put her in a position to make another contribution. She says that many British tabloids have been carrying the story about the polygamist sect in Eldorado, and its women and children’s exodus to Fort Concho. But she says even the most reputed sources aren’t quite getting it right.

“All of the British nationals are carrying the story—and they’re getting it wrong,” she says. She recounts a photo error: one “highly respected” British newspaper that Holland declined to name printed the iconic photo of the Eldorado women weeping with children in their arms—with the wrong cutline. The paper relayed that moment as the one where women and children were leaving the compound. In actuality, they were already standing outside their temporary digs at Fort Concho.

Holland says she has e-mailed the papers-in-error, half-jokingly offering to be their journalist for the events going on a street away from her.

And why not? She’s already done everything else: Traveling the world? Check. Performing Shakespeare for the BBC? Check—though, after getting that check, she kept it on her wall instead of cashing.

Who knows what could come next?