21st June - whirlwind madness!
Apologies for not writing for a month, but things have been soooo busy with Sweet Hearts, and I am now blogging almost daily on the new Sweet Hearts website - yes! It is live and EXTREMELY funky! (though one of my friends asked, 'Crikey, Jo, have you completely abandoned your feminist principles?' which rather gave me pause to think. More on that one later if I can come up with a coherent argument!)
STAR CROSSED is popping up all over the place in shops, and it's all so exciting because I've never had this much promotion before! There was even a two-page spread in MIZZ magazine - omigosh! And the fab news is that Sainsbury's Book Club has chosen the second book, STRICTLY FRIENDS? as their Book of the Month in August (which is puzzling me somewhat since it's not supposed to be published until September but maybe things will happen faster than that!)
So this news page will probably not be updated as often as it used to be because I now have blogging commitments elsewhere. However, TAKE TWO which I wrote aaaaages ago and is due to be published by Barrington Stoke, will be out April 2011 (it's been delayed and delayed further) so any news about other books will definitely still be recorded here!
26th May - IT'S NEARLY HERE!
STAR CROSSED is published tomorrow!! Woohoo! And what's making me even more excited than that is the anticipation of the new Sweet Hearts website. I cannot WAIT to see the finished thing! I have been allowed a couple of sneak peeks and they are simply fab. And on Monday I spent a very hot afternoon in Queen Park with Suzanne from Random House who filmed me doing lots of short introductions and reading an extract from the book - all of which are due to appear on the website too! Many thanks to Ailsa McEnallay for agreeing to interview me and doing such a brilliant job! (and I hope I've spelt your name correctly!)
Plans for the launch party are also going swimmingly - that reminds me, I must do some posters asap. I have ordered the invitations, do send me a message if you'd like one!
In the meantime, I finished proof edits on Book 2 last week as planned, and Book 4 is ticking along nicely. Lovely Editor also gave me her edits on Book 3 on Monday over lunch and to our relief, there isn't too much to do, phew! So that should be fitted in soon, though not today because I am trying to bump up the wordcount on Book 4 as much as possible, and also I have some small plants that MUST be planted out in the garden today before they outgrow their pots and die! The garden is looking really lovely at the moment, and I am managing to do some work in my shed, which is a wonderfully peaceful place to write.
Here is a quick pic of the bottom of our garden, with the lovely honeysuckles and clematis and some really pretty aquilegia, not to mention the poppies starting to come up:
So, you may ask, how am I going to celebrate Publication Day tomorrow?
I am going to the dentist!
17th May - proofs and pudding
Ooh, it's all getting very exciting! This morning I took delivery of two helium canisters and one hundred balloons for the Sweet Hearts launch party! (More on that in a week or two). I have also seen the design for the homepage of the new Sweet Hearts website and it is FANTASTIC!! I am busy writing extra stuff to go on the site, like a special story about one of the characters as well as character blogs to be posted every couple of weeks alongside my own blog.
In the time in between (ahahhahaha!) I am proof-reading Book 2, which arrived last week and has a deadline of this Friday, and also forging ahead with Book 4, which is approaching 10,000 words. I am also due to go to London on Monday to do some filming for a video to appear on the new website. And have lunch with my lovely editor, hopefully. Soooo it's busy, busy, busy!
PS there is no pudding. I just put that in the title for alliterative purposes. Sorry.
5th May - Sweet Hearts countdown!
The good news is that I'm feeling MUCH better, thank goodness! Though Jemima has come down with a streaming cold, so I'm hoping very much that I can avoid this particular virus. We were all at my sister-in-law's wedding in the Lake District at the weekend which was a really lovely affair - congratulations Helena and Jonathan!
Stuff is Happening about the launch of STAR CROSSED the first Sweet Hearts book on May 27th - I am organising a book launch! How exciting, I've never had one before! So am making lots of lists of things like cake, decorations and music. The very lovely English Department at Matthew Arnold School in Oxford has offered to host it for me, so I must get things sorted very quickly now as they'll be in the middle of public exams. Will let you know when it is!
Copy edits are done on STRICTLY FRIENDS? and I am trying to get back to Book 4 but there are sooo many other things to do, like start up a Sweet Hearts fanpage on Facebook, order postcards for the launch, talk to someone at Random House about the new website...poor Book 4 is calling to me plaintively but it will have to wait a few days more! Besides, the enforced separation has been good, I think, because it has clarified a few things in my head about the central character. And that's good to discover now, 5k into the book and not 50k in! Edits on ICE DREAMS (Book 3) should be in by the end of the month, so I shall have to drag my brain back into the world of ice skating.
But but but...the REALLY exciting thing is that a copy of STAR CROSSED arrived in the post last week! Yes! A real shiny new copy like wot will be in all the shops! And it's fab, I am so pleased with it. And here, for your delectation, is the lovely front cover:
Isn't that snazzy? And the grey bits are all silver foil on the real book - ooh, shiny!
26th April - ill again and new Barrington Stoke book out!
It's been 20 days since I last wrote and there's a good reason for that - I've been very very fed up with YET ANOTHER virus - this time tonsillitis. Which has just hit two weeks long today and although I am finally starting to feel a little better, I'm still not back to 100%. So I have been very grumpy and my poor family has had to put up with me moping around the house, yelling, 'Where's the paracetamol?' (OK, not yelling, throat has been too sore, I said that for dramatic effect).
In the meantime, my new gr8read OUT has been published by Barrington Stoke, and I think it has possibly the best cover image of any of my books so far!
How cool is that?! And it's so brilliant because it's about a girl who's in love with her best friend (a boy) who realises he's gay and in love with another boy. And you can get all that from the front cover - genius!
Fighting my stupid sore throat, I went to talk to some undergraduate publishing students at Oxford Brookes last week. I went well over time, but they didn't seem to mind (!). I hope I talked some sense and certainly they asked some very good questions. I gather they have to write some kind of coursework essay on the 'author to book' process, and so they had been thinking of suitable questions anyway. My favourite was 'at which point in the process are you as the author most needed, and when are you least needed by the publisher?' Good question! I said (in case you're interested) that I think the author is most needed - nay, vital - at the beginning of the process, the actual creation of the book and the editing stages. After that - well, the author could be hit by a bus and it wouldn't necessarily have an impact on the publication of the book. Most other things - jacket design, publicity, blurbs, booksellers - are handled by the publisher (usually). If you're a Brookes student reading this, good luck with your coursework and it was great to meet you!
This morning I am anxiously awaiting the e-arrival of the copy-edits on STRICTLY FRIENDS? because although it shouldn't be complicated to do, I only have three days to do it as I have lost my Friday writing day this week. My sister-in-law is getting married on Saturday (hello, Helena! Stop worrying!) and we are driving up to the lovely Lake District on Friday morning. Let's hope for another decent weekend, weather-wise!
6th April - signing off Book 2 at last!
Despite my misgivings (and frank astonishment) I did actually make my deadline for the rewrite of STRICTLY FRIENDS? and RK must have cleared her schedule specially because she read it within 24 hours! (sorry to any other authors who were waiting for her response...) Much to my HUUUGE relief, she liked it (yay!) and so it has now gone to the copy-editor for a close reading rather than coming back to me for more rewrites. This is fab news because copyedits are usually quick to deal with and there shouldn't be any major work to do on it now. So - phew!
In the meantime I have been quite unwell with a chest infection which has laid me low with post-viral knackeredness, but I am starting very slowly to feel better. Which is just as well because I need to get cracking on Book 4!
"Book 4?" I hear you cry. "Whatever happened to Book 3?" Aha, but you see this is where we came in a whole year ago. Book 3 - ICE DREAMS, set for publication February 2011 - was the very first SWEET HEARTS I wrote (then called HEARTBEATS) and so has been patiently waiting in a data file for its moment in the editing suite. Sooo that's really good because it means that I am now working a year in advance instead of about six months. Which means I can stop panicking that I can't get everything done.
So Book 2 will come back in a couple of weeks with some line edits to do, and at some point soon Book 3 will also come back, with possibly more structural edits to do (although hopefully not as it was in quite good shape to start with, unlike the fated Book 2) but in the meantime I am free to start work on Book 4!
Everybody got that?
22nd March - editing and the Oxford Literary Festival
The edits on STRICTLY FRIENDS? arrived from RK and were as substantial as I had feared! I am now trudging my way through re-writes and culling minor characters with abandon (just too many people in this book! Some Must Go! Sale Now On!). I hate editing, and this book is becoming very much my least favourite, which I am sure is only a temporary love/hate relationship. I think the changes are definitely for the better though - just wish they were all done and finished and back with Random House! I blithely told RK that I should be able to do them by the end of the month. Having hit half-way today, I'm no longer sure that's at all possible...oops! We plod on...
On a more exciting note, I went to two events at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday and much enjoyed myself. The first was a discussion on Fantasy and Reality by Malorie Blackman, Frances Hardinge and Philip Pullman. Having heard Malorie speak before and having met PP, I was primarily going to hear from Frances, since her debut novel Fly By Night has the extraordinary distinction of being the ONLY book that my agent Penny has ever TOLD me to read. She was right, of course, it's brilliant, and I hope Frances won't mind my including a very short quotation to illustrate her fantastic ability with language:
'For a while the river's current rolled the little boat about, the way a child rolls a marble between his hands. Houses fled away giddily to the left, only to reappear from the right, and the moon circled above Mosca's head like a moth. Fat raindrops hit the dark glass of the river's skin, each leaving a coin-shaped dent with a crinkled edge. The papery sound of the rain was so loud that Clent had to lean towards Mosca to make himself heard.' Fly By Night p236
I was delighted that Frances agreed to sign my copy after the talk and also that she confided in me that her editors are constantly telling her to rein in her use of metaphors and images 'because they hunt in packs,' she told me, 'and I would write pages and pages of imagery if I let them take over.' I said I'd never come across anyone using language in such a fresh way before and thought she shouldn't let her editors cut out too much!
Other things I learned from that morning talk: Philip Pullman watches Neighbours (who knew?) 'because it's fascinating watching them get hold of a really good plot idea and then screwing it up'; Malorie Blackman took a superhero kit (consisting of black leotard and tights) to school for three years just in case someone came in and took everyone hostage; Frances Hardinge played imaginary games with her sister for years in which there were portals between worlds and everything.
In the afternoon, I went to hear the talk on The Blue Peter Book I Couldn't Put Down, which consisted of the three shortlisted authors - Ali Sparkes, Harriet Goodwin and Frank Cottrell Boyce - and Sonali Shah, from CBBC Newsround. Again, a great event and I immediately made a decision to go out and buy the books. Ali's especially appealed to me as it contains two characters who are children in the 1950s, cryogenically frozen and then woken up in 2009. I loved the way she talked about imagining Julian and Anne from the Famous Five and what they would make of life in the 21st century. Ali won the category, by the way, and the extract she read out was utterly hilarious. I must get hold of that book!
Oh goodness, I almost forgot! The previous Saturday - 13th March - I did a signing with six fellow SAS authors at the Book Store in Abingdon. We had a great time doing a collective event, though we did all agree that perhaps seven authors was slightly too many for the size of shop! Here is a photo of us all, courtesy of Sara Wallcraft, Monkeyflower Design:
From left to right: Rhiannon Lassiter, me, Dennis Hamley, Mary Hooper, Mary Hoffman, Katherine Langrish and Leslie Wilson.
10th March - plotting and planning
Edits haven't yet arrived on STRICTLY FRIENDS? but I know RK has done them, so maybe they'll arrive today. I much prefer working from a hard copy when editing. I find it much easier than working on screen using track changes (though I'm happy to use them for copy-editing later on). Also expected today is a new kneeling chair for me to use at the computer - in deep purple! Will report back on how comfy it is!
Whilst waiting for edits on Book 2 I have plotted Book 4. (Remember that Book 3, ICE DREAMS, was the first one I wrote so I'm going straight to Book 4.) Book 4 has a general theme of gardening, which may not sound very romantic but having written three that could be called quite stereotypically 'girly' (theatre, dancing and ice skating) I wanted to do a story about a girl who spends most of her life with dirty fingernails and who loves growing flowers and digging in the garden. In fact, it may be my favourite so far because I am really enjoying plotting out this one. I had done the whole plot yesterday but today I had an idea on how to improve it so I'm having to re-do it. Once I have plotted it into some kind of synopsis, I then start writing a detailed chapter breakdown that usually runs to several pages. I never used to work like this - I used to prefer to let the characters lead me through the story - but when writing to such tight deadlines, I find I've had to change the way I write. And I don't mind at all, I think it helps these books to be written in this way.
I had a busy but exciting week last week. As reported in my last post, I was due to visit a Brownie pack in North Leigh, which turned out to be great fun and as usual I ran out of time to do everything! We did some imagination exercises and some acting out arguments, which was hilarious. And the Brownies had been writing their own stories about a magic box, which were fantastic and so imaginative.
I dashed from that event straight to Larkmead School in Abingdon in order to talk to a very large group of parents/teachers/publishers about writing reluctant readers for Barrington Stoke. I hugely enjoyed this event and was so pleased to finally meet Patience Thompson, who co-founded Barrington Stoke and who has edited all my books over the phone with me since the beginning. Many thanks to Mark Thornton at Mostly Books for supplying books (they sold loads, how wonderful!) and generally getting everything organised.
On Tuesday I went up to Random House to meet their sales reps as planned. Wow! I had NO idea just how many people were involved in selling English-speaking titles to foreign booksellers. I felt really honoured to meet them and to be able to say thanks in advance for all their hard work. Thanks also to RHCB themselves for putting on a wonderful spread of Lebanese food (YUM! And I ate everything in my doggy bag on the train home too - what a greedy-guts!) and for also putting out bowls of heart-shaped sweets and Love Hearts too! I felt even more honoured when I was introduced to the reps in the same sentence as Nick Sharratt (who was also there and was lovely)!
Then on Thursday I went back to Wychwood School (which I only left at Christmas) to present prizes for the best short story. I was delighted that Beth Saward won with her fantastic story - I don't know if she has seriously considered a career as a writer but if she does decide to pursue that path I am quite convinced she will do very very well. Remember her name!
So now I am back on track, plotting and planning and with only one event coming up - a signing with some other SAS authors at the Book Store in Abingdon this Saturday 13th March. But I quite like things to be a little quieter so I can make sure I'm staying on schedule!
Time for coffee, and perhaps a brioche. I am so lucky to be able to do this!
1st March - sickness, proofs and writerly love
I have a very good excuse for not writing for two weeks - everyone here has been ill in one form or another, including me. Once again, the Small Child shares her viruses with us - how thoughtful! But I am now feeling much better, if a little tired (but that might be because she got us up for three hours in the night...) and will try to remember what happened in which order!
Proof pages of STAR CROSSED arrived with a turnaround of less than a week - thanks a bunch, LOL! Fortunately they were very clean indeed and Random House had had their own eagle-eyed expert going through them too, so hopefully there will be not one single tiny typo or error in the final book! Thanks to my dad for reading them at top speed too!
Last Tuesday I went for a photo shoot at a local studio - huge fun! I took lots of heart-shaped props, like cushions and sweets, and spent two hours posing in all sorts of ridiculous ways with them. We are just choosing the final images and then I will put one or two up for public consumption!
This weekend just gone, I spent in
This week I am expecting edits on STRICTLY FRIENDS? which will be extensive, I'm quite sure. I am also judging a short story competition for my old school, and I do need to start plotting out Book 4 of Sweet Hearts (no title yet). But tonight I am doing two author visits - one to a local Brownie pack, which should be great fun, and then straight to a talk for Barrington Stoke in Abingdon. And then tomorrow afternoon I am shooting back to
13th February - London lunch and Sweet Hearts tea party!
Yesterday I went up to London and did all sorts of exciting things. Firstly, I had lunch with my writer friend Tabitha Suzuma, whose new YA book FORBIDDEN is out at the end of May (can't wait! Bet it's brilliant, all her other books are!). We had a lovely time at Bella Italia (somebody tell me, did it used to be Bella Pasta, or is that a different chain entirely?) and got very silly with suggestions for future books.
Then I met Ruth M, Random House Publicity Gal, who took me to a cupcake cafe (OMG they were amazing) and talked to me about Where We Are At with publicity stuff and asked me if I could do a short introduction to Sweet Hearts that she could film and post on the company website (or something). Fortunately I was pre-warned about this so had put on some makeup! Ruth also showed me something VERY exciting - personalised Love Heart sweets with the Sweet Hearts logo and everything on them!! Then she told me she was leaving - noooo! It's always really sad (and worrying for an author) when someone you've worked with at a publisher's leaves. You wonder who will take over and whether they'll be as nice and whether they'll like your work as much and all that. But I'm sure whoever takes over from Ruth will be lovely too...*lip wobble*
Then Suzanne came to join us, and she's from the Digital Team and wanted to talk to me about the website and other online stuff we can do (eg fan page on Facebook etc). They are REALLY keen on me doing lots of video podcasts, which is kind of cool (although I don't want everything I say to be in a podcast because some people don't like them or want to visit the site on a public computer etc). And they also want to film a short introduction with me before the publication of each new book - !!! The list Suzanne gave me says '1/2 day filming as standard with Jo in specific themed location' - OMG! The other things that they're thinking of for the website involve lots of secret info and exclusive material which - you guessed it - involves me writing a whole load more! What a good thing I'm not trying to be a teacher at the same time any more...
THEN I went to a special Sweet Hearts tea party in Kilburn, where a group of Y7 girls were giving opinions on jacket covers for their age group and also sharing their responses to STAR CROSSED (the first one, which they've been given as sneak peeks!). By the time I arrived, they had already ranked the books whose covers they liked, and they were very sweet about my book. If you guys are reading this, hello! And especial thanks to Katie and Ailsa for hosting the party at their house!
Ruth K, my editor, was also at the party, and she said she had had a quick read of STRICTLY FRIENDS? and really liked it - so that was a huge relief! As I expected, she thinks it needs some more work, especially the central character and the early pacing, but basically she thinks it hangs together as a story. So that's good - and I even confessed that I had started plotting Book 4 on the train on the way up!
Today I am quite tired...but am really thrilled at the way things are going. How lucky am I!!
10th February - phew!
I have just emailed the manuscript of STRICTLY FRIENDS? to my editor. Hurrah! It's tidier than it was, and I've added in some extra bits because when you write you make mental notes 'oh, must mention something about her feeling fat when she talks about her boyfriend later' - and then you forget to put it in. Which is why re-reading is so very important, because you remember that you'd made that mental note and you can go back and add in the extra stuff. So the manuscript was running at about 48k but the extras have added another 500 words.
I am SO relieved it's basically done, constructed, knitted together. But I shall be even MORE relieved when my editor says 'yes! It's great!' I don't mind how many bits I need to work on, just as long as she likes the basic story. Fingers crossed!
In other news, I bought a new pair of black boots yesterday (no, not wellies - I have some of those already!) and was dismayed to find that they were two different sizes when I got them home! Cue trip back to the shop today to exchange them - the shop assistant was very apologetic. I wonder what would have happened if I hadn't noticed the problem and they had been left with a right boot size 5 and a left boot 5 1/2 in the shop - would they have been able to sell them? Or would those boots then have been thrown away?
Oh dear, see what happens when I finish a new book? I revert back to Completely Boring And Pointless Wittering...
I suppose this means I shall have to start planning SWEET HEARTS 4 soon - which is so far off my radar that it doesn't even have a title yet.
But first, perhaps, more shopping.
5th February - a light at the end of the tunnel!
STRICTLY FRIENDS? is nearing completion! No, really! I rewrote all the stuff I needed to and then ploughed on, but it is much better than it was. I warned my editor today that it'll still need more work though. I'm not sure the pacing works properly (where you want the climaxes to come at the right points, and you want the reader to RACE to the end to find out what happens!) and the central character still worries me a bit - is she simply too nice?
In other news, I read two stonking books recently: UGLIES by Scott Westerfeld, and TROUBADOUR by Mary Hoffman. Completely different - the first is futuristic sci-fi, brilliantly realised, and the second is historical fiction, also brilliantly realised and heartbreaking in places - but both very gripping and so well written. I also read THE WHITE DARKNESS by Geraldine McCaughrean, a writer I admire very much. But oh dear, I just couldn't get on with this book, which was a dreadful disappointment because it won the Whitbread Children's Award (before it became the Costa). I wondered if my judgement was impaired, but reading the Amazon reviews suggests it's a bit of a Marmite book. Lots of five star reviews but also some one-stars. I definitely didn't think it was a one-star book (Gillian wouldn't be capable of a one-star book, I am quite sure) but I found it very difficult to care about the characters. It's set in the Antarctic, but I would have liked more mention of the physical difficulties as well as the spiritual ones. And I thought the central character almost unbelievably naive. But never mind. UGLIES and TROUBADOUR more than made up for it - and Mary Hoffman has just asked me if I would read her latest (unpublished) adult novel! I am so excited and honoured!
Right, must go and defrost soup for lunch.
27th January - plot tangles and high stakes
Work continues on STRICTLY FRIENDS? but it's been a bit of a trudge and yesterday I figured out why. The central character is far too sensible! She's meant to fall for this 'bad boy' who's into skateboarding and BMX racing and all this stuff (whereas she loves dancing). But in the version I'd written, she didn't much enjoy having a go at go-karting or the like. Which meant the two characters had no reason to be together really - I mean, why exactly did she like him? And he's meant to do a big humiliating dumping scene towards the end of the book (so she can realise that actually it's her best friend Jake she loves. Oops, probably giving away the end of the book here!) but as it approached, I was thinking 'well, she won't be that upset, will she? Because she's not that fussed about him anyway.'
WRONG, wrongity wrong! The emotional journey doesn't work that way! Oh dear! We need more drama, more trauma! She has to actually be upset by the dumping, otherwise it's all very tame and boring and frankly why should the reader care?
Soooo, now she has to have a change of attitude. She has to find the racing and stuff very exciting because it's so different from anything she's done before. She has to develop a taste for danger! And that means she can develop as a person too - get stroppy and be rude to her parents (shock! horror!) and come on an 'emotional journey' (gaaah) in order for the end of the book to work.
Which is all very well and good, but that means re-writing practically EVERYTHING I've already done! I mean there are some bits that can be kept, some that can be tweaked, but everything else...oh dear. And I do so hate re-writing!
But. It will be better. Much better. And the fact that the rewrites are flowing quite well suggests it is exactly the right thing to do.
Annoyingly.
20th January - furious writing or writing furiously?
A new year and my new life as a full-time writer! The past year has been quite extraordinary in terms of opportunities, and now I have to fulfil my obligations - what FUN! I can't help feeling extremely lucky when I sit down to write FOUR TIMES A WEEK now - what luxury! And sometimes I manage to fit in a bit in the evening or at the weekend too.
Which is just as well, because I am now under contract for six books of my series SWEET HEARTS which launches in June with the first book STAR CROSSED.
So here's where we're up to with the various processes:
STAR CROSSED (Book 1) is all written and edited. Random House is now finalising the jacket design - something that is taking a long time because the design chosen for book 1 will be the basic design for ALL the books (hopefully more than six as the years go by) so they are, naturally, anxious to get it Just Right. As am I, obviously, but I have to say that so far the designs are looking very promising and I think my readers are going to love them! Once the cover is designed, there may well be proof copies made (sort of rough versions of the final book) and more discussions about publicity and promotion etc etc.
STRICTLY FRIENDS? (Book 2) is half written. I am quite behind on it because of last term, trying to teach and look after Jemima and write all at the same time. Needless to say, it wasn't plain sailing and so now I'm rather playing catch-up. But my lovely editor has given me an extra couple of weeks to complete it, so I hope to get the first draft to her by mid-February. It's due out in September, so I am VERY aware of how tight deadlines could be! The book itself is going well, it's just a question of getting enough words on the page every day.
ICE DREAMS (Book 3) is already written, since it was the first book I wrote and was submitted to publishers last summer. However, it's going to be published Feb 2011 because it's about ice skating, and that's the middle of winter and Torvill and Dean are on the TV etc. Ice Dreams needs editing, but that can wait until Book 2 is done.
In other news, OUT will be published by Barrington Stoke in March (I think, it got pushed back a bit) and TAKE TWO has been bumped to spring 2011, which is a shame but never mind. I also heard yesterday that Barrington Stoke has sold Swedish rights for PERFECT, my first ever book with them! So that's nice, because the same Swedish publisher also took MINDSET last year (which translated into SYNDABOCK which I think is a much better title!) I look forward to seeing PERFECT in Swedish!
So I'm busy busy busy at the moment, but really loving this whole Being a Writer thing (yes, I know I was a writer before, but this is different!). A big HELLO to anyone from Wychwood who is wondering what I've been doing with my time since leaving at the end of last term. I promise to come and visit soon!