A SELF-PUBLISHED novelist from Somerset has written a “real woman’s” romantic comedy after getting fed up with fiction’s lazy love for the ‘happy ever after’.

Eight years after taking up her personal mission, Darel Pace from Cotford St Luke has released her take on chick lit, Broken Dreams, Bottom Lines.

The 35 year-old, who lives with her teenage children Connor and Caitlyn a stone’s throw from where she was born, also works full time as English teacher and head of media at Bishop Fox’s.

“The classic ‘happily ever after moment in film and literature drives me insane,” says Darel.

“When I was a single mum, certainly when I was younger, I used to hate reading romantic stories where there’s a handsome prince charming and it’s all so magical, and ‘happy ever after’.

“I wanted to write a romantic comedy with a character who’s already had children… it takes the idea of happily ever after and shows that actually, life’s more complicated than that, but doesn’t mean it’s any less hopeful. It’s something that a lot of people will recognise and respond to I hope.”

Pitched midway between Bridget Jones’ Diary and Sex And The City, the book retains the warm realism of Helen Fielding’s classic and Candace Bushnell’s four female protagonists, but keeps the story firmly free from cosmopolitan gloss, says Darel.

“It’s set in Bath, because I wanted to put it into a British city that people recognise certain aspects and features of, and to make it stereotypically British in some places. So there’s picnic scenes, playing in the park in the rain, the behaviour of people in a nightclub… I definitely didn’t want to go to London.”

The book is “light-hearted, really fast reading that you can sit on a beach with on holiday and read in a day and a half.”

Responding to popular demand, Darel is now writing not just one, but two sequels, the second of which to be launched at Christmas along the theme of “blended families and messy business”.

Broken Dreams, Bottom Lines is available as a Kindle download or paperback from Amazon.