The Zoë-Trope

RETROFRIDAY: CLICHE KILLER

2012-01-27T00:52:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dear Readers! Friday has arrived, and so it is time for another glumptious helping of that well known delicacy RetroFriday, where I present to you a post which you might have missed the first time around, or may benefit from reading again. Today's post?

CLICHE KILLER (Rawwwr!):

Happy Friday, dear readers! The end of the week has rolled around again and here I am submerged up to my chin in FrostFire, so close to writing The End that I can literally smell it (hmmmm. Grilled cheese). Before I type anything else, I'd like to encourage everyone to head over to the Undercover Reads blog and become a follower or bookmark it. And this is not just because Shadows on the Moon will be on this blog in July and will be getting an Undercover book trailer and promotions of it's own. It's because this blog is really fascinating and an excellent resource for young writers (it's run by the editors of Walker Books!).

So just a quickie workship today, inspired by the lovely Vivienne DaCosta (of Serendipity) and designed to help you do something that all writers want to do: Kill those cliches stone dead (and yes, that's a cliche).

I'm not talking about cliched plots or characters here, because those are a bit of a deeper problem. This workshop is about is cliches at prose level. The first thing to realise about cliches is that they became cliches - over-used, meaningless phrases which a reader's eye skates over - because they WORKED. The first time that someone wrote these phrases:

It was a white knuckle ride

My heart sank into my stomach/my heart was in my mouth

He had an iron fist in a velvet glove

She was as white as a ghost

They were dead tired

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder

I had a snowball in Hell's chance/when Hell freezes over

They were SO good, so clear, so apposite, that everyone who read them said: WOW. And promptly stole them for their own writing, or to use in every day conversation. And after ten years, twenty years, fifty years of being used over and over again, these phrases have become basically meaningless.

See - that's the problem with a cliche. It's not just that it isn't original. It's that when a reader sees those words, that is ALL they see. The words. The phrase is so familiar that it no longer evokes an image or a feeling, as it should. It acts as a placeholder for what the writer wants us to know without actually telling us anything interesting or unique about this character or the situation. In most cases, the writer might as well just have written: Joe was scared, or Beth had no chance. Because the cliche is every
bit as flat and obvious.

No matter how beautifully rounded your characters, how stonking your plot or how unique your setting, if you're expressing these things using cliches your reader is likely to be stifling yawns. Language used correctly allows us to get to a reader's heart. It's a tool that we can utilise to shoot images directly into their brain. Using a cliche to do this is like trying to hammer a nail into the wall with a marshmallow. Cliches obscure everything bright and brilliant about your work.

Cliches turn words into a barrier between the reader and what you want them to feel.

When you're drafting, quite often the ideas are coming so fast that you shove a cliche in there just so you can keep going - and that's fine. I have friends who actually put notes in the margins with 'Make this better' or 'Wrong Word' so that they can pick these up in revision. Revision, you see, is the key to eliminating tired, bland phrases from your work.

When you come across a cliched phrase in your work you need to stop and think about WHAT YOU REALLY WANTED TO SAY. This might sound blindingly obvious, but it's not. So Ranjit 'gasped with shock' did he? Really? Is that what you actually want to convey to the reader - that your character reacted to this shock with exactly the same reaction as every other character who had a shock, ever? If something has just jumped out of the shadows at Ranjit, or another character has just confided something horrifying, the reader is smart enough to work out that Ranjit is shocked.

Tell them something they don't know.

How is this person reacting to the shock and what does that say about them? Maybe Ranjit was so shocked that he felt as if someone had punched him in the stomach? That's a cliche too, but at least it's a better cliche, one that tells us Ranjit's shock affected him physically, which tells us something about who he is.

Strip it back a bit more. What does being punched in the somach really feel like? Are you talking about this character literally staggering back, or maybe you just mean that his stomach cramps up and makes him hunch over? That's a reaction we can all sympathise with.

Having gotten this far, let's strip it back a bit further. What's going on in Ranjit's head, right now? Is he scared-shocked? Appalled shocked? Laughing-shocked? That's going to have a big affect on how he feels.

Maybe Ranjit is shocked because he's heard that his friend is dead. In the instant when this terrible news hits him, Ranjit doesn't want to hear it. He wants to block it out. In fact, for a second, it feels as if he's deaf, because his brain is trying to avoid having to cope with this awful news. Realising this about Ranjit (that he's the kind of person who reacts to shock by wanting to block it out, that it causes physical discomfort for him) is very good, because not only does it give the reader a deeper insight into him, it means that we - as the writer! - are going to know him well enough in future to hopefully avoid even more cliches.

So: Ranjit gets bad news. He feels a terrible pain in his stomach and has the sensation that his ears have stopped working. He's almost as devastated physically by what he's learned as he is emotionally. That's a powerful moment.

We've gone from:

Ranjit gasped with shock, staring at Sandeep as if he couldn't believe his eyes. (Reader reaction - BOOORING)

To:

Ranjit felt as if his ears had stopped working. A terrible pain cramped through his midsection - he doubled over, struggling for air. It took a moment for him to hear the rest of what Sandeep was saying. He didn't want to hear. (Reader reaction - Um...wow. Poor guy)

By stripping back the meaningless cliche and really thinking about the character, about how he feels, what he's going through, you've shown us reaction that truly feels real, one that has the possibility of moving us. One that, for that split-second, makes us think maybe we know just how he feels.

More than that, this description of how Ranjit reacts to learning about his friend's death tells us a lot about Ranjit himself, about who he is. That's every writer's Holy Grail (cliche alert!) - to convey character in every line. Someone who punches a wall when they hear this terrible news would be a very different Ranjit:

Sandeep's face blurred in Ranjit's eyes and pain exploded in his right hand. He realised that he had driven his fist into the wall of the barn. Sandeep was talking to him quietly, trying to coax him away, trying to look at his stinging, bleeding knuckles.

Someone who passes out would be a different Ranjit.

Someone who turns on the bearer of bad news would be a different Ranjit.

Someone who walked away before the bearer of bad news could even finish would be different:

Ranjit heard Sandeep's words distantly, but he didn't try to process them. He already knew. Sandeep's face had told him everything the second that his friend rounded the side of the barn. Ranjit jerked away from Sandeep and walked off, the noises of the farm rushing together in his head and turning to choked silence.

So many possibilities! So many ways to teach us about Ranjit and so many ways to make the reader feel. And we're even learning about Sandeep in the process! (Does anyone else totally ship Ranjit and Sandeep now? No? Just me then...)

The cliche tells us nothing. The good description tells us everything.

You probably can't do this for every single cliche in your book. You may have noticed that while the cliche took up one line there, the good piece of description took three lines. There are times when, in order to pick up the pace, you will need to skip the detailed analysis and allow the reader's eye to skate. There are also times when a reaction or an event isn't that important. Not every shock that the character gets is going to be a your-friend-is-dead-emo-angst type of shock. Ranjit doesn't need to double over with pain when he finds out there's no coffee for his breakfast (although I might).

But when you're depicting important events, when you're writing key scenes of action or emotion, make an effort to comb through them and catch the cliches. Then kill those suckers so that your characters can live.

ROADTRIP WEDNESDAY

2012-01-25T00:19:00.000-08:00

Road Trip Wednesday is a ‘Blog Carnival,’ where YA Highway's contributors post a weekly writing- or reading-related question that begs to be answered. In the comments, you can hop from destination to destination and get everybody's unique take on the topic.

We'd love for you to participate! Just answer the prompt on your own blog and leave a link - or, if you prefer, you can include your answer in the comments.

This Week's Topic

Pick two of your favorite YA characters and write a dialogue between them.

Well, you know what? I'm going to pick two of my own characters here (even though I don't think that was the purpose of the thing) because as soon as I read this the most funny, ridiculous pairing popped into my head. And that pairing is Akira, the fabulous fairy godmother from Shadows on the Moon, and Arian, the tortured, gruffly-wuffly lieutenant from the upcoming FrostFire.

(Bear in mind that I'm taking a few liberties with them here, just to allow them to exist in the same space)

BEGIN SCENE

Akira: Oh, hello! I didn't see you there - who are you?

Arian: (Stares, blushes, looks away) *Mutter mumble*

Akira: I beg your pardon, I didn't quite...

Arian: (Blushes harder) *MUTTER mumble growl mumble*

Akira: My apologies, perhaps there is something wrong with my hearing this morning. Could you repeat yourself for me one more time?

Arian: NEVER MIND!

Akira: (Jumps a little) Goodness me. Is there something wrong, young man? Because I can assure you that no matter how handsome you are, in this country that is not what passes for good manners. (Starts to turn away)

Arian: (Blinks) Handsome?

Akira: Oh, that got your attention? How typical. (Turns away again)

Arian: Wait!

Akira: (Sighs) Yes?

Arian: *Mutter mutter mutter*

Akira: (Sighs louder) Oh, will you please just come out with it? I'm starting to get the worrying sensation that I might be going deaf, and I'm not nearly old enough for that.

Arian: I think you're the most beautiful woman I've ever seen.

Both: Awkward pause.

Akira: Oh.

Arian: (Blushes brighter than a thousand suns)

Akira: Well, that's...that...ahem...very nice of you...ahem. But I think maybe...(Steps a little closer, leans in) *Whisper whisper whisper*

Arian: Oh? Oh! Um...well, I don't mind if you don't.

Akira: What? Really?

Arian: Well, just between you and me, there's this guy I was trying to get over, and then this girl...I'm open minded, you know? What's always mattered to me is - um - what's inside. And there's something about you...

Akira: (Stares, open-mouthed)

Arian: (Shifts uncomfortably)

Akira: All right. Come with me. You and I are going to get better acquainted. (Grabs his arm)

Arian (Allows himself to be dragged, a tiny smile on his face)

END SCENE

And there you are folks! That's what it looks like when an author writes fanfic for their own books - and ships a couple no one else probably ever thought of :)

LOOK WHAT I GOT!

2012-01-23T00:27:00.000-08:00

Dear Readers, I have a wonderful friend. She is called Barbara and she lives in Canada, and she is part of my writing group The Furtive Scribblers. Barbara, on top of being an intimidatingly talented word artist, is also a dedicated craftsperson who is determined to hone her abilities to their very sharpest. As part of this, she goes to a lot of writing and genre festivals and conventions, and she meets a lot of other writers, including some very famous ones.

Now, as I may have mentioned on the blog before, I live in somewhat of a geographical cul de sac. Travel from my home to...er...well, pretty much anywhere is both expensive and exhausting, and as a result of this and the fact that I need to look after my father, I don't often get to go to writing related events. And this means that I don't have access to something which I love and adore. Something which Barbara gets her hands on quite often.

Signed books.

Barbara, dear, lovely Barbara, knows that signed books are like crack to me. She is the one who managed to get me a signed and personalised copy of The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin, the book which I mention here as one of my ultimate writing influences (and by the way Ursula Le Guin? WE ARE NOT WORTHY *Bows Down*).

But this time, B. you have outdone yourself. This time when I opened the unexpected parcel that arrived on my doorstep I was not prepared for the awesomeosity that was to spill into my lap, oh no.

Remember this story about The One, Dear Readers? About the lightning-struck moment of clarity when my life changed forever as I realised that I wanted to write fantasy for young adults? And the author whose book I was reading at the time was...

That's right.

B. it's possible I might have had a heart attack when I saw this. But it was totally worth it. You are a bright and shiny star, and like a star, you always lead me home eventually. I'll see you back in the FSC soon, promise.

*Snuggles book*

RANDOM FRIDAY

2012-01-20T01:17:00.000-08:00

Is there any day of the week that I cannot engulf with my very own brand of randomosity? I think not. Onwards, Dear Readers!

First, I'd like to share this excellent post about sexism (thanks for bunting this my way Saya!) written by Rae Carson, author of last year's kickass debut fantasy Girl of Fire and Thorns - which I reviewed, glowingly, here. Everything that she talks about experiencing in her article, I experienced during my time in the working world, at three separate work places. And what was more, I didn't realise there was anything wrong with it for the longest time, because this is how young women and girls expect to be treated in our society. Once I did realise that something wasn't right, I felt powerless to change things because I had accepted being treated that way for years - and whenever I did try to stand up for myself, I incurred even more abuse.

I'm not sure even I understood the full extent of the bullying, harassment and abuse I dealt with on a day to day basis until I actually left my day job and worked for myself for a while, and was able to look back with some perspective. So it's sobering to realise that there are people out there - men and women - who believe sexism is a myth. And that women have somehow taken over the world and are being unfair to men. And that discrimination and anti-bullying laws should be scaled back, either to 'boost industry' or because they're no longer needed.

Next, I want to share this wonderful blog where an artist envisions Disney heroines as real people:

Seriously - how awesome is that? Go check out the other images on his blog.

Now for a question: What does everyone think about my website?

Do you think it needs a redesign? I first put it together nearly seven years ago and at the time it was the envy of everyone who looked at it - it was pretty and comprehensive and back then a lot of authors didn't even have a website. In the years since, though, all those writers who were hesitating on the brink of online activity have taken the plunge, and most of them paid web designers to create their sites, which means that the homemade nature of my little site has become startlingly obvious. What do you guys think? Do you like the wonky, homemade look the thing has now? Should I redesign myself? Or should I invest in something a bit more professional? That last one is expensive, so it's not a decision to be taken lightly.

If you think I should spring for a professional's help, do you have any favourite author sites - ones you think are particularly attractive, fun, or easy to navigate - to direct me to so that I can check out their designers?

Finally, since it's a brand new year and we've not talked about it for a bit - does anyone have any suggestions for what my challenge should be if/when the blog reaches 400 followers? It doesn't seem likely to happen any time soon, since we've been hovering around 320 for months now, but it would be nice to have something up there.

Well, that's all the random I've got right now. Have a great weekend - read you later!

JUNIOR LIBRARY GUILD SELECTION & COVER REVEAL!

2012-01-18T00:37:00.000-08:00

I'm very excited today, Dear Readers! I've got two lovely things to share with you.

Late yesterday evening (due to the time difference) I received an email from my editor at my U.S. publisher Candlewick Press. She told me that Shadows on the Moon, which is due to be released in a hardback edition in America on the 24th of April this year, has been chosen as a Junior Library Guild Selection.

I've heard of the JLG before but they've never picked any of my work to recommend, so this is wonderful news. I'm pretty sure it's also happy-making for Candlewick - my editor says the jacket of the book will be amended before it comes out to show the selection on the flap. The book isn't up on the JLG's website yet (presumably because this news is hot off the presses) but you can bet I'll be checking back frequently until I see it for myself!

Hot on the heels of this news, I realised that the final cover for the U.S. edition of Shadows on the Moon was up on the Amazon pre-order page. It's been up on various other websites for a while - NetGalley and Goodreads - but in a tiny thumbnail. Now, Candlewick had asked me not to put the artwork on my website until closer to the release date, so I've held back on that. But since we're now within a few months of U.S. publication, and the image is there in enlargeable form on both Amazon and the publisher's website, this seems as good a time as any for me to do a belated unveiling. So...

(Drumroll please!)

I know there's a lot of affection for the U.K. artwork (although I've seen some people dismiss it as generic too!) but I really love this. For a start - and believe me, I know how lucky I am! - there is No Racefail Here. The model is very beautiful, very Japanese, and has a flavour of that same mysterious Suzume expression which you see on the U.K. cover, and I adore that.

The most fabulous thing about this artwork, though, is the way that Suzume is fading away into the trees behind her, like a ghost, while at the same time luminous with a kind of fearsome beauty, her hair becoming a hood of shadow. The artist has captured something very important from the story: the idea that someone can project an image of beauty while their inner self is hidden or even dying. There's a great spookiness about this, too, which I like.

What do you guys think? And can anyone tell me how to get the larger image up on Goodreads when the thumbnail version is already there?

FROSTFIRE TEASER #4

2012-01-16T00:26:00.000-08:00

Heeellooo, Dear Readers! Today I bring you a teensy snippet of the upcoming Daughter of the Flames companion novel FrostFire, which is coming out from Walker Books in July of this year. Since the manuscript is in edits now, there's less chance than usual of this scene being significantly cut or changed, but you never know, so bear that in mind.

Since this is probably the last sample I'll be able to post for some time (if at all), it seemed only fitting to head back to the beginning of the book. Or...nearly the beginning. There's a preface, but that would give away far too much, my pretties (mwaa haa haa!). So here's the start of the first chapter proper. Click the cut for more:

My mouth tasted of dust and iron.

The cool white mists that rolled down the mountain slopes in the early morning had burned away, and the sun was directly overhead. Now and again a sudden, blinding flash of light would pierce the silvery blue leaf canopy, dazzling me. I had learned to walk with eyelids half closed.

My hips and feet ached like a half healed bruise. Sweat itched at the small of my back, in the bends of my knees and elbows. Waving strands of dark hair worked free of the braid pinned up around my head, and clung damply to my skin, no matter how often I tried to brush them back.

I’d been walking a long time.

I was blowing hair out of my face again when the dry earth gave way beneath my left boot. I lurched sideways and snatched at the waxy tree roots thrusting out of the hillside, dragging myself away from the edge. The path was dangerously narrow and winding. If I tumbled off, it was a very long fall down the steep layers of terraces into the river I could hear thundering below. I’d likely never get the chance to climb back up again.

I regained my footing, then sighed tiredly, letting go of the roots to shake red soil off my hands. The first few times the path had betrayed me my heart had pounded and my fingers had shaken. But I was too weary to get excited about these brushes with death anymore.

The bush ahead of me rustled.

I froze.

Something was shifting in the foliage. Something big.

A bandit? No. The bush wasn’t big enough.

Animal then. Leopard?

I couldn’t outrun a leopard.

My feet felt as if they had rooted into the crumbling earth. I swallowed hard, and slowly, slowly, slowly reached back for the handle of my father’s axe, which was secured across the top of my pack.

A massive blue pheasant burst out of the bush. The fan shaped copper tail nearly grazed my face as it flew up, filling the air with a frantic beating of wings that seemed to mock my speeding heartbeat. As the bird disappeared into the trees my hand fell limply from the axe. Just a bird. Just a bird.

I squeezed my eyes shut, taking deep, careful breaths as the world swam around me. Too weary to be excited by brushes with death? Oh, father – the lies I tell.

My stomach rumbled loudly, and I let out a weak laugh. I scrubbed my face roughly with both dusty hands, then turned off the path and clambered up the slope until I found a thick clump of glossy purple shrubs that would hide me from anyone passing below. I sank down in the shelter of the leaves and shrugged off the leather pack. My shoulders crunched with the movement. I groaned, stretching out aching legs and rotating my feet in their heavy boots.

From my new vantage point above the path, I could see the bright glint of water through the trees. The River Mesgao. Not far to go now. I just had to follow the river, and it would take me where I needed to go. My blood surged with hope and longing – and fear.

I had come such a very long way.

RETROFRIDAY: WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW?

2012-01-13T01:21:00.000-08:00

Happy Friday! Gosh, what a week it's been - I'm really glad to see the finish line in sight, let me tell you. Before I launch you into RetroFriday, I want to share this link for the 2012 Leeds Book Awards website. I'm up there, along with the other shortlisted titles and authors, and anyone who wants can write a review, although you need to be attending school in the Leeds area to actually vote.

And now it's time to dust off an antique post from days of yore (well, only 2010, actually), which sprang to mind this week because of the interesting discussion about empathy in the comments of Wednesday's post. Enjoy!

RetroFriday: WRITE WHAT YOU KNOW?

Okay, I know you've all heard that one before.

I guess how you react to it will depend on who you are. If you sailed single-handedly around the world at age fourteen, or volunteered to go abroad and build orphanages for the under-privileged in Borneo at fifteen, or climbed Mount Kilimanjaro when you were sixteen, then chances are you're making a smug face right now.

But if you're like me, a fairly normal person who's had a few interesting experiences but has generally lived an average sort of life, you're feeling a leeettle annoyed that someone's brought that old chestnut up again. And you kind of hate the adventurous people making disgusting smug faces (don't worry, so do I. Just a bit). But hang on just a minute there, Smuggy McSmuggerson! Read on, and you might find that you need to think again before writing your epic story about the smug single-handled sailing/orphanage-building/mountain-climbing kid from Ohio!

I'm going to let you in on a secret. Write what you know is the most widely misinterpreted piece of writing advice EVER. It does not mean what most of the people repeating it think it means. And that includes your teacher, your mum, and most probably that guy on the writing forum who laughed at your story about vampire unicorns. Trust me.

How do I know? Well, look at me, kids. Do I seem like a girl whose three brothers were turned into swans and who swore an oath of silence while weaving nettle shirts in order to save them? Do I seem like the kind of person who can take on three murderous mercenaries simultaneously and whip them into a souffle without breaking a sweat? Er...no. I only have one brother, and he works in a doctor's office in Sheffield, quite happily, without any untoward avian illnesses. And if I tried to pick up a sword and defend my one true love with it, I'm fairly sure I would disembowel myself.

But did I write from the point of view of people who were going through those experiences - and I got published anyway. So did I break the Write what you know rule? No, actually. Because the true meaning of this saying isn't that if you're a fifty year old dentist in Scunthorpe you're only allowed to write about other middle-aged Scunthorpian dental-technicians. It means that what your character feels, you, the writer, MUST FEEL TOO.

It doesn't matter if you're writing about three headed Smargle-Lizards from the far off planet of Squink. It doesn't matter if you're writing about a child soldier fighting for her life in Uganda. It doesn't matter if you're writing about a young person very much like yourself, going through the same things in life you are right now. What makes the reader care about your story is not their (or your!) similarity to the characters. It's that they can identify with your character's emotions.

Readers want to be touched in their hearts. If the Smargle-Lizard is weeping over the grave of her dead mother, your reader wants to feel her pain, understand her grief. If you can achieve that, they won't care about her three heads anymore. All they'll want to know is if she's going to be all right. But if they can't feel the character's emotions and understand why she feels the way she does, they won't care if the character is exactly the same as them. The story simply won't matter to them. They'll close the book and move on.

It's not easy - in fact, it's the hardest thing a writer ever has to do. But we all have grief inside us, sadness, worry, as well as laughter, love and joy. When you put a character through an ordeal, you have to be willing to reach down into the deepest and darkest bits of your own soul and pull those emotions out. You have to live them along with your character.

If you can do that - if you find yourself laughing at your character's jokes, crying when she does, feeling joy when she does, then the reader will too. At that point you will have fulfilled the command to Write what you know in the best and the only way that really matters. Like the saying goes, if there are no tears in the author, there will be none in the reader either.

Write what you know means write from the heart. It means be brave enough to let yourself grieve and laugh and fall in love, for the world to see, right there on the page, even if you're doing it inside the character of a three-headed Squinkian Smargle-Lizard. It means, be true to yourself and your characters.

Do that? And you'll be a writer.

A QUESTION OF ROLLERCOSTERS

2012-01-11T00:20:00.000-08:00

Hello, hello, hello Dear Readers! How are you all? We're in this weird troughy bit of the year when it feels too early for anything new to have started, and spring still isn't here, but all the wintery holidays are behind us and nothing's festive anymore. I've always found this time a little depressing - a bit like being in a seasonal waiting room, kicking your heels, longing for your name to be called.

So today's reader question is an appropriate one, dealing as it does with the strange troughy period between getting your work down on paper and actually being ready to call it finished, and the uneven emotions created thereby. Anonymous asked (via comments):

I remember you saying in one of your previous posts that you go through a few drafts before calling it your "first draft," but when you do your actual first draft, how do you keep your spirits up? There are some parts that I write that I really love, but other parts don't seem as good. I know you always improve what you write after your very first draft, but how do you keep your spirits up in the meantime? I love my idea and my characters and I'm not going to desert them, but every now and again I do get insecurities about whether my writing is, or will be, as good as some of favourite books. I feel like I'm on a rollercoster.

Well, Anon - you've summed up the way I always feel very nicely there. Especially the part about the rollercoster. When I'm writing the first draft (scribbling in my notebook, typing up my scribbles, revising the typing up, putting the manuscript aside to mature before I revise again) it really does feel like a rollercoster.

One moment I'll be flying high, convinced that the scene I've just written is the best thing I've ever committed to paper, knowing deep down in my heart of hearts that the story I want to tell is worthwhile and that my characters really have inner life that jumps off the page. *Cartwheels* *Starjumps*

The next day I'll re-read that scene and be plunged down into despondency. The prose is flat and clunky. None of it feels important. The characters are just 2D cut-outs. The story is - must be - fatally and inherently flawed. *Weeps* *Wails*

I used to think that when I got a bit more experience I'd get over these extreme fears and joys. I used to think that if I ever became a full-time writer I'd have the confidence to sail through smoothly with no crises and just get on with things in a sensible, even-keeled sort of way. I actually got quite cross and impatient with myself when that didn't happen. Why can't I keep it together? Why do I always react in just the same way? Why can't I be professional?

I read an article in a magazine not long ago where a writer confessed that at some point in every book she writes she will sit down at the table with her other half and have a mini-breakdown. 'I've made a horrible mistake. This book is the worst idea I've ever had. The whole thing is dire. I'll never make it work. My talent has died. My publisher will cast me into outer darkness. My agent will stop returning my calls. We won't be able to pay the mortgage and we'll end up on the streets.' And her partner nods wisely and drinks his tea and when she's finished and is staring blankly into the abyss, he asks her to pass the muffins. And they go on as before, and eventually she finishes the book and the mortgage is paid after all.

Libba Bray, international bestseller and YA superstar, confesses to much the same sort of rollercoster experience here.

Writing is not plumbing. It's not accountancy. It's not baking. Yes, just like all those things, a writer does have a toolkit (words and metaphors and tenses and semicolons) but what we don't have is any raw material except ourselves. A plumber uses his tools and expertise to get the water flowing. An accountant uses theirs to make the figures match up. A baker combines ingredients to produce the final product. Writers? Writers only have their own emotions. Our medium (contained and shaped and channeled by our words) is human feeling, and we have to literally pull that straight from our own hearts.

When you're putting your characters through Hell, there's a tiny part of you - the part of all your creations that comes from you, that allows you to understand and inhabit them and make them work - that is going through Hell too. Your empathy for them pulls all your emotions to the surface. And that means, outside of the story world, that your Real Life (TM) emotions about your writing are likely to be a bit more sensitive than the average bear's.

So the secret to keeping your spirits up, I think, is to accept the rollercoster. Give yourself permission to experience those highs and lows, to get a bit freaked out and emotional. It's going to happen anyway, and by telling yourself that it's OK and natural you take away some of the power of that rollercoster to reach outside the writer part of you into your Real Life (TM) and make you a wreck there.

Just don't ever mistake the feelings you have on that emotional rollercoster for REALITY. The dizzying feeling that you've written the greatest single kissing scene in human history? The sickening conviction that every word you've just put down is the wrong one and anyone who reads it will be violently ill? Both wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong. When writing your first draft you are in no position to judge the quality of anything. All you can do is keep putting one word in front of the other until you reach the end.

It's OK to be on the rollercoster. It's OK. So long as you realise that it is a rollercoster, and not the actual ground beneath your feet surging and bucking and trying to throw you off. And just like a rollercoster, eventually it will come to an end. There's a little jolt and some juddering, and then you push the bars up, step out, walk away - your legs just a little wobbly - and look back at it without any of that visceral fear, and say 'Wow, that thing's really high, huh?'

I hope this is helpful, Anon! Any more questions? Pop them in the comments, or email me :)

MONDAY FOUR

2012-01-09T01:21:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dear Readers! Here we are again. The weighted rubber mallet of Monday has slammed inevitably into our skulls. If you're anything like me, you're clutching your head and staggering around making muffled whimpers of suffering (no? Just me? Oh, well). But fear not! I offer the wet flannel of randomness to drape over our foreheads and soothe the ache.

1) Daughter of the Flames Kindle edition became an Amazon bestseller in several categories for a brief moment last week and this weekend. This was mostly to do with the fact that it was part of the Amazon Twelve Days of Kindle sale, and the price was reduced to 99p. Of course, as soon as the sale was over and the price went back to the (still rather reasonable!) rate of £2.69, it dropped off the bestselling chart like a lead balloon. But it was still fun to see it there in the company of such luminaries as Cassandra Clare, Chris Priestley and Joss Stirling for a while. A very nice start to the New Year!

2) This weekend I was on Twitter, bemoaning the fact that one of my all-time favourite songs, 'All I Need' by Within Temptation, is written in a key which makes it impossible for me to sing along without my voice breaking. Well, ask Twitter and ye shall receive: lovely Twitter people brought this cover of the song to my attention, and I loves it:

3) This picture which a lovely reader sent me a while back and I forgot to share. My heart still melts whenever anyone takes the time to show me my books in the wild, especially where the book's clearly been displayed with such enthusiasm.<3

4) The Hunger Games Trilogy. Although I was determined to wait until the film came out and so not spoil it for myself (as the book is pretty much always better) I finally gave in over the weekend and read them. I'm still dehydrated from all the weeping. Holy Emotional Devastation, Batman! Ms Collins pulls no punches, and I'm in awe - I couldn't write something that bleak, something that *truthful*. The places she must have had to go, internally, to create this world! Normally I can call who will live and die fairly reliably early on, but the utter pointless randomness of the deaths in these books...eugh. So truthful, especially amid the alien decadence of the setting. I WILL NEVER GET OVER THESE BOOKS.

LESSONS FROM A CLUB SANDWICH

2012-01-06T01:16:00.000-08:00

Hello, my Lovely Readers! Somehow it's Friday again, and I hope you've all had a great week.

Today's post is just a little glimmer of inspiration about writing that I thought I would share before it slipped away. And yes, as the title suggests, this inspiration comes to you courtesy of a club sandwich.

Yesterday was my dad's birthday and, as is my tradition, I dragged him out for a birthday lunch. He's a tiny bit of a hermit, my father (probably where I get it from) and so getting him to eat out is challenging. But he usually enjoys it when I manage it, and that ensures I keep up the effort. He's a simple guy at heart, though. Even when I do shoehorn him from the house he never wants to eat anything fancy or indulge himself, not even on his birthday. Despite my taking him to a posh bistro with all kinds of interesting things on the menu and offering him free rein, the man ordered a simple chicken and bacon club sandwich.

However, because it WAS a very nice bistro, I was pleasantly surprised when my dad's lunch arrived. It looked pretty spectacular - there must have been half a roast chicken in there, along with about five slices of bacon, and he also had an amazing salad garnish and curly fries. They'd stuffed so much into the sandwich that they'd been forced to put those little wooden cocktail sticks through it just to keep the toasted bread together. I was sort of wishing I'd ordered the same thing when I realised that my dad was not making pleased sounds. He was sighing.

Restraining my instinct to interrogate him (no one likes being interrogated by me, least of all on their birthday) by way of eating my own lunch, I watched as my dad tried to pick up half the sandwich in three or four different ways without causing it to disintegrate. When he finally managed to get the thing off the plate he had just as much of a struggle taking a bite out of it, as it was twice as wide as his mouth. Eventually he ended up just using a knife and fork to dismantle the thing. He ate about two thirds of it, and most of the curly fries, and then sat back and poured himself a cup of tea.

My good intentions evaporated. "Is something wrong with it?" I asked him anxiously. "I mean, it looked nice, but if it wasn't..."

"It was fine," he assured me. "It was all really good. There was just...too much of it."

"Too much? But it's all your favourite things! How can there be too much?"

He shrugged. "I don't know, flower. I mean, I like chicken and I like bacon, and I like both in sandwiches. But the amount of filling stuffed into this was overwhelming. It felt less like eating a sandwich and more like trying to eat a two course meal slapped between slices of toast. After the third bit of bacon or whathaveyou, you're just struggling on. But it was still good!" he added hastily, seeing my crestfallen expression.

Now, this may not seem to have anything to do with writing. In fact, it doesn't. But my brain, as we all know, is hardwired to try and turn pretty much anything that happens in life into a writing related metaphor. So later on, I found myself thinking about this, and deciding that there's a lesson about plotting to be learned from these lunchtime shenanigans.

When you first come up with an idea for a story, it can often be vague. You know, to bring the metaphor into it, that it's a club sandwich, but what KIND of club sandwich is another thing entirely. You've got a beginning or an ending or both in mind if you're lucky (like slices of toast on either side of the plot, holding it together). Maybe some blurry ideas for one or two developments in the middle, or some characters you really want to get to know better (that's the chicken and the bacon). You might have an idea for the feel of the thing (mayonnaise or ketchup or barbecue sauce? White bread or granary? Extra salad in the sandwich?).

What you don't have is an actual club sandwich. All you've got is scattered pieces.

And so the temptation, like the temptation given into by the chef at the bistro, is to quickly throw all the ingredients together in the traditional way (quick, quick - no time to consider trying different things or experimenting) and if it looks a bit thin, just grab some extra bits of bacon or chicken (plot twists you've seen in other books or half-developed echoes of characters that you have in the back of your head) and stuff those in. In fact, the more the merrier! Chicken and bacon are good, right? So if you add more, it can only make the sandwich better. When you finish the whole thing seems a bit shaky and like it might fall apart, but no big deal. Get out your cocktail sticks (maybe a stock romance that you've seen a hundred times before, or some other plot element that always seems to work for other writers) and pin it all together that way. Then add some garnishes (some pasted on descriptions that leap to the top of your head) to pretty things up, and off it goes, looking amazing! Job well done!

The problem is that this sandwich hasn't been put together with any thought of the person who is going to be eating it on the other end. How is this person supposed to pick up such a towering confection, or even take a bite out of it? This thing isn't even a sandwich anymore! For the reader, this book may be stuffed to bursting with cool and interesting things, but it's hard for them to appreciate any of it because the writer's not taking due care with what they present. It's a jumble. It's all too much. It's not a story; it's a mishmash.

Have you ever read a book like that? Where brilliant ideas were almost falling out of the sky, where there were dozens of interesting characters, and yet the whole thing just didn't work? It felt less like a story and more like an endless series of events and people, with nothing was properly explored? I come across these all the time and it exasperates me, because I know that if the writer had just waited a bit, considered a bit more calmly and carefully, they could have selected one or two of those plot elements and characters - the ones they truly loved and were interested in - and made them amazing. They could have allowed the fineness of the ingredients to shine through, like a lovely sandwich with just the right amount of filling. Instead of which, you're forced to slog through seemingly endless amounts of filler until it all begins to taste the same.

I think the lesson to be learned is that less can quite often be more. Sometimes a few morsels of delicious, succulent chicken and a couple of pieces of crispy bacon, beautifully cooked and carefully arranged between the toast is enough. Concentrate on making what you've got to hand the best it can possibly be and putting it together with love and care. Don't fill your story with dozens of extraneous elements. Take the time to construct something the reader can pick up easily and sink their teeth into, instead of trying to wow them with a gigantic plate that looks exciting at first glance.

(And BTW - I'm making this up to my dad by taking him out for a fish and chip supper over the weekend. He likes the fish and chip place better than fancy bistros anyway. *Shrugs*)

LEEDS BOOK AWARD NOMINATION

2012-01-04T02:11:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Today I'm sharing some exciting news about Shadows on the Moon. I've known about it for a while, but I was asked to keep quiet until after the new year (and you all know how hard it is for me to keep secrets - argh!). So I'm delighted to finally announce this.

Shadows has been shortlisted in the 14-16 category of the Leeds Book Award!

This is the full award shortlist for my category:

Angel’s Fury by Bryony Pearce
Wreckers by Julie Hearn
Shadows on the Moon by Zoe Marriott
Quarry by Ally Kennen
Department 19 by Will Hill
Flip by Martyn Bedford

Which I think you'll agree is pretty darn impressive company to be in! I'm absolutely thrilled!

There are also shortlists for 9-11 year olds:

Moon Pie by Simon Mason
Gold Seekers by Jane Johnson
Gravehunger by Harriet Goodwin
Sky Hawk by Gill Lewis
Magicalamity by Kate Saunders
Muncle Trogg by Janet Foxley

And 11-14 year olds:

My sister lives on the mantelpiece by Annabel Pitcher
Dark Woods by Steve Voake
The truth about Celia Frost by Paula Rawsthorne
Fifty Fifty by S L Powell
Sektion 20 by Paul Doswell
Wereworld: The rise of the wolf by Curtis Jobling

There's a really great mix here of bestsellers, critically acclaimed work, and lesser known books (that last one includes me!) which I always love to see, because it means the awards are aiming for excellence but at the same time are accessible and helping to raise the profile of deserving books which might otherwise be overlooked. My heart always sinks a bit when I see an award list which is made up of the same old 'buzz' books that have been nominated for every other award in the world. I think this wonderful diversity comes about because the shortlists are voted on by the people who really matter - the young adults themselves. Cheers pupils of the Leeds area!

Last year's winner in my category was ANGEL by L. A. Weatherly, which, as you all know, I adored, and which makes me all the more gleeful to see my work nominated. I'd love to win this, but just seeing my name up there surrounded by so many other wonderful authors and knowing the quality of past winners is pretty darn all right by me.

This year's award website isn't up yet, but I'll probably post a link to it when it is, so watch this space for that.

LOOKING FORWARD TO 2012

2012-01-02T00:26:00.000-08:00

Happy Monday - and Happy New Year - Dear Readers! And whoa, that's a lot of capitals in one sentence. But you deserve them! And so does this shiny, bright, beautiful new year that we're all just beginning right now.

Today's first order of business is to note that I, like most of Britain, watched the BBC's SHERLOCK last night and adored it to the point where I'm going to have to exercise iron-clad control to hold myself back from some serious fanfic writing. O. M. G. I'm sure a lot of people have far more intelligent comments to make about it, but all I can say is that the exquisite beauty of this episode made my heart ache. It's definitely for the over sixteens, but if that's you and you haven't seen it yet, make sure you do and soon (and if not, maybe plead with your parents because just watching it will probably boost your IQ by a few points and make you do better in your exams. Honestly).

And now onto the non-squeeing part of the programme!

Following the tradition we started last year, I'm going to share some goals that I'd like to aim for in 2012, and then when 2013 cycles around I can present myself for your congratulations, or your pointing/jeering/mocking etc.

2012 GOALS

As I mentioned in my last post, in 2011 I had a slight problem with over-working myself. I didn't end up passing out or being rushed to the hospital with heart pains or any of those other melodramatic symptoms that TV characters who over-work always get, but more often than not I'd be in my Writing Cave when eight or nine in the evening rolled around, and I'd end up shoving a microwave meal in and collapsing on the sofa - and then doing the same the next day too. I saw less of friends and family, made less time for healthy outdoor activities and new experiences and reading, and generally turned into a Writing Hermit to match my Cave. So this year, I'd like to prove to myself that I can do my job WITHOUT being a hermit. In 2012, I'd like to stick to a reasonable writing schedule of no more than eight hours of work six days a week, making time for other important stuff as well.
The last year has been an amazing one for this blog in every respect. My follower numbers nearly doubled, my unique visitor numbers quadrupled, and I wrote some posts that not only make me feel rather proud in terms of the discussion they generated, but which also brought in astonishing numbers of readers (The original Mary Sue post has had nearly 12,000 hits to date - for realz). Apart from a few early experiments, I've never really gone in for the traditional, accepted methods of driving traffic. I don't usually require people to follow the blog to enter giveaways, I don't take part in memes or post awards. I just write the best stuff I can come up with and try to interact with my readers in a way that shows how much I love and appreciate you - and somehow it's paid off. It's humbling and heartwarming. In 2012, I'd like to carry on posting here three times a week every week (with a few holiday/hiatuses as required) and growing my blog readership through sincerity and the pursuit of excellence.
I suppose this next one's fairly predictable, because I didn't manage to get to it in quite the way I wanted last year - instead of writing two completely new books, I ended up writing one new book and completely revising and revamping a book that I'd written the year before. However, it's a bit more urgent now. In order to meet the publishing schedule that's been worked out for me over the next several years, I really do need to write a book and a half in 2012. And if I'm going for a book and a half, why not go the whole hog? So: In 2012, I'd like to finally manage to write two books in twelve months.
Last year I made my final goal about promoting Shadows, but this year I'm going for something a bit less fun (and probably less interesting for you - sorry!). I've just had my first full year as a full-time writer, and it's made me acutely aware that my skills as an accountant are horribly lacking. You may wonder what one thing has to do with the other. Well, as a self-employed person, I have to keep records of all my earnings and expenditures, keep receipts, and complete my own tax returns. It's been hard enough up until now, when the largest part of my income was a non-taxable grant. The coming year is going to bring me more income from my writing, which is great, but it's also going to bring me concern over voluntary VAT registration. U.S. tax payer numbers, and pay coding notices. It's vital that I stop dithering and start to really keep on top of my records. Frankly, it makes my stomach churn. In 2012, I'd like to seek out professional help with book-keeping and learn how to run myself as a proper business so that I can stop panicking about this issue all the time.

Phew. Well, that's me done. What about you guys? What would you like to aim for this year?

LOOKING BACK AT 2011

2011-12-30T00:48:00.000-08:00

Heeellooo, Dear Readers! It looks like we've survived Christmas (hopefully - you're still alive, right?) and as we head into the New Year it seems only right to take a look back at everything that's happened over the last twelve months, reflect on events, see what went wrong and why, and be thankful for what went right.

Following the tradition I started last year, I used the Year In Status app on Facebook to take a look at what I've been talking about most in 2011, and it's not a surprise to see that what I've mostly been talking about is writing, writing and more writing. This year was my first full twelve months as a full-time writer. It's been unbelievably wonderful, and there have been a lot of challenges, many of them not the ones I'd have expected if you asked me this time last year.

2011 saw the release of my third book after a gap of over two years, and it was a relief and a joy to get my place in the nation's bookshops back again. That's the main landmark, and that's how I'll probably always think of 2011, the year of Shadows on the Moon. Highlights included getting a five star review from Books For Keeps, getting shortlisted for the St Helen's Book Award, and seeing the amazing book trailer for the first time.

But a lot of other stuff happened as well! Too much stuff to go back and list, really. So instead, I decided to go back and have a look at the list of not-quite-resolutions-but-something-like-them for 2011 and see what worked and what fell by the wayside.

Write six days a week, using my notebook. Did I succeed here? For the most part, yes, I did. A lot of this year was taken up with reworking and revising and rewriting, but there were many weeks when I worked seven days, and many days when I worked twelve hours, scribbling away either on my laptop or in my notebook. In fact, this year it was a challenge to hold myself back from turning into a writing hermit, and force myself to take the time to get out and do other things now and then.
Write two books in 2011. This was an ambitious one! And in a strange way, I did manage to achieve it - but not in the way I'd hoped. I spent several months completely revising FrostFire and turning it into an entirely new book than the one I'd written in 2010. Then I wrote The Night Itself, the first book of the Katana Trilogy. I'm proud that I managed to get both those things done, and I\m proud of the way both books turned out... I just wish that I'd managed to get FF right the first time.
Carry on blogging three times a week, and try to vlog once a month. Well, I managed to do the blogging thing - apart from my one week holiday hiatus and the hiatus over Christmas, which I think were an OK compromise. It wasn't always easy! It's always been rewarding, though, and this year I've seen reader numbers surge, as well as getting fairly widespread attention for my posts on the Mary-Sue issue. But as for the vlogging...ha! That fell by the wayside early on, as I realised that each five minute video I made usually took at least one day to put together. I actually did apply to join the vlogging group The YA Rebels this year, which would have meant vlogging once a week. I didn't get in, and when I realised that instead of disappointed I felt relieved, I realised that I generally MUCH prefer writing my blog posts than talking them out loud!
Do all I can to promote Shadows so that it gets into the right hands, gets the right reviews or award nominations, catches the imagination of the people who will enjoy it, and finds its place in the market. Well, I tried my best! At one point this year I felt as if I was almost drowning in reviews and interviews and guest blogs (and thanks so much to all my blogging pals who made it more pleasure than pain) and because the book came out in July I still haven't seen my first royalty statement encompassing this period, so I don't have a concrete idea of how it went. But I do know that the book went into reprint within a week or two of release, and every now and again people still send me pictures of it in their local bookshops, which is unbelievably thrilling. So it didn't vanish without a trace, as I'd half feared :)

All in all, it's been a tiring, exciting, happy, slightly scary sort of year. The kind of year that I wouldn't mind having again in 2012. So in my next post I'm going to make some new goals, bearing in mind all I've learned (and I've learned a lot!) in my first twelve months as a full-time writer.

What did you guys achieve in 2011?

CHECKING IN...

2011-12-27T23:06:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dear Readers. I hope you all had a marvellous Christmas and Boxing Day. Mine were surprisingly relaxing and happy. Today I'd vaguely planned one of a couple of posts, depending on my mood - one about dialogue tags, the other a run down of my Christmas loot. But today I've woken up to a blinding pain in one eye which signals that looking at my computer (or the TV, or any bright, blinky thing, including Christmas lights) for more than a few minutes is going to trigger a migraine. And I'd really...rather not. So I'll be back on Friday instead. Sorry guys. Use the time to read something awesome, 'kay?

DISTANT FUTURE TEASER

2011-12-20T23:39:00.000-08:00

Hello all! Did anyone notice the date today? It's the 21st! Only four more sleeps 'til Christmas! How did this happen? *Hugs self with mingled panic and excitement*

In honour of the holiday season, I'm going to be taking a tiny hiatus here, and won't be posting on Friday this week or Monday next week. This is to ensure that the levels of nonsense on the blog remain low, because what with sorting out last minute presents, cooking Christmas dinner and various other baked treats, dealing with relatives (including my brother who only comes home once a year) AND the fact that I just got my edits back for The Night Itself, anything I post is highly unlikely to be thoughtful and good quality. What can I say? I'm good, but I'm not THAT good.

So, as a special treat this Wednesday, I'm going to share a teaser from a book that you won't be seeing on shelves until 2015 (although I will be telling you more about it before then!). It's not one of the Katana Trilogy books. It's a standalone high fantasy, but it's set in Tsuki no Hikari no Kuni (or The Moonlit Lands), the setting I invented for Shadows on the Moon, and like Shadows on the Moon, it is inspired by a fairytale. This book is literally only a few pages and a synopsis at the moment - the literary equivalent of a twinkle in my eye, and that means the sample you're getting is even more subject to change or deletion than normal.

Bearing that in mind... Follow the cut for teasing!

“There is a monster in the forest.

Do not sneer at what I say - and do not protest, for I saw the look in your eye, the flash of pity and doubt. You think me a foolish child. But I am not a child. I am not a fool. I do not speak of some sinister, shadowy figure used to threaten babies to obedience, a half-seen terror dreamed up by drink and superstition. The thing is real. Its slashing fangs and claws, its night-glowing eyes, its hot carrion-stinking breath, are real. I have known this all my life.

Before I was born, it stole my grandmother. By the time I was old enough to walk, my uncle had gone to join her. When I was ten...my older brother was taken.

Oh yes, there is a monster in the forest. And it craves human flesh.

It is a truth we cannot escape, those of us who make a life here on the mountain. Sometimes, at the dark of the moon, men and women are drawn into the trees. No one knows what calls them, what they see or hear that makes them fling aside a lifetime of caution and care. What sings to them so strongly that they will abandon everything they love for the embrace of the darkness under the rustling leaves. We only know that they go. And they do not come back.

All except one.

One returned. But it was already too late for him, so the healer says.

Why do we not leave this place, you ask? Why stay here on the green slopes of Mount Moonview, when the great city, the city of the moon, the jewel of the Moonlit lands, is there less than two week's journey away? Why not pack our things and flee while the sun is high?

Why not run from the thing in the forest?

Perhaps we are too stubborn. Too proud of the ground our great-great-grandparents cut from the hillside with nothing but stone picks and the sweat of their skin. Or maybe too frightened, for among the trees, with no beloved walls to shelter us, no familiar paths to lead us, we might all succumb to the enchantment of the trees, regardless of the shape of the Moon.

Both those things might be true, or neither. I only know that this mountain is within me as well as without. The iron-hard rock of the mountain is in my bones, strong and craggy under my skin, and my skin is tanned brown as the earth. The perilous shades of the trees are like the shadow of my hair, and the rushing, thundering song of the leaves the same as the music of blood in my veins. I do not love the mountain. No more than a man loves his right hand, or his eyes. I am the mountain, and I could not live anywhere else. Not if I wished to remain me.

And besides, it is not the mountain that takes loved ones. It is not the mountain that breaks hearts. No. The monster does that. The monster that takes what it wishes and never lets it go. All except once. All except one...

My grief is as sharp and hard as the point of an arrow and I know what I will do. I will go into the forest. I will go, though everyone I know believes I am mad. I will find the monster. I will make sure that it never takes another brother or father from the family that loves them. I will kill the beast with my own two hands.

Even if I die in the doing."

EARLY REVIEWS & AWARDS

2011-12-19T00:53:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Once again Monday has dragged its reluctant behind through the door and is slumped, grey and slightly hungover, on the couch of life. So what better way to cheer it up than by looking at some lovely things related to Shadows on the Moon?

First up - Shadows on the Moon has been shortlisted for the St Helen's Book Award. My publisher let me know that a while ago, but at the time I was so caught up in talking about Katana with them that I forgot to pass the news onto you (bad blogger! No cookie!). There's no info online about the award, but apparently it's linked to the St Helen's school and library district which means it was most likely voted on by teachers, librarians and young people, making it very valuable in my eyes. Whoot!

In addition to this, the lovely Cass of Words on Paper has given Shadows on the Moon her Faves of Twentyeleven Award for Most Original and Imaginative Book, as well as making it a runner-up in the Most Atmospheric and Vivid Setting category. I'm delighted - thank you, Cass!

In early reviews of Shadows from US bloggers, we have:

Sassyreads 4.5/5 Star Review

Colorimetry 4 Star Review

And in just-down-right-cool-stuff:

This review of my books by author R.J. Anderson (who, if you remember, blurbed Shadows on the Moon and whose books I really LOVE).

A lovely review of Shadows on the Moon by the very lovely Y. S. Lee (a fellow Walker Books and Candlewick Press author).

I also found myself on this list of favourite books read in 2011 on the New York Public Library.

Finally, for any readers who are over sixteen or eighteen (or the age of consent in your country! Seriously there's a lot of sex and swearing in this one, don't go there if you're not old enough!) and who have a liking for both historical novels and gay romances (as I do) a book recommendation: Out of the Blue by Josh Lanyon, a bittersweet, absolutely beautifully written novella about the love between First World War fighter pilots. This made me cry over the weekend, and I shall be seeking out the author's other work post-haste.

ETA: My terrible spelling. Shame. Shame on me to the tenth generation.

RETROFRIDAY: WRITING ROADBLOCKS

2011-12-15T23:36:00.000-08:00

Happy Friday, Dear Readers! We made it to the end of the week - which probably seemed impossible somewhere around the middle of the week - so let's all have a pat on the back. Now the time has come for me to delve deep into the cool, secret shadows of the blog archive, emerge with a dusty old post, give it a quick polish with a damp cloth, then pop it onto the dinner table so that new readers can experience its delicious vintage, and long-time readers can sip of its rich sweetness once more. That's right! It's RetroFriday!

The topic of writing roadblocks was inspired by regular commenter Megha, who asked me a couple of separate questions in various comments, which I've smushed together to make this:

"Do you ever feel that your plot is too... big? Too much? I'm scared of starting my novel. It has been planned and plotted properly, and now I'm too scared to start. It's not writers' block, I know. And I know that all the writers go through this. My planning's done. There's nothing LEFT to plan about. I need to start, but I can't."

This is a writing roadblock.

Megha is right - this does happen to most writers at some time or other, for various reasons. In my case I'm usually scared the story is too SMALL, rather than too big. I worry that not enough happens, that I haven't made the right choices to stretch my characters, that I'll just run out of stuff to write after 30,000 words. I worry that it's all flawed because I've missed some huge, vital conflict that would have made everything worthwhile. Hence this Post-It stuck in the first page of my FF notebook:

But being scared that the story is too big, that it's too ambitious, that you won't do it justice, that it'll be too long...those are crippling fears too (I know, 'cos that's The Scary Place I've posted about here, and which I usually enter at around the 50% mark of my manuscript).

These roadblocks are hard to break through specifically because they don't come from the logical part of your brain. They're not based on anything you can put your finger on. They just appear out of nowhere, causing a nebulous sense of dread that makes us feel we'd do anything, even scrub the bathroom clean with a toothbrush, to avoid actually writing.

This isn't about writer's block in the sense that I think writer's block normally has one of several concrete causes (which you can read about here). This is basically about your own fears, your conscious and unconscious worries about writing, getting all snarled up and taking all the fun out of everything. And there's only one cure. One way to kick that writing roadblock to the curb.

If you've read many of my writing posts before, you probably know what I'm going to say next.

The one way to destroy a writing roadblock is to write.

It will NOT go away on its own. You won't wake up one day and find it's miraculously evaporated. You may wake up on many mornings thinking 'This is the day! Today I will write!' and then find yourself making excuses, procrastinating and pottering until it's midnight and you need to get to bed, but that's obviously not very useful. You will never be able to escape the sense of horrible foreboding until you punch through it and actually write. And the longer you leave it? The harder it gets.

I know it's horrible! Believe me, I know! But taking charge is the only way.

HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO DO:

Put the plans/notes/story outlines/folders of maps you've made for this story away.

At this point you're using these as an excuse to avoid writing. They've become part of the problem. Put them at the bottom of the draw. You are forbidden to look until you actually NEED to check a fact or remind yourself of something.

Leave your normal writing place.

If you've been sat in the same room in the same chair, or lying on your bed, or sat at your desk, every day, stewing over his for hours at a time, your brain has now incorporated the location into your sense of dread. Go somewhere else. Somewhere you would never normally associate with writing. A new coffee shop. A corner in the library. A friend's house, if they can be trusted to leave you alone. I find trains very good for this, personally. Anyway, chose a place and go there.

Set yourself a time and stick to it.

Tell yourself that you will start writing at precisely whatever-o'clock and that you will write for a certain, set amount of time. Make it manageable. It's no good saying you'll get up at 6:00am and write for three hours. You'll fail and feel even worse. Give yourself a reasonable start time, and a reasonable writing period. Half an hour is a good stretch to start.

Remind yourself that you're just scribbling.

You're just writing to fill up the blank page at this point. It doesn't have to be great. It doesn't even have to be good. I find it useful to use a pencil and paper when doing this, because it looks messy and smudgy and reminds you that it's just scribbling, not actual writing. But if you normally write with pen and paper, maybe you'd want to switch to a laptop, so long as you're okay taking it with you to wherever you've chosen to write.

That's all.

As soon as you've started writing again, as soon as you've defied the dread and the worry and the stressing-out and put pen to paper for fun again, you remember why you actually wanted to do this writing lark to start with.

Don't go too fast - don't put pressure on yourself when you start to feel better. But don't let yourself off the hook either. Keep doing your half-hour scribbling sessions until you get to the point where you're starting to over-run, to not want to stop. Then stretch yourself with forty minutes. Maybe think, 'Today, I'm going to use my forty minutes to play around with opening lines. Opening paragraphs for the first chapter. Hmmm...'

Then one day you'll find you've written for two hours straight and that you've got a first chapter staring at you.

Writing roadblock? Dust.

Right - time for me to get back to my precious. Hope this was helpful everyone - and have a great weekend!

HOW EDITING WORKS: Part Two

2011-12-14T02:00:00.000-08:00

Hello, my lovelies! Happy Wednesday to all. Today I'm continuing with the theme of Monday's post - How Editing Works. Which all sounds terribly grand and grown-up, so I'll just add a quick reminder that I'm a relative newbie to working with editors, and that your mileage will of course vary when it comes to this stuff.

Last time I talked about how editing generally falls into a few distinct stages, with each part of the process relating to the improvement of an aspect of the manuscript (major structural edits = big picture issues, line edits = prose, copy edits = everything else, pass pages = final polishing/error catching).

What I'd like to discuss today is the way that authors react to edits, and how you can manage that reaction to help ensure a good working relationship with your editor, not to mention getting the best possible result for your book. Because that's what you need to always, always bear in mind when you're editing. This process isn't about you as a writer, or your feelings or your ego. It's about what is best for the book you've created, and how to make the characters and story shine.

Generally I find that my reaction to the comments my editor makes in her editorial letter and line edits falls into three distinct categories:

The Blinding Epiphany: Saint Paul on a pogo-stick how did I miss this? Argh, this is so embarrassing - but of course she's right, and now that she's put her finger on it I can see just where I went wrong and I know what to do to sort it out! *Rolls up sleeves*

Guilty Avoidance: Oh hell, she noticed. I was so hoping it was a minor issue and no one would pick up on it. But I have no idea how to fix it! That's why I sort of handwaved around it in the first place. Maybe I can get away with ignoring this? Or fudge some stuff around it to make it work? *Hides under duvet*

Frustrated Anger: What? WHAT? That makes no sense! There's no problem there! I can't change that, I won't change that, it's fine as it is, and if she hates the damn book so much why are they publishing it in the first place? *Kicks wall*

What do all these reactions have in common? They're knee-jerk and not entirely reasonable. If you act on any of them right away you will regret it. Dive straight into the manuscript to 'fix' an issue by slapping on the first idea you have like a sticking plaster, and you may mess things up worse than they were. Try to fudge an issue so that you won't have to deal with it, and you definitely will mess things up. And writing an angry email or making an angry phonecall to your editor to tell them how very wrong they are and ask why they're publishing the book if they hate it so much is such a d*ck move that I shouldn't even have to explain why you'll regret it.

The best - probably the only - way to deal with each of these is time.

When I get an edit letter or my line edits, I read through them once, carefully but quickly. And then I walk away. Literally. No matter what my reaction is, how eager I am to get to work or how much I want to curl into the fetal position and commence with soft, pained moans, I force myself to get my dog, put on some waterproof boots and go for a nice long tramp through the fields. Rain or shine, sun or snow, I walk. I'll let everything I've just read marinade in my brain as stomp and mutter, throw biscuits for my dog, and occasionally wave my hands around emphatically. When I finally get home an hour later, shivering or sweating or sodden wet, I will generally feel much calmer and more rational.

But having had my therapeutic stomp, do I THEN dive straight into the manuscript or writing a snotty letter? No, no, and no, Dear Readers. I leave it at least another day before I look at the letter or notes again. I know some authors who leave it a week. You have to give your brain enough time to get over any initial knee-jerk reaction that you had so that when you read those notes or that letter a second time, you see what the editor actually wrote, rather than what your offended ego or eager-to-please nature is telling you is there.

Trust me. When you return and look at your editor's words twenty-four hours (or more) later, you will be stunned to find that somehow they've changed. They're not calling you a talentless hack after all. They're not saying the book is terrible. And all the quick fixes that sprang into your head on the first read now feel a bit hasty, and as if they rather missed the point. Whatever your initial reaction was, you will be profoundly glad you waited before you acted on it.

I'm not saying that walking away from the edits will make it easy to deal with them when you come back. It won't, necessarily. When we worked on Shadows on the Moon my editor had a problem with the way a certain plot thread was resolved. She felt that it was unsatisfying for the reader, and in the back of my head I agreed with her. But unfortunately I was completely stumped as to how to weave that thread back in without tangling up for or five others that were vital to the end of the story. And what was more, leaving that part of the plot like that had been in my original plans, from when I very first started the story, and my stubborn back-brain was convinced that it should work like that, dammit.

I avoided and fudged around the issue every way that I knew how, but my editor (thank heavens!) didn't let it go. Every time she came back to me she prodded me about it more and more insistently. In response, I got more and more frustrated because I thought she should be able to see how impossible it was to do anything about it. But of course, it wasn't impossible.

Nothing is impossible. A book is words on a page. If you change the words the right way, you can fix anything. And so, on one of my bad-tempered stomping walks by the river, I got a glimmer of an idea. I worked it out as I tramped, and went over it again and again in my head, checking for problems and flaws, and realised that it was the perfect way to fix things. Yes, it would mean doing away with a few things that I liked, but the result would be worth it. I couldn't believe I hadn't seen it before. I got home, scribbled it all down, and within a few days I'd sorted out the issue which had been holding the edit in limbo for weeks.

This was a defining moment for me as a writer. It made me realise that I had the ability fix pretty much any mess I'd made, given the time and space to work it out, and the confidence to accept that sometimes things needed to be changed. I had to let myself believe that needing to change things, even things I'd planned from the beginning, even things that my editor had spotted rather than me, didn't reflect on the book or on my skills, or mean that I was admitting I was a talentless hack.

The object of the edit is to get things right. This grace period, this time spent working on a book with a dedicated, passionate professional editor who won't let you get away with fudging, is a judgement free space. It's a blessing. A gift. A chance to go back and fix your mistakes - a rare thing in life. How to fix them might not always be obvious or simple or easy, but it's always possible, so long as you believe it's possible.

Looking back, I'm so glad that I had this revelation working on Shadows. If I hadn't, I don't think I would have had the determination and confidence to deal with the work that I needed to do on FrostFire. In fact, I know I wouldn't. So that's something else to bear in mind: when you work with your editor on making a book the best it can be, you're also learning. You're learning craftsmanship, and confidence, and you're learning how to make the next book even better.

Now, from time to time you'll get a note from your editor which you actually disagree with. Not a note that makes you guilty or frustrated or angry but a note that, on reflection, you truly believe just isn't right. You can't do what they're asking you to do. Not because it would be difficult or mean admitting you'd made a mistake, but simply because it would be wrong for these characters or this book.

When this happens, you'll find that the relationship you've built up with your editor to this point pays dividends. If you've always been polite and professional, and if you've always been willing to admit that changes need to be made and work through them, then when you come back to your editor here with a problem, they'll be more than willing to listen to what you have to say and you'll be able to work out why there's an issue here.

For example, while I was working on The Swan Kingdom with my U.S. editor, she gave me a note in which she said she felt a certain confrontation in the middle section of the book should be radically changed to play out a different way. At first I felt devastated, because it was the first time that I flat out 100% knew I couldn't make a requested change. I just couldn't do it. What was more, the fact that the editor had asked for that change made me feel as if the book as a whole couldn't be working, because if it had been, the editor would have seen that changing the outcome of that confrontation would completely go against every bit of characterisation up to that point.

Heart in my throat, I politely emailed my U.S. editor and explained that I couldn't do what she'd asked me to do, and why. I braced myself, not sure what the reaction would be. I'd heard so many things about awkward authors who thought their words were golden, and I didn't want to be like that, so the minute I sent the email I wanted to call it back, but no matter how I looked at it, I just knew I couldn't change the story that way.

The editor came back to me within an hour with an apology. She completely saw my point and she realised the note had been wrong. It was fine, and I should ignore it and keep working. Oh, the relief!

I've since learned that this is normally how true disagreements play out between writers and editors. Sometimes you go backwards and forwards about things, and sometimes the author changes their mind and sometimes the editor does, but you can nearly always work it out. As a writer, if you've demonstrated the willingness to work hard to produce the best possible work, and if you've got the courage to argue your case both intelligently and with passion, you will get a lot of respect from your editor when it comes to the changes you're willing to make.

Sometimes these disagreements are an opportunity to improve things in unexpected ways. Going back to Shadows on the Moon, after the initial edit letter, it was clear from my editor's comments that she and I perceived a particular character in very different ways. She pushed me to make changes to his behaviour to make him more vivid and understandable to the reader. But I felt that this would change him so profoundly that he wouldn't be the same character and the story wouldn't work anymore. We debated it over the course of several emails and through a couple of edits. Being forced to defend who this character was against my editor's extremely perceptive and insightful comments made him come into such clear focus for me that although I didn't make the changes my editor wanted, I did make several other changes - and my editor loved them.

It wasn't that she necessarily wanted me to change the character to fit her vision. She had just seen that there was something missing in the way he was characterised, and in prodding me about it, she allowed me to fix it in a way that worked for the story.

Again, I've gone mega, mega long here, so I'll finish by saying this. Editing can be fun. It can also be stressful. And frustrating. Even a little painful. And that's just within one page! But I honestly would not want to be published if I had to share my work in its unedited state. Working with an editor is a chance to learn wonderful things about the craft of writing in general and your own strengths and weaknesses in particular. Having a great editor allows you to take risks, try out crazy stuff that might not work because you know you've got someone in your corner who will lay it on the line for you and tell you if you messed up and how.

It not only makes for vastly improved books. It produces vastly improved writers.

*VIRTUAL GROUP EDITOR HUG*

HOW EDITING WORKS: Part One

2011-12-12T00:06:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dear Readers! I realised over the weekend - much to my embarrassment, although not to my surprise - that I promised to do you a post about editing/working with editors last week, and then forgot all about it. Frankly, sometimes I'm amazed that I can tie my own shoelaces. But anyway, here that long-awaited post is, and if anyone has any questions about this or would like any points clarified or gone into in more detail, bring it up in the comments.

In my leisurely roaming of the writing-centric parts of the interwebz, I've noticed a lot of general assumptions and misconceptions about editing - that is, the work that writers do with the professional editors employed by their publisher. Often I see people talking as if its an editor's job merely to fix typos and spelling mistakes (and that this means the writer shouldn't bother about those things) or bemoaning this widespread idea that 'real editing' is dying out because of the heartless paper-pushers in charge of publishers (and this can be proved by all the typos in published books).

Both of those ideas are, in my experience, dead wrong.

I can't claim to be a huge expert on this topic. I'm a relative newbie compared to many authors, and all my books have been published by one publisher (and their international sister companies). But over the course of five YA books (one of which never ended up being published) I've worked with three different editors (two at my UK publisher, one with the US one) and at least four copy-editors, so maybe I do have a bit of insight about the editor/author relationship that could be useful.

First: Fixing grammar, spelling mistakes and typos is only one very small aspect of a huge array of responsibilities that fall under an editor's job description - those things are primarily the author's job. Editors act as a safety net to catch the mistakes which everyone, no matter how careful, makes from time to time. Land in that safety net too often though, and the people in the circus will rightly wonder why you're up there on the high-wire in the first place if you don't know how to do the walk. Any writer who thinks they don't need to worry about those things themselves is operating under a tragic misapprehension.

Second: Editing is not dead. Neither is it a 'lost art'. Editors are not a dying breed; they're not even feeling off-colour, as far as I can tell. All the editors I've worked with have been fiercely intelligent, intimidatingly well-read and PASSIONATE about making the books they've acquired the very, very best they can be. These guys are hardcore; without them, half the books on your shelves would not be on your shelves at all, and the other half would be much the worse. Blaming the editor for a handful of typos which were most likely introduced during typesetting is like blaming the head engineer of a ship for a handful of lose bolts rattling around in the hull of a giant ship. Yes, the rattling is annoying: but if the head engineer weren't around the ship would probably have sunk by now.

So, bearing that stuff in mind, how does working with an editor...work?

Generally, once you've managed to get your foot in the door with a publisher, the editing process breaks down into a few distinct steps. Reading author blogs, you can get the impression that these stages of editing are somehow set in stone, but I've found that it changes not only from editor to editor but from book to book. It's an organic thing. The steps I've listed below can blend into each other, be repeated multiple times, or sometimes be skipped altogether.

There's even rumour of a wondrous thing known as a 'clean' manuscript. This is a draft so perfect, so beautifully formed, so effulgent with divine beauty, that on being submitted by the author it needs no editorial work whatsoever before going off to the printers. Please note - If I ever manage to produce such a thing, you'll probably want to find a sharp implement (a shovel or a woodaxe perhaps) and remove my head immediately, as it will be a sign that I've been taken over by a malevolent alien intelligence and am plotting the end of human civilisation as we know it. *Shudder*

Basically what I'm saying is that this is just a guide, rather than a set of commandments.

HOW IT BREAKS DOWN:

Structural edit/edit letter: Mention edit letters to published authors and you get one of two reactions. Either they groan and hold their head in their hands, or they bounce up and down with feverish excitement. The first reaction probably means they've just received an edit letter. The second kind are waiting for it to arrive.

The structural edit is the first stage of getting a book ready for publication. It's all about the big picture - characterisation, plot, pacing, setting. The things that hold the book together and make it what it is. This is the stage where an editor may request big changes, such as transforming your main character from an elf to a vampire, killing off the erstwhile heroine in chapter four with a poison dart, or moving the whole story from Medieval Florence to the purple rainforests of Gundi'iip Prime in the Taurus Nebula. The edit letter pretty much tells you what the editor thought of the book, which is why writers tend to get very excited and scared about them. It addresses issues the editor has with the book as a whole and offers suggestions on how to fix them.

The edit letter I received (via email) for Shadows on the Moon mentioned that my editor felt two important characters were a little vague - they didn't come fully into focus throughout the book and their motivations were unclear. She also felt that the middle section of the book was too long and contained too many secondary/minor characters, and that the ending was too abrupt and left a major plot thread inadequately resolved. We eventually ended up cutting nearly 30,000 words from my first draft.

However, with FrostFire, I never got a formal edit letter. My editor felt that it would be best for us to have a phone conversation about the book and the extensive changes that would be required. We talked for nearly an hour, going over all the issues that prevented the story and characters from working, and tossing possible solutions at each other.

At the end of that conversation I went away and produced a new, detailed synopsis for what I called FrostFire #2 - an entirely different version of the book in which the plot was turned inside out and most of the characters swapped sex. This served as a kind of backwards edit letter, as my editor read it, and came back to me with detailed notes. I amended the synopsis accordingly. She read the outline again and approved it, and then I revamped the book based on that. FrostFire #2 ended up being around 15,000 words longer than the original version.

Subsequent structural work: After you've done your first run at any major changes and re-writing, you send the manuscript back to the editor. She may love the changes you've made and be happy to accept the book as 'delivered' at this stage. Or she might feel that you've not gone far enough to address the issues she brought up in the edit letter. Or she might now have new concerns caused by the changes you made.

The book can go back and forth between the editor and the writer several times at this stage. With Shadows on the Moon, I think we did about four or five structural passes (one of which included notes from my US editor). I tried to beef up and clarify the motivations of some characters, but in the process I made their actions seem contradictory in some places, so I needed to dig deeper into them and make the reader understand why they acted as they did. I cut some characters from the middle portion of the book and compressed it, but it still felt overly long and crowded. I extended the ending, but one plot element still felt unresolved.

We worked on those issues until each one was fixed. Every pass that we did moved us closer to that Eureka moment when all the elements of the story clicked together and worked - but it took at least six months for that to happen.

With FrostFire, after I finished rewriting the (radically different version of the) story and sent it in, my editor loved it and we moved straight onto the next stage with no further structural work.

Line editing: This is probably my favourite part of the editing process. This is where love of language really comes into play, as the editor and author work together to make sure that every line of the book expresses the author's ideas in the best possible way. We want to make sure that the words on the page are acting as the reader's gateway into the world of the story, rather than a barrier.

Normally at this point, the writer will receive a copy of their manuscript (either as an computer document or printed out) which has been 'marked up'. That is, the editor has taken out their red pen and gone through the whole thing, literally line by line, noting problems with sentence construction, clumsy wording, repeated words, grammar, places where the author's meaning is unclear, where drafting has left inconsistencies in the fabric of the prose or where ideas could be better presented.

Because my first draft of Shadows on the Moon was exceptionally long for a YA novel - 130,000 words - we did a huge amount of trimming during this stage. My editor would take two or three pages of lovingly researched descriptions of clothing or food, or two separate scenes that served a similar purpose, and suggest changes that snipped away extraneous words, clauses, sentences and paragraphs, reducing the length to one page or less, or compressing those scenes down into one. She also made sure that in my efforts to create a convincing fantasy world and weave authentic details into the story I didn't lose track of the important themes I'd introduced early on.

In FrostFire (probably because the book had already undergone a massive overhaul) the line editing was far more focused on polishing the prose and hunting down and murdering any sections where all the cutting, pasting and re-writing I'd done had caused jerky transitions or repetitions, or where characterisation or plot didn't track quite smoothly.

Copy editing: This is where, quite often, someone else will get involved in your work on the book. At my publisher they have dedicated copy editors who provide a fresh pair of eyes to double check everything in the manuscript, since by this point both the editor and the writer will have read it many times (in fact, it's normally at this point that I become convinced the book is utter dreck and start begging my editor to reassure me that they're not just publishing it out of pity). I'm told some publishers contract this stuff out to freelancers, which I think is a shame, as there's enormous potential to develop a friendship with your copy editor. One of mine used to make little pictures in the margins, which always made me smile.

If you thought that your editor was tough, be prepared for this stage to bring tears to your eyes. Every little tic in your writing (words that you've taken a liking to and reused, the tendency to start sentences with But or And, incorrect use of semi colons) is going to get mercilessly highlighted. Every mistake you made (changing a minor character's eyes from brown to hazel without realising it, making the moon gibbous in chapter two when it was cresent in chapter one, having the heroine scratch her head without first showing her letting go of the war-axe she was holding five pages ago) will be noticed.

No matter how much work you've put in up until this point - in fact, sometimes because of the work you've done until this point - this stage will usually drench the manuscript in red. By the mid-point, you will feel like a talentless, careless, moronic hack. You will swear that if you ever have to meet your copy editor, you will grovel at her feet for having forced her to wade through this awful soup of errors, although secretly you will be tempted to tip itching powder into her underwear as well for pointing out every flaw your book has.

During the US copy-edit of Shadows on the Moon, it turned out that the copy-editing manager at Candlewick Press was a haiku scholar and a Japanophile. So along with Americanising the spelling and grammar, we ended up re-writing most of the haiku in the book to reflect a more traditionally Japanese aesthetic, which made the whole process unexpectedly fun.

Pass pages/proof reading: This is the final stage of editing before the book goes off to be printed, and sometimes it sort of blends into the previous one, depending on how long the preceeding steps have dragged on. Basically, this when you get a massive envelope in the post which contains the typeset/formatted manuscript or pass pages. For the first time, you see your book laid out as an actual book, with chapter headings, section pages, page numbers and the correct font. Usually it arrives on very large pieces of paper which show two pages on each side.

This is your very last chance to make changes to the book - to catch any typos or errors that have been introduced at any point along the way, or caused by the typesetting. It's very much NOT the time to make radical changes to anything, since cutting a paragraph on page one of a chapter is going to have a knock-on effect of the typesetting of every other page in that chapter and cost the publisher money, but you should still mark anything that you notice, and approve or stet (that is, withhold approval of) any changes which have been made since the last time you saw the manuscript.

Seeing the pass pages for Shadows on the Moon actually made me cry a little bit, as I realised the book had been decorated beautifully throughout with the same sakura that illustrated the cover, and that the final product really would be gorgeous.

Okay guys - this post is already mega, mega long so I'm going to stop here for now. I think we'll come back to this topic on Wednesday, and I'll talk about how writers tend to feel during editing, how you work out disagreements with your editor, and how you ensure your book is the best it can be.

FRIDAY FIVE

2011-12-09T00:03:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Happy Friday. I hope you've all managed to get through the week without too much of a struggle. And if you did, please tell me how?

Today I bring you a heaping postful of randomosity with a side of cool sauce. Enjoy!

1) I got a cover flat of the FrostFire cover in the post yesterday, so now you can see how gorgeous the entire book really will be. The lettering is in shiny red foil just like on the cover of Shadows on the Moon. Icy fires and swirly bits? Wolf eyes? YES PLEASE.

2) A big thank you to everyone who responded to Monday's somewhat controversial post about the Dead Girl cover trend. Many people disagreed with me, either that there was a problem or that the problem was what I thought it was - but the discussion stayed both civil and informative, and no one can ask for more than that.

3) It looks like the U.S. hardcover version of Daughter of the Flames has gone or is going out of print (no one's informed me of this officially, but the publisher's website no longer lists it and it's not available to buy new anywhere anymore). Frankly, this is one of the most beautiful hardcovers I've ever seen, with copper foiling on the bindings to match the flaming phoenixes on the dustcover, so if anyone else is a book junkie and likes to collect them for their beauty - now is the time to snap up a copy.

4) This picture, which is from my inspiration file for an upcoming project I've mentioned a few times. Love it!

5) This album from the band Sleeping At Last. I'm ashamed to say that I'd never even heard of these guys until their song 'Turning Page' started turning up everywhere as a result of being on the latest Twilight soundtrack. But their music is just GORGEOUS. Lush and sweeping and romantic and playful. I adore it, and have been listening non-stop since I downloaded yesterday.

6) Unexpected-extra-list-item-no-jutsu! Guys, do you have any suggestions for topics you'd like me to blog on in the future? Are there things you'd like to ask about? A particular kind of post that you really enjoy? Let me know! I can't promise that I'll be able to create a scintillating response to everything you ask for, but I'd love your input, and I'll do my best.

Have a great weekend, my duckies!

THE ENAID

2011-12-07T01:23:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! As Wednesday rolls around again (and after the seriousness of Monday's post) I'd like to share something fun and rather beautiful - this video made by long-time blog commentor Alex, which she calls The Enaid.

The Enaid, for anyone who hasn't read the book, is the name of the magical earth energy or spirit of the land which features in my first novel The Swan Kingdom. In the video Alex uses quotes from The Swan Kingdom to highlight the loveliness of shots of one of her favourite places, which happens to remind me very much of the marsh/meadowlands where I live. Since the countryside surrounding my home was a partial inspiration for the book, I find what Alex has done here very effective.

Enjoy!

BEAUTIFUL CORPSES

2011-12-05T00:42:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend. I, personally, celebrated the release of The Deathly Hallows Part Two by barricading myself in the house with several bags of Doritos and having a non-stop Harry Potter marathon. So I face Monday feeling emotionally drained and borderline dehydrated (salty snacks + constant weeping) but content.

In the midst of this important business I did spare quite a lot of time to think about the discussion that's recently been going on in the YA community with regard to 'dead girl' covers.

For anyone reading this who may have sexual assault triggers (or if you're under sixteen), it might be a good idea to either skip today's post or get someone else that you trust to read it first to make sure you'll be all right with it. I really want to talk about this, but I don't want to hurt or upset anyone. OK? *Virtual Hugs To All*

Dead girl covers are the glamorous images of young women in sexy dresses (girls in trousers, or jeans, or a nice warm jumper, don't really have the same impact) sprawled out (on grass or flowers, in a river or the sea, sometimes floating on a cloud or in darkness) either with their eyes closed or staring vacantly in such a way that you can't work out whether they've just finished having sex, or just died, or both.

There's been a low-level buzz about this for a while, but the real conversation about whether these images were OK started here, on Rachel Stark's rather wonderful blog (where she provides a whole raft of examples). It was taken up by reknowned literary agent Kristin Nelson, here.

I was happy to see this debate taking place, because it's been something that my writing group (several of whom are YA writers) have been feeling queasy about for...years, actually. Supposedly these books are aimed at young women, but the way that the models are dressed and posed smacks strongly of something called The Male Gaze, which is where the cameraman or woman makes the assumption that all (important) viewers are heterosexual males and focuses on portraying what they shoot in a way that appeals strongly to a heterosexual male perspective.

As a result, I feel as if these covers speak less about what young women are interested in, and more about what the world itself is interested in - ie, images of young women in which the women are passive and sexualised.

You just don't see images of young men like this in the mainstream media, with barely any clothes on, airbrushed limbs carelessly sprawled across the ground, hair trailing gently around their faces, and a dreamy/dead look in their eyes. Images of men on covers (and in the general media) are much, much more likely to be active and even heroic. Boys or men will be found standing, leaping, climbing, holding weapons, reaching out. Their faces will be filled with emotion. If they aren't looking directly into camera their eyes will be focused on some distant goal that only they can see, with a look of stern concentration. For some strange reason, we don't really find a man attractive if he looks vacant or possibly dead.

But having read and written a few mini-rants on the topic, my writing group and I moved onto other things. I don't have any dead girl covers as yet myself, and without really thinking about it I can state that there are few to none on my own shelves. Whether that's due to the content of books with these sorts of covers generally not appealing to me, or because I'm unconsciously avoiding books with covers that I find disturbing (and heck, why not?), I don't know. In either case, as worrying as I found this trend, I didn't feel that I had much to add to the conversation that was taking place about it.

Then last week Rachel posted again, talking about how some commentors had defended the fascination with the glamorised, sexy corpses of young women by reminding us that this is a trope that stretches back a long, long way. Back to Sleeping Beauty and Snow White. It's a fairytale archetype, they said - the heroine undergoes a spiritual or even a physical death and arises changed and transformed.

Rachel's response to this is great - she points out that just because the trend for beautiful corpses has been going on for a long time, even back to fairytale time, that doesn't mean it's healthy. It just means it's deep-seated.

But seeing the current deluge of dead girl images related to sleeping princess fairytales made a lightbulb pop up above my head. I think what the people talking about this don't realise is that the sleeping heroines they brought into the discussion are rape victims.

I can practically feel readers sucking in a horrified breath as I type this. I know that's not the common conception of these beloved, Disneyfied princesses. And I know that when parents read Snow White or Sleeping Beauty to their daughters before bedtime, they're imparting what they feel are beautiful stories of true love conquering all. After all, waking a princess from a terrible spell with 'true love's kiss' has become a trope in itself by now.

Unfortunately, that is not what those stories were originally about. If you read the earliest versions of Sleeping Beauty and Snow White - the versions you find in Italo Calvino's Italian Fairytales, the versions which had not yet undergone the benign censoring hand of Grimm and Anderson and the Victorian Era, you find stories in which true love's kiss has nothing to do with the awakening of the poor, unconscious girl lying in the castle or in the crystal case.

What really happens is that a travelling prince, in the course of his adventures, comes across an apparently sleeping young woman who is unable to defend herself, and rapes her. Then he goes on his merry way. About nine months later, the girl gives birth to a child, and this experience (not surprisingly) finally wakes her from her slumber. And then (the part which always makes me feel the most squinky) the girl is so grateful for having finally escaped the curse that she goes after the travelling prince, thanks him very much for his random sexual assault, and ends up getting married to him.

This represents a fairly strong and very dark male fantasy - that of the unresisting victim. A girl who can't fight or struggle because she is incapacitated. A girl who, although unable to offer any kind of consent to sexual activity, of course actually wants it. A girl who will even thank you for it later on. So why not go ahead and, as the original fairytale text puts it 'enjoy [your]self thoroughly'?

Time may have prettified the fairytales, removed the sex and replaced it with a sweet kiss, but it says a lot about all of us that hundreds of years later we're still telling those stories to our daughters. As a folklore enthusiast I can list dozens of fairytales and folk stories which have completely disappeared off the radar and which no child today would recognise. But somehow the image of the sleeping princess - the dead girl - still endures.

Recently there was a rape case in the U.S. where a young women who was out having fun got extremely drunk and called a taxi to take her home. She was unable to get out of the taxi on her own and the driver was worried about her, so he called the police and two officers came and took the girl out of the taxi and got her into her apartment. They then sexually assaulted her. When she woke up and realised what had happened, she reported it. But even though it was shown that the two police officers had lied about their whereabouts during the time they were in her apartment, and that they HAD both had sex with a girl who was so drunk that she was incapable of even getting out of a taxi on her own, they weren't convicted of anything. The jurors apparently believed that any girl who allowed herself to be incapacitated to that extent was 'asking for it'.

When you've thought about that for a little bit, go look at those beautiful images of dead/unconscious girls in thin dresses, with their trailing hair, sprawled limbs and closed or empty eyes, again. Somehow they've stopped being a little disturbing now haven't they?

Instead, they're downright nauseating.

RETROFRIDAY: STICKING TO YOUR GUNS?

2011-12-02T00:03:00.000-08:00

Hello, my Dear Readers! Happy Friday to all - I hope your week has been productive and fun. Today's RetroFriday is unusual in that it's not one of my big editorial posts where I rant about stuff. It's a reader question (from the lovely Isabel!) which I answered a while ago and which I decided would be interesting to dig out of the archives. That's because I'm thinking about doing a post next week that will offer some insight into the editorial process for a published writer; the stages you need to go through to get a book into a publishable state. Hopefully this post will give some background for that one.

On with RetroFriday!

You may remember that not long ago I posted some questions from reader emails. Faithful blog reader Isabel left a question of her own in the comments. It went a little something like this:

I'm doing an essay (well, have been doing several) and have been getting some comments from teachers on my work and how I should change it that I sometimes don't quite agree with. What should I do when this happens and how do I know who to trust on giving me good tips? Just so you know, I go to a really small school where the writing teacher is the same as the math teacher is the same as the history teacher and so on. so the people who teach me writing class don't specialize in writing.

This is tricky. When you write, you need to believe in yourself. If you strongly disagree with someone's comments about your work you need to have the courage of your convictions and argue your case. On the other hand, your marks for your essays come from your teachers - effectively they're the ones you're writing for, and if they say you haven't accomplished what they want and need, you won't get the marks you want and need.

In a way, this is a bit like a writer's normal life. We create a unique world and characters that belong to us and then agents and editors read it and come up with comments and often suggestions for changes. Sometimes those ideas are great and by going with them you find your work improves so much you can't believe you didn't think of it yourself (as often happens with me and my editor - thank you, Annalie!). Sometimes the comments seem so 'out there' that you wonder if the person making them even read the same thing you wrote, and you feel as if trying to follow their suggestions would really hurt your work.

Usually the answer to which way you need to go will lie within you. Quite often you will KNOW there are weak spots in your work. If the person making the comments has put their finger on something that bothered you when you wrote or re-read it - something that made you squirm a little bit and go 'Oh, well that'll do' - then they're very likely to be right. That doesn't necessarily mean you need to follow their suggestions exactly. I'm pretty sure my editor makes out-there suggestions sometimes just to stimulate my imagination! They are not you, which means their mind will work in a different way and their idea of how to fix the problem might be completely different than yours.

Combine what they've said with your own instincts and look for an answer that will fix the weak spot and make you happy. Sometimes it can take a while to figure it out (I find going for a long tramp with my dog helps) but it'll come eventually. Believe me, when you've fixed those weak spots you will feel much better about your work.

There are also times when a comment will come completely out of left field and you think: 'Oh no! How did I miss that? Oh &*)$F£"@?! Well, *I* don't know how to fix it! It's impossible!' and you decide to ignore it and hope they forget. Don't do that. Once again, you shouldn't expect to figure out an answer straight away. Don't get impatient and decide it can't be fixed and give up. Go over it calmly in your head and let it sit there for a while until you can see the light.

However, if you seriously believe that the suggestions your teacher has made are not going to improve your work, that they've missed the point, then stand by that opinion. Do your best to find and fix your own weak spots and mistakes. Often doing that will change things enough that their previous objections will go away.

If not, then chances are that while you're at school you will probably need to buckle under and do what your teacher wants in order to get the good marks you deserve. You don't really have the power to fight your teacher, and they're the final arbiter of what's 'good' when it comes to your essays. When I was at school I had a teacher RUIN a poem of mine which was going to be published in a collection of work from local children. I felt then that the change weakened the work at lot, and looking at it now I still can't understand what he was thinking. But if I had refused to listen to what he wanted the poem wouldn't have been published at all. I know this is not much fun - but then essays aren't much fun anyway (at least, I didn't think so, when I was at school).

When it comes to writing stories of your own, though, you shouldn't ever 'buckle' this way and go against your heart and instincts. That takes all the fun and life out of things.

I hope this was helpful, Isabel - and as always, if anyone else has questions they'd like me to answer, pop them in the comments or send me an email, and I'll do my best to answer.

BLURBS WONDERFUL BLURBS!

2011-11-30T00:25:00.000-08:00

Hello, my lovelies! Wednesday has rolled around again, and it has brought various bits of news about Shadows on the Moon in the US.

The rather beautiful hardcover edition from the rather lovely Candlewick Press (still not allowed to share the cover - sorry!) will be coming out for definite on the 24th of April.

I'm not sure if I've mentioned this before, but the text will be slightly different than the UK printing. That's because, by a nifty coincidink, the copy-editing manager at Candlewick Press is a ninja haiku scholar. OK, possibly not the ninja part (I mean, who knows? It's not like a ninja would tell me that she was a ninja. That's all part of being a ninja) but she IS a genuine expert on the fine art of haiku writing and she very kindly helped me to make some of the poetry in the book more faithful to the spirit of Japanese aesthetics. Not that I don't love the original versions, you understand. This just means that American fans get a special gift from me; a unique version of the haiku for their very own.

I've just received a couple of the very first advanced reader copies, hot off the presses. I'd take pictures of these for you, except, again, not allowed to share the cover. The audiobook will be coming out at the same time in April next. No news on who's going to be reading that yet, but I'm still mega-excited. You can find the pre-order links for both here on Amazon. Which brings me to my happiest piece of news, which is that three absolutely WONDERFUL authors agreed to blurb the US edition of the book.

Just in case anyone's in the dark as to what a blurb is - it's when a well-known and well-respected author 'recommends' another writer's work via a snappy sentence or two, which the publisher puts on the book or on promotional materials for the book. I've never had blurbs before, and I'm just. So. Excited!

So these are the blurbs which will hopefully be on the Candlewick Press edition of Shadows on the Moon:

Beautifully written, with diverse and fascinating characters, an intriguing plot, and a romance that will steal your heart. One of the most innovative fairy-tale retellings I've read in years.—R.J. Anderson, author of Spellhunter and Ultraviolet

Shadows on the Moon weaves a spell as deft as any by its main character. Beautiful and cruel; a mesmerizing read with an intoxicating love story.—L.A. Weatherly, author of Angel Burn and Angel Fire

The lyrical prose of Shadows on the Moon captures the essence of the fairy tale, while the love story will capture reader's hearts.—Jaclyn Dolomore, author of Magic Under Glass and Between the Sea and Sky

Right? OhEmGee you guys. I can't believe such wonderful authors said such nice things about my book! I honestly can't thank them enough.

In other news, I just saw Megamind and I haven't had this big a crush on a primary coloured character since Donatello from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles captured my heart when I was nine. *Sigh*

A QUESTION OF PREPARATION

2011-11-28T00:25:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dear Readers - and Happy Monday! I hope you've all had a productive weekend. I enjoyed the tiny bit of autumn sunshine we got, and also watched Disney's Tangled for the first time (and adored it! Animated films really are better than live action ones at least half the time these days).

Today I'm going to tackle a couple of reader questions which are looooong overdue for an answer.

On Twitter, the lovely Liz asked me: "When does the world building stop?" Followed by (as far as I can remember, since TweetDeck ate the rest of the question) "If you want a complex, intricate world with lots of detail, obviously you need to do a lot of planning and world building. How do you know when you should stop, and start the actual writing?" My apologies if you actually said something different, Liz!

Then, in the comments, Megha said: "I'm not much of a person to plan - it's horribly hard. I know I need to do it, and I do plan before I start a story, but I feel like I don't plan enough. I know what will happen, but I don't know my characters as well as any other writer. Is this because I am young, because I am a sort of beginner writer, or because I'm one of the people who can work finely without planning? Is it okay to be one of those people who don't plan as much and like to improvise as they go along, or is that a bad thing? I can't control this urge of plunging into my book. You know when you have a special beginning scene in your head? I just need to write it straight away, and hence I start my story. Is there any way I can plan enough? I really think I need to plan more, I'm just horrible at it."

Since these questions are basically coming at the same idea from different directions, I'm going to save on waffling by answering them in one go.

First of all, I think it's important to state that every book is different. Some stories and characters will shape their own world and their own narrative shape as you write, and you'll find yourself throwing all kinds of stuff in there that's pure invention, and then knitting it together into a coherant whole later on, when you revise (this is how I worked with The Swan Kingdom). Some characters and stories respond very well to planning, and need a lot of forethought into how the plot will unfold, and research into real world analogues before you can see a clear way to make everything work (this is how Shadows on the Moon was).

And some books (like Daughter of the Flames) are somewhere between the two.

I've seen writers say that they find it easy to get very carried away by their research, that they love diving into reference books and making notes and reading up all about their topics. That before they commit a single word to paper they produce intricate, bullet pointed synopses which break down every chapter into colour coded lists, and that they always know just what their characters are supposed to do.

I've seen other writers say that the very idea of figuring all this stuff before they begin their story makes their soul die a little. That it literally sucks every bit of fun out of their process to try and plan ahead, and that if they don't know what happens next they make a note that says 'Research this!' or 'Insert scene that makes sense of the stuff in the river' and then move onto something else, letting the characters do whatever they want and finding out about the world and story that way.

And then there's me. I'm somewhere between the two.

What am I trying to say here? Really, that there's no foolproof way of doing this. Not only is every writer different in what helps them, but every book is different in terms of what it needs. There's no calculation you can run which will work out if you've done enough planning or enough world-building. You can't pencil in two weeks or two months of planning/world building and then know, for certain, that you've done enough. And no one is going to point a finger at you and say 'Hey! What you doing there, diving into this story without a plan?! Stop it at once!' or 'Oi! That world building is way too intricate! You're wasting time!'

The only way to know if you've done enough preparation for the story is to start writing it.

If you get past your brilliant first chapter and then feel at a complete loss because the world feels like a fuzzy mess that you can't visualise and you don't know how to move forward with the characters? Then you didn't do enough preparation. Go back and start again. It's not the end of the world. If you spent six months researching and planning and then find, a chapter or two into the story, that your characters want to do something entirely different and that you need to change key details to make that work? Does it hurt anyone or anything? No.

When you find yourself aching to write and holding yourself back from writing because you just need to research this one thing? You probably ought to just write. Similarly, if you start to feel like you'd be happy to keep world-building forever and have no urge to write the story at all? You may have taken it too far.

A key thing to remember:

The only way you can truly reveal your world to your readers - the way you make their ears ring with strange and haunting songs, choke them on dust, cause them to shudder in the cold, taste the sweet, soft flesh of ripe summer fruits or experience the warm breath on the back of their neck - is through the protagonist(s).

The way that your readers will experience the plot and other the characters - the surprise of a story twist, the horror of a betrayal or the joy of falling in love - is by the protagonist(s) is experiencing them.

Trying to figure out EVERYTHING before you begin work will always be impossible. Until your characters experience it in the story and make the readers do so, it's not real in the story world anyway. If you're in doubt about whether you need to plan in more detail or do more research, go back to your characters. Put yourselves in your character's skin, ask yourself what they will be or are experiencing (and how their unique perspective shapes that experience) and then you'll understand what they need to know, what their world and their story needs to provide.

You can do this before you begin work to show you how to start, or twelve chapters into the book when you start to feel lost, or (as I did) in the very last chapter of a book when you need an ending that resonates with everything that's gone before. You can do it as a planner or a pantser. I honestly believe that the characters are more important than anything, and that if you always place them at the apex of your list of priorities, you won't go far wrong.

I hope that's helpful, my lovelies! I'll be back on Wednesday with more shenanigans. Read you then!

REVIEW: HALLOWED BY CYNTHIA HAND

2011-11-25T01:06:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Happy Friday to you all - and I hope you've had a good week. If not, I next week will be better. Positive Thinking No-Jutsu!

First, a request: Liz and Megha submitted questions for me to answer (on worldbuilding and planning respectively) but now the TweetDeck page where I'd saved Liz's question is unavailable, and I can't find Megha's question in the comment trail. So if you guys would still like me to talk about this after waiting for so long (sorry!) then can you comment here or email me and ask me again, so that I know exactly what to answer? *Smooches*

Onwards now, to a review of HALLOWED by Cynthia hand.

US Hardcover

THE BLURB:

For months part-angel Clara Gardner trained to face the raging forest fire from her visions and rescue the alluring and mysterious Christian Prescott from the blaze. But nothing could prepare her for the fateful decisions she would be forced to make that day, or the startling revelation that her purpose—the task she was put on earth to accomplish—is not as straightforward as she thought. Now, torn between her increasingly complicated feelings for Christian and her love for her boyfriend, Tucker, Clara struggles to make sense of what she was supposed to do the day of the fire. And, as she is drawn further into the world of part angels and the growing conflict between White Wings and Black Wings, Clara learns of the terrifying new reality that she must face: Someone close to her will die in a matter of months. With her future uncertain, the only thing Clara knows for sure is that the fire was just the beginning.

THE REVIEW:

I read the first book in Ms Hand's angel-lore based trilogy last October (you can see my review here) and I really, really liked it. I was surprised how much I liked it, since the set-up, on the face of it, seemed to be that basic paranormal romance staple of a new girl coming to town and then getting involved with two boys, and various supernatural shenanigans.

The difference with UNEARTHLY was that the author had an unexpected knack for characterisation which immediately drew me into the story. With a cast of such endearing, human (even if not actually human) people on the pages, the outcome truly mattered to me. And once she'd drawn me in, the author set about creating a really convincing (and in places quite dark) mythology for her angels and angelbloods. I gave the book four stars because I felt it ended on an unsatisfying cliff-hanger, but I was desperate to get my hands on the next one.

I'm very happy to say that HALLOWED lived up to and exceeded my expectations. I loved it. The problem is...I can't say all that much about it! Pretty much anything I tell you is going to be a huge spoiler. Let me borrow a phrase from Mark (of Mark Reads Harry Potter fame) and say: You are not prepared.

Australian Edition - my favourite!

This story carries on almost directly from the first one and the developments within are exciting and shocking and, despite being pretty much the opposite of what I expected, the book grabbed me by the heart and didn't let go.

The author takes the hints of darkness she embedded in the previous installment and runs with them, creating a world for Clara which is much less certain and far more frightening. There's still the trademark humour which I enjoyed so much in the first story, but now there's a more bittersweet flavour to everything, because Clara, at the end of UNEARTHLY, chose to ignore her 'Purpose' (that is, the task that was set before her by way of celestial visions) and to save the 'wrong' person. She did it for all the right reasons. She did it for love. But in the wake of that choice, the world goes from black and white to shades of grey for Clara, and her mother and brother. Quite literally.

When you read HALLOWED you're going to find that a lot of the things you were absolutely, positively certain of in the first book will dissolve. Certain facts you took for granted turn out to be major plot twists in disguise. Your suspicions will turn out to be cleverly planted red herrings (although I still have some ideas which I think will play out in the final book). Characters change, or come to see the world in such a transformed way that their motivations flip - or maybe it's your understanding of them that flips. I don't even know how to describe it, except to say that it rocked.

If the first book made me tear up a few times, this one made me flat-out weep on at least two occasions. It's brutal. But it's also beautiful. I felt as if Ms Hand's confidence and skill were literally unfolding before my eyes here. All the promise that gleamed in UNEARTHLY burst into blazing life.

UK paperback

That's not to say, however, that this book was perfect. I felt certain plot threads and certain characters got short shrift (Jeffrey, for example - at the end of the book he seemed to just disappear, and this hardly had any impact on Clara's life and decisions, which seemed odd given how close they once were). And I also wonder...if the first book's message was about free will...what was the theme of this story? That fighting against destiny/fate/God's plan causes only suffering and pain? While I can see how that sort of of underlying assumption would be of comfort to a religious person who puts their faith in a higher power, I found it a little bit discomforting at times because I believe that we all have an absolute right to make our own choices and the responsibility to do so, rather than expecting anyone (or anything) else to guide us or fix our mistakes.

Despite these niggling qualms, I can honestly say that HALLOWED is a moving, well-written, gorgeous follow-up to UNEARTHLY. As soon as it becomes available in hard copy, I'll be snapping up a copy for my own. Recommended.

OOPS!

2011-11-23T03:18:00.000-08:00

Hi you guys! Happy Wednesday. I didn't actually realise that it was Wednesday until five minutes ago. Whoops. Sorry about that.

Today I fully intended to present you with a) a book review or b) a post answering some reader questions. But I haven't written either of them. I'm really very sorry!

In the past few days I've gotten caught up in all kinds of fiddly little jobs (like making an all-new playlist for Katana Book Two) and going to see Breaking Dawn (OMG lolarious epic insanity - all the actors take it so seriously and act their little hearts out and I swear I actually teared up a couple of times. Also, I can't believe THAT was a 12 rated film. Yikes) and then having to research new computers because The Scalpel's shenanigans are scaring me and then trying to read some of these books I have for review and figuring out how to work AIM chat on Skype wwwaaaaah not enough hours in the day!

I promise you that I would have written a great post for you anyway, if it weren't for the fact that I thought it was Tuesday. Before you ask how an actual adult grown-up person could not know what day of the week it is, just remember that I don't actually have to leave the house to work. I always know what DATE it is, because that shows up in the bottom right hand corner of my computer display, but the DAY is something I know because of my routine. And my routine has gotten messed up lately.

Basically, as some of you may be aware, as well as being a writer, I'm also a carer for my father, who is disabled and has many chronic illnesses. Normally I regulate my schedule around when my mum is at work during the week, so that I can do things like help with his medication and get his meals ready when she isn't there. But this past week my mother has been struck down with a nasty virus and so she's been at home the whole time, and I've been looking after both of them. And without an office job of my own to go to, it's been very easy to literally not realise if it's a Sunday or a Thursday or whatever.

So...that's the sad story of why there's no decent post today. Many apologies. I think I'm going to try and do that reader question post (featuring Liz and Megha) on Friday and then next week I'll try to review Hallowed by Cynthia Hand (hint: liked it more than the first one).

Read you later, Beloved Peeps. In the meantime:

REVIEW: SERAPHINA BY RACHEL HARTMAN

2011-11-21T05:23:00.000-08:00

No cover art for this book yet! Boo!

The Blurb:

“Four decades of peace have done little to ease the mistrust between humans and dragons in the kingdom of Goredd. Folding themselves into human shape, dragons attend court as ambassadors, and lend their rational, mathematical minds to universities as scholars and teachers. As the treaty's anniversary draws near, however, tensions are high.

Seraphina Dombegh has reason to fear both sides. An unusually gifted musician, she joins the court just as a member of the royal family is murdered—in suspiciously draconian fashion. Seraphina is drawn into the investigation, partnering with the captain of the Queen's Guard, the dangerously perceptive Prince Lucian Kiggs. While they begin to uncover hints of a sinister plot to destroy the peace, Seraphina struggles to protect her own secret, the secret behind her musical gift, one so terrible that its discovery could mean her very life.

In her exquisitely written fantasy debut, Rachel Hartman creates a rich, complex, and utterly original world.”
The Review:

As soon as I read the part that mentioned dragons taking on human form, I was sold on this book. I’ve come across this idea in a only few fantasies but it’s one of my so-called ‘bullet-proof kinks’ – that is, an idea I love so much that even if nothing else about the book interested or excited me, I’d still read it from beginning to end. I just want my dragon-in-human-skin fix (and yes, one day I will write a book with dragons in, it’s on the list).

How lucky for me, then, that it turns out Rachel Hartman has a profoundly meaningful grasp of high fantasy language, description and dialogue, which made this book an absolute joy to read on prose level! That her characterisation is deft and beautifully subtle! And her main character – the eponymous Seraphina – was a fascinating, complex and unique creation who captured my heart with her resourcefulness and bravery!

Dear Readers, I read this book in one sitting, and I loved it.

First, however, a confession: at first the writing style did not quite gel for me. And I’m not sure why. It might be that after a chapter my brain snapped into the right mode and I was able to appreciate what the writer was doing and relax into the flow of things. Or it might be that the first chapter is a bit stiff (as first chapters often can be) and after that the writer herself relaxed, along with her prose. In either case, I recommend you persevere. By chapter two I was completely hooked.

The slow burn love story between the heroine and...er...well, a certain endearingly honourable and inquisitive male member of the cast was really well done, show-casing instant attraction (which is not the same as Insta!Love, no matter what certain Goodreads reviewers seem to think) followed by a brilliant build up of meshing interests, ideals and understanding. It was pitched perfectly and I believed in it. I wasn’t driven to roll my eyes, mutter ‘Oh, come ON!’ or to wish that the plot would just ‘MOVE, damn it!’ instead of wasting time on pointless repetitions of how hot the love interest was. Instead I was always eager to return to this part of the story, and the assured way that the writer handled the bittersweet nature of the relationship without going all emo was extremely enjoyable.

Going back to that bullet proof kink thing? I actually don’t think I read anything else in the description before I pressed the request button on NetGalley. If I had, I wouldn’t have been so surprised to find, on opening the eGalley, that Seraphina was so devoted to music. I’d have liked that characteristic regardless, but Ms Hartman’s descriptions of music and the way making it feels to a musician, the way that understanding it transforms people’s hearts, scored a direct hit. The passages relating to music were completely inspiring - in a book that was filled with magic, the music was one of the most magical things of all. THAT is an achievement.

Ms Hartman also managed to do something else which makes the writerly geek in me grin happily, which is to take an inhuman race, in this case the dragons, and showcase them as exactly that – inhuman, a discrete and alien species – without a) making them seem like big scaly humans despite their long lives and differently wired brains or b) falling into that smug assumption that if dragons are really different then of course human ways must be better. I loved the logical, analytical dragons, from their incessant wind-vector calculations and their contempt for human small-talk and rituals, to their reluctant fascination with human art and, on occasion, their helpless addiction to human sensation.

Seraphina is a cracking read, filled with three-dimensional people living in a three-dimensional world. It’s full of delightful surprises – humour, beautiful descriptions, unique ways of looking at the world – but it has a deep, rich undercurrent of genuinely moving reflections on family, and humanity, and choices, and lies and truth.

Although it’s the first in a series, and the characters have definitely not completed their journey by the end of this book, the initial challenge faced by Seraphina has been well resolved and you’re left feeling, if not satisfied (Hell no, I want the next one yesterday) at least comforted that Goredd and its people are ready for the trials ahead, as long as they have Seraphina and Kiggs and Glisselda looking out for them.

Seraphina comes out in May next year, highly recommended by yours truly.

FROSTFIRE COVER & SYNOPSIS REVEALED!

2011-11-18T03:25:00.000-08:00

Hello and Happy Friday, Dear Readers! Today it's my very great pleasure to finally unveil the cover and synopsis for FrostFire, the companion novel to Daughter of the Flames! FrostFire is due to come out in the UK from Walker Books in July of next year.

First, what is the story about?:

Frost is cursed - possessed by a wolf demon that brings death everywhere she goes. Desperate to find a cure, she flees her home, only to be captured by the Ruan Hill Guard. Trapped until she can prove she is not an enemy, Frost grows increasingly close to the Guard’s charismatic leader Luca and his second in command, the tortured Arian. Torn between two very different men, Frost fears that she may not be able to protect either of them ... from herself.

FrostFire's characters were a first for me. They arrived in my head as a trio.

I was haunted by the outline of three situations which would define the characters. The first was of a pair of injured, lost people, talking to each other in the cramped darkness of a tiny cave while a river flowed by outside, confiding secrets that might never emerge in the light of day. The second was of a golden person with stars in their eyes, standing in ripples of sunlight, reaching out to someone else and givng them a chance to change their life, and the sense of fearful exultation that second person would feel. And the final one...that was the most emotional, the most shocking of all. But I can't tell you about that one, as it would spoil the whole book :)

I saw a sort of triangle of personalities, each of them vulnerable and broken in a different way, each of them extraordinary and heroic in a different way. I saw how the flaws and strengths of these individuals would both support and aggravate the others, causing them to love and hate one another in unique ways, and to change and grow and eventually - hopefully - heal.

FrostFire deals with all the issues that I never had a chance to explore in DotF. Betrayal on a fundamental level, betrayal by someone that you love, how, in the middle of a war, bad guys and good guys sometimes merge into the same thing, how it feels to love someone who is utterly beyond your reach, and the way that people can transcend suffering and horror and become true heroes.

So now that you've scrolled past all those boring paragraphs...here's the cover!

And can I just say? O! M! G! I love it! Love, love, love it. Like, it's my favourite cover of mine EVER. It's right in ways that you can't even understand unless you've read the book. The colours! The flaring blue flames! The WOLF EYES! When my publisher asked me what Frost, the heroine, ought to look like, I sent them these reference pics of a Native American actress:

And they found a model who could almost be her sister.

And also? SWIRLS, baby! My own, my precious swirly bits! *Flails*

Oh, and just in case that wasn't enough to send me into a blissed out author coma for a week? When FrostFire comes out next year Walker Books are also going to reissue Daughter of the Flames with a brand new cover? You wanna see it? Yes? Yes?

Heeee! #NoRacefail covers that accurately depict and celebrate beautifully diverse heroines? Oh yeah. Walker Books is all over that. I love my publisher!

P.S. Why yes, Dear Readers - that is the gorgeous Elizabeth May, writer and photographer extraordinaire, on the FF cover! Where can I find more of her haunting and lyrical photography you ask? Why, here!

RANDOM WEDNESDAY

2011-11-16T00:24:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone! Welcome to a random blogpost of randomness, in which I will share a few things that have made me smile this week, in the hopes that they might make YOU smile, too.

First, this music video for the song A Thousand Years. Yes, it comes from the Breaking Dawn soundtrack and yes, the video does contain some clips from the film. And yes, you know I'm not really a fan of this whole Twilight thing. But this song is gorgeous and it works just as well for the lead characters of The Katana Trilogy (aka Big Secret Project) as for Bella and Edward. So I'm reclaiming it. As of now, it belongs to Shinobu and Mio.

Next, this picture (courtesy of YA Highway) which goes a long way to explaining why I have turned out the way I am.

How about this trailer for the new Snow White and the Huntsman film? I'll tell you the truth, this gives me shivers down the spine - it feels like it came right out of my imagination. Can anyone say 'Zella'? Can't wait to see this!

And this picture, which I found on Pinterest and absolutely adore: I'll be using this as inspiration for Barefoot on the Wind (the Other Novel that I'm going to be working on, and which I'll tell you more about some other time):

And finally, yesterday I realised that one of my absolute favourite musical artists, Two Steps From Hell, had released a new album and I'd somehow missed it! The thrill of this is almost impossible to describe. Nineteen new epic tracks! Love! Joy! Happiness! So here I offer you the first track from the album Archangel, which I can tell is going to be inspiring the heck out of me for many years to come.

FORGIVE ME...

2011-11-14T00:48:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dear Readers. Happy Monday - I hope you've had a great weekend.

Over here in Zolahland I'm still mostly lying flat on my back and getting a teensy weensy bit sick and tired of it. Typing in this position is uncomfortable in the extreme, and so is trying to write with a pen and paper, which means that the book - Big Secret Project Book Two, aka The Katana Trilogy Book Two - which is practically BURNING inside me (ohmygodyouguysit'ssoawesomecoolandheartbreakingandbeautifulillluuurrrvvveit) is not getting written.

And that makes me cranky, Dear Readers. Very cranky. Who'd have thought that a writer with a perfect excuse to do nothing but lie around procrastinating for days on end would feel so cross about it? Not me! Turns out I'm not ready for my silver procrastinating medal quite yet.

Signs are that I'm probably on the mend now. I've made the decision to stop taking the powerful muscle relaxants that made me feel drunk and groggy all the time, so my back is hurting again, though it's not nearly the blinding agony that it was last Tuesday when it first happened. All the lying flat on my back does seem to be helping. I'm hopeful that I might be able to sit upright like a normal person within a week or so.

However, I know that I promised the lovely Liz and the lovely Megha to do a post for them today tackling planning and worldbuilding, and this has been weighing on my mind. I just can't do it. Believe me, I'd like nothing more than to get at least *some* writing in, but I just can't stay in this position long enough to do it. In fact, it looks like all my posts for the next week at least will be short and sweet. It's so frustrating for me, and I know it must be for you.

Please bear with me while I heal up, Dear Readers! I will try to keep to my normal posting schedule during all this, even if all I do is offer you a pretty picture or a YouTube video that I like. And forgive me for not writing the planning/world-building post that I promised. I will get to it, honestly, once I'm back on my feet!

A NANO CONFESSION

2011-11-11T00:49:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone - and Happy Friday!

Today, I have a confession to make. A confession which will already be fairly obvious to anyone who's checked my NaNoWriMo profile and seen my current wordcount.

I fell off the Nano wagon. *Sob*

No, I'm not really that upset, to be honest. After the catalogue of woe I've endured the past week I feel lucky just to be alive. Getting stressed out over Nano would be a bit silly.

As you know, I did try to push on despite the Nanovirus (with the pounding head, achy joints and sore throat) that struck me on November the first. In fact I did so well that I was ahead of target and gave myself Saturday off. But on Sunday I started to feel really ill again, and not the kind of illness that you can write through. I draw the line at taking a notebook into the toilet with me. Ew.

Despite feeling like death warmed over until Tuesday evening, I was still prepared to press on with Nano, adding words to my daily target to try and catch up. I was determined to start bright and early on Wednesday morning, motivated by getting to announce my news about The Katana Trilogy (aka Big Secret Project).

Then, as I was about to get into bed on Tuesday night, I crouched down to pat my dog, caught my foot in his bed, slipped, and felt an explosion of burning pain - like a red hot wire being ripped out of my spine and dragged down my leg. I couldn't sleep all night because of the pain in my back, which kept throbbing no matter how I arranged myself. I was on the phone to the doctor first thing the next morning. Those close to me know this is a last resort; I really hate going to the doctors. But I couldn't sit up, and was in pain even when I was walking. I was scared I'd done something really serious.

Turned out I'd done something medium serious - a prolapsed disc, which is when one of the discs of soft, cushioning tissue between the bones of your vertebrae bulge out and press into the nerves of the spine in a not-good sort of way. Not permanent but definitely very painful until it subsides.

Trying to sit upright in a normal position is agony. I'm typing this lying flat with my knees propped up by a pillow so that I can lean my laptop against them, and that's the position I'm more or less stuck in for a while. The only breaks are to eat (standing up) and take my dog for his walks. The pain is starting to ease off a little, although I'm not sure how much of that is actual progress and how much is due to the strong anti-inflammatory, muscle relaxant and painkilling drugs my doctor prescribed (these drugs make me feel a tiny bit drunk aaaaall the time, so please excuse any mistakes in this post based on that and the fact that it's hard to type in a horizontal position).

Given all that, I was forced to accept that I'm going to have to give up on hitting any kind of meaningful Nano target this year. It's a little frustrating. I'm SO keen to work on the second book of the Katana Trilogy. Everytime I think about all the cool stuff I get to write I want to clap like a seal. But I can't risk making my back worse, because that's just going to add to the delays. So for the moment I'm mainly watching American TV programmes on iTunes (I <3 Castle) and napping, and daydreaming about the feel of a pen in my hand and a notebook on my knees (yes, it's sad, I know).

Anyone who's been following this blog for a while will know that this is only the most recent in a serious of hilarious comedy pratfalls that I've been through (dislocating my toe while walking down the stairs was a good one) and might wonder if I have some heavy Karmic debt that I'm paying off or something. I can only wonder that myself, since I haven't managed to get through a year without some form of injury since I was about twelve. But never mind! My motto is that it could always be worse, so make the best of what you have.

With that in mind, I hope everyone has a great weekend - and I'll read you on Monday when, barring mishaps, I'll hopefully be answering some reader questions about planning and world-building :)

BIG SECRET PROJECT DEAL ANNOUNCEMENT

2011-11-09T01:08:00.000-08:00

Yes, you read that right!

At long last, after a YEAR of teasing you, and writing and revising furiously, and crossing my fingers, and long phonecalls with Super Agent and exciting emails with my editor... I can FINALLY tell you all about Big Secret Project.

*Deep breaths, deep breaths*

OK - first, some theme music. Well, I mean, clearly I'd love to provide a drumroll at this point, but not only is it hard to find one that lasts more than five seconds, but it would get really annoying after a minute (a bit like all this waffling I'm doing right now) so instead, the song which I've been listening to most throughout the writing of Big Secret Project:

For the full experience, click now, wait for the music to play, and then scroll down to read.

Right.

What is all this fuss about?

What is Big Secret Project?

Read on!

****

THE KATANA TRILOGY. A breathtaking new urban fantasy trilogy from the critically acclaimed, award winning author of The Swan Kingdom and Shadows on the Moon.

When fifteen year old Mio Yamato furtively sneaks the katana - an ancestral Japanese sword - out of its hiding place in her parent's attic to help liven up her Christmas party costume, she has no idea of the darkness she is about to unleash on modern day London, or the family secrets that she is going to uncover.

The paralysing paranoia that descends on her before she gets to her friend's party is her first clue. The vivid and terrifying visions that nearly get her killed are a pretty good warning too.

The giant nine-tailed cat demon that comes after the sword and tries to rip her throat out? Overkill.

Seconds away from becoming kitty-food, Mio accidentally releases Shinobu, a warrior boy who has been trapped within the sword for centuries. He saves her life and sends the demon running. But it's already too late. Mio has ruptured the veil between the mortal realm and the Underworld, and now the gods and monsters of ancient Japan stalk the streets of London, searching for her and the sword.

With the help of her best friend Jack, a fox spirit named Hikaru - and the devoted protection of the betwitchingly familiar Shinobu - Mio attempts to discover the true nature of the sword and its connection to the Yamato family. Because if she doesn't learn how to control the katana's incredible powers, she's in danger of being overwhelmed by them. And if she can't keep the sword safe from the terrible creatures who want it for their own, she'll lose not only her own life... but the love of a lifetime.

The Night Itself, Book One of THE KATANA TRILOGY, is due for publication in summer 2013 from Walker Books, publishers of Cassandra Clare's The Mortal Instruments Series and Patrick Ness' Chaos Walking Trilogy.

Squeeee!

BOOK MEMOIRS INTERVIEW!

2011-11-07T00:42:00.000-08:00

Hello, Dear Readers - and Happy Monday! This weekend I realised that I had never posted the wonderful interview which Elle and Kate from The Book Memoirs did with me for their Writer's Workshop. I'm not even sure I posted a link, since I'd kind of forgotten about it (bad Zolah! No cookie!).

And so, I present it now, for your consideration. Some great questions here, which I've never been asked in quite this way before.

Hej, Memoirites! Hvordan har du det? It feels appropriate to say hello and ask you how you are in Danish because today’s author is young-adult novelist Zoë Marriott! No, Zoë herself is not Danish but her wildly popular first book, The Swan Kingdom, is an ingenious retelling of the fairytale ‘The Wild Swans’ by Hans Christian Andersen… (See what I did there?) Zoë is also the author of the acclaimed fantasy novel Daughter of the Flames and the highly acclaimed Shadows on the Moon, currently available in a bookstore near you. We love Zo and we’re always delighted to have her on the site.

Elle: Hi, Zoë! Thanks so much for agreeing to be here. In prepping for the interview, I spent some time working through your treasure trove of a website and all of your tips for aspiring writers. If you had to pick one single piece of all-important advice to give to budding novelists, what do you think it would be?

Zoë: Thanks so much for inviting me, girls! Now, this first question… Oh, heck – where’s Yoda when you need him? The thing is, the One All-Important Piece of Advice probably changes from writer to writer, from day to day, even from minute to minute. It all depends where you are in your book, your life and your career. If I’m going for a one-size-fits-all type of thing I’ll probably plump for a reminder that the only difference between a published writer and an unpublished one is that the published one never gave up. So don’t ever give up. Persistence is three times as valuable as luck.

Kate: As a big fan of fairy tales and folk stories, I’m curious: what made you decide to use an Andersen story as the backbone for your novel? Was this a conscious decision at the get-go, or an evolution as you worked through ideas?

Zoë: I’ve always been fascinated by fairytales, and The Wild Swans was my favourite fairytale growing up. Looking back, I can see that what really captured my attention about the story – and all folkloric works – is the wide gaps left for the imagination within the narrative. Fairytales always tell you who did what and where, but somehow that essential WHY is never provided. Just why is the wicked stepmother so wicked? Why is the father or King always so willing to banish and forget his own children? How do the children themselves feel about it? What kind of courage does it take to go on when your fairytale world has fallen apart like this? I promised myself that I would explore these questions when I got older. And then I forgot about it. But when – several years later! – I realised that I wanted to write young adult novels, The Wild Swans immediately presented itself as a story that I needed to re-tell. It was as if it had been waiting patiently at the back of my mind all that time for me to grow up and notice it.

Elle: I’ve noticed that in my search for information, I haven’t seen anything which speaks to your writing process. Do you story-board? Are there lots of pieces of paper stuck haphazardly on your walls or do you have nice, neat index cards full of plans?
Zoë: Here’s where I bust out my camera! As you can see here, I’m a devotee of notebooks. Generally when I get a little spark of an idea I’ll pick out a notebook that seems right – I have nearly a hundred neatly stored in my Writing Cave – and I’ll start shoving Post-It notes into it with all my random thoughts. Later on, when the idea has matured or collided with another idea to make something that seems juicy enough for a book, I’ll get the notebook out again, pop a working title and a date in the front and start scribbling like mad – everything from fully formed scenes to one-line snatches of dialogue, to character sketches.

I do almost all of my rough drafting with a pencil in a notebook, which means that about 75% of my notebook is full of messy stuff which bears no resemblance to anything in the finished book at all. I’ve tried typing directly into a computer but I find it adds a lot of hard work to the revising later on – things look so official once you’ve got them in a Word Doc., it’s much harder to be flexible, play with ideas, change your mind. When I feel like I’ve rooted the story firmly in my brain I start trying to write a synopsis to contain all the craziness. Oy vey, synopses! I’m terrible at them! Plotting is definitely my week spot. I’ve developed all kinds of elaborate graphs and diagrams to try and keep control of my plots (as you can see!).

I’m not sure any of them really work – they’re more like a comfort blanket that I need in order to keep going when really I have no idea how things are going to fall out. For instance, after finishing the first draft of my current book I was forced to go back and change the gender OF EVERY SINGLE CHARACTER except two, and completely re-write it to make that work. I feel as if I’m a 50/50 mix between a planner and a pantser, and I hope one day to find a combination that works for me a bit more smoothly.

Kate: As someone who’s fairly private with her own writing, I always wonder this about published authors: when do you share your writing with other people? Do you have a sounding board you bounce ideas off of from inception or do you wait until you have some or all of a first draft done?

Zoë: Oh, you’re not alone, Kate! Lately I’ve been feeling like a bit of an anomaly in this regard, because Twitter and other writers blogs show me that everyone – but everyone! – seems to have teams of alpha readers, beta readers and critique partners. But I don’t. I never have. The only people who even get to glimpse what I’m working on before I’ve completed the first draft are my agent and editor – and when I say ‘first draft’ I actually mean ‘third or fourth draft that I call a first draft because I don’t want to admit how awful the actual first draft was’.

When I was first writing this was because I couldn’t find any person in my real life who was a) interested enough to comb through a first draft on my behalf and b) capable of doing so in a meaningful or helpful way. Seriously, you can’t exactly ask your mother, can you? By the time I became aware of the huge online YA community and the critiquing boards on places like AW I found that I didn’t really want feedback from anyone who wasn’t going to be directly involved in getting the book published, because so often the comments I saw online were contradictory and unhelpful.

But even though I don’t have any beta readers, I do belong to an informal writing group which was founded by an online friend of mine several years ago. We call ourselves The Furtive Scribblers and you’ll find them mentioned in the acknowledgments of everything I write. We have enormous, no-pressure fun, brain-storming, bouncing ideas, testing plots for holes, and pushing each other through writer’s block. I adore them, and without them my books would be HALF as good, if that.

Elle: I’m really interested in your experience of planning a fantasy novel and the alternative rules of that world. For high-fantasy, everyone’s advice is to start with a map, urban-fantasy seems to carry the recommendation of working out the mythology first. What did you do first whilst plotting your brand of fantasy novel?

Zoë: Panic, normally. As soon as I start to get an idea of what my fantasy world is going to be, I freak out and become convinced I JUST DON’T KNOW ENOUGH OMG. I wear out my library card, spend all my cash on reference works, documentaries and world music CDs and Google until my fingers bleed. Because my fantasy worlds so far have all had a historical basis (Daughter of the Flames was a mixture of India, Africa and Tibet, Shadows on the Moon is Japan and a sprinkling of China) it would have been all too easy to get things wrong.

Which may sound crazy when I’m making up my own world – but if you’re creating a pre-industrial country with no mass production and you have your characters pull out a ‘tarp’ or carry water in a metal bucket, you’ve already messed up. If you’re going to create fairytale Japan you need to know about real Japan or instead of an homage you’ll create a stereotypical parody, and not only insult the real culture you’re using but embarrass yourself. I do not like to embarrass myself!

Only when I’ve stuffed my brain to bursting point with every real life fact I can find do I feel as if I have the right to start messing around and actually making stuff up. This is the fun part. I used to draw incredibly detailed maps, but my publisher doesn’t like them and won’t actually put them in the book, so now I mostly sketch out relative areas so that I don’t get mixed up later on. I have a mental check list of vital facts I must know before I start work in earnest, like – what is the primary religion or religion of this country or countries? How strongly does this affect the day-to-day lives of the people? What does the general populace look like? What is the climate like, what are the major geographical features and natural hazards? What are is the wildlife like? The list goes on for quite a long while. But once I’ve filled those boxes I’ll give myself freedom to make other things up as I go along and as the plot or characters require. Some of my favourite bits of world building have come from impulse invention – like the facial tattoos in DotF.

Kate: Do you have any writing “rituals”? Do you have to cut yourself off from the outside world? Do you start rereading what you last wrote? Is there anything that has to be done for the juices to get flowing?

Zoë: I try not to let myself get into too many rituals, because I have an addictive personality and I feel as if I would just end up strangling myself. So, generally, I try to be in my Writing Cave by 9:00, I usually have a large mug of tea or coffee with me, and I generally try to re-read and revise what I wrote the day before, and then go onto new material. But if I blocked the doorway of the Writing Cave with three baskets of un-ironed laundry and I have to write downstairs instead? I try to be OK with that. If the dog rolled in something awful and needs a bath and I can’t start until 10:00? Golly, I really, really try to be OK with that. I think the only things I absolutely must have are my notebook/pencil and my iPod. Music is one thing I can’t do without. I mean, I can write without it, but I find it so hard to get started, it’s just easier to give in.

Elle: You’ve mentioned in one of your Q&A answers on your website that the ending to The Swan Kingdom changed drastically halfway through as you got to know your characters. Do you tend to find you start a novel with a fully-formed character in mind, or do you often begin with a handful of details and surprise yourself as you go?

Zoë: Actually, the ending itself stayed exactly the same. What changed was where the ending took place, how it took place, and all the characters involved!

I always start with a character. Stories come to me through the filter of a character’s eyes. I get that little whispering voice in the back of my head, and their life begins to unreel itself before my eyes. And because of this I fool myself that I know who they are and what’s going to happen. But of course, I’m not actually receiving messages from an alternate reality – it’s all coming from the little Writer Plugin in my hindbrain. And so what seems to come to me as incontrovertible ‘fact’, like this character’s actions, or that character’s traits, are all negotiable.

It’s only when I actually put the characters in the world, set them against each other and and let them get to work, that I truly start to understand them, and see how their histories, personalities, and conflicting desires, work together to create what I hope are fully realised people. And as soon as this starts, the story – what it means to them and what it means to me, and hence what actually happens – begins to warp and change.

This is a good thing. Even if it does cause the occasional panic attack…

Kate: At what point do you abandon an idea – be it for a plot twist, a character, or part of your fantasy world – as unworkable? Is there some threshold that lets you know “this won’t work”?

Zoë: Nope. I’ve not yet figured out how to be well adjusted about this stuff. There’s things that I love, and things I don’t. The things I love stay no matter what, and the things I don’t go out the window in a constant stream. Then I send it to my editor and she cuts half the things I love, brings half the things I don’t love back from the flowerbed under the window, and tells me to make it work. And I groan and clutch my head, and try to sneak as many of the ‘love’ bits back in as I can, but it’s never as many as I wanted. If anyone else has any tips on how to handle this? I’d be extremely grateful!

Elle: I’ve taken great pleasure in putting this question to everyone else but I especially can’t wait to see what you say! Writers are often asked who their biggest influences are but I would instead like to know which novels most influenced you as an individual and as writer, barring the most obvious answer (cough, cough)!

Zoë: The Holy Trinity for me as a young person was – The Blue Sword by Robin McKinley, Lioness Rampant by Tamora Pierce, and Crown Duel by Sherwood Smith. If you’ve read these, you’ll sense a common theme – resourceful, brave, compassionate heroines, with bag-ass swords. These books taught me who I wanted to be and I like to think I’ve lived up to that, at least in a small way. Even though my sword is only a wooden one.

When it comes to writers who influence me and my work as an adult, though – writers that I’m still striving to emulate, writers whose books have expanded my horizons and continue to make me a better writer myself – the picture changes a little. Suddenly I’m looking at a new top three:

Hexwood by Diana Wynne Jones, The Curse of Chalion by Lois McMaster Bujold and The Other Wind by Ursula Le Guin.

These books have a lot less in common on the surface, but each of them has a core of… something, some indefinable thing, that I’m constantly trying to breach and understand. I’ve re-read each of these so many times you’d think I’d know them by heart. Instead, I find myself reading a new book each time. THAT is greatness. I bow down before them.

Thanks again for having me Elle and Kate, and for coming up with such different, intriguing questions!

RETROFRIDAY - SUGAR & SPICE...

2011-11-04T01:12:00.000-07:00

Hello everyone! Happy Friday to you all!

I'm a bit dazed and confused that it *is* Friday already, but despite the attack of the Nanovirus (and the pouring rain) I'm pretty cheerful. I'm slightly ahead of my NaNoWriMo target, I'm starting to feel a little better, and most importantly Super Agent LOVES Big Secret Project Book One. Yippee!

So it's time to bust out the RetroFriday goodness, and drag a post from the archives which you may not have seen before or may find interesting to re-read. Given last week's ranting about the problems of Mary Sue in our sexist society, it felt about time to pull out some of my earlier thoughts on the topic. And so I give you:

RetroFriday: SUGAR AND SPICE

Today, as part of my random, FF-is-eating-my-brain programme of entertainment, I present a post on what I think is wrong with the way our society perceives and enforces gender roles. To read the article that inspired this blog post you can click on this link.

In summary: This very clever lady used Zoë-Trope favourite Wordle to create these.

The first one is a Wordle made up of the terms used in advertising boy's toys. The second is made up of terms used in advertising girl's toys.

These toys were marketed at boys and girls between the ages of six and eight - very young. But not too young to already be assessing and questioning their place in the world and who they should be. In fact, this is exactly the period when children are assigning themselves the gender roles that they may carry for the rest of their lives.

By this age I was already rejecting my mother's desire to dress me in sensible jeans and dungarees and begging for pink, flowery dresses. By this age the boys I knew were already wearing mostly blue and bright red and camoflage colours, and saying things like 'Ew, giiiirls!'

These behaviours all seem perfectly natural - until you realise they're not.

Until the age of around eight or nine, boys and girls have precisely the same hormones running through their veins. If you took a group of boys and girls under ten and dressed them in the same grey sack and cut all their hair to the same length, you would be unable to tell boy from girl, even if they spoke or hugged you or danced around the room.

There is no pink gene on the X-chromosone that automatically makes little girls crave flowery dresses and ribbons and baby dolls. There's no blue gene on the y-chromosone that automatically makes boys crave fast cars, swords and buzz cuts. There's definitely no 'Euw, giiirls!' gene that requires boys to treat girls and anything that girls might be interested in with disdain and contempt.

And yet these are all behaviours which are so common, so normal, so 'natural' to us that we not only don't QUESTION them? We get all het up and bothered if kids *don't* conform to them. Like, for instance, when this American blogger helped her little boy's wish come true by allowing him to dress as Daphne from Scooby Do at Halloween, and dozens of people descended on her to say that she was a bad mother.

It's not that either of these Wordles presents any bad words. There's nothing wrong with a child of either sex liking dresses and babies or dragons and heroes. The problem is that the companies creating these toys, and the people marketing them, are making an assumption that girls - and only girls - are vitally interested in fashion, perfect nails, babies, love and hair. And that boys - and only boys - are interested in battle, power, heroes, stealth and beating people.

Which is only true if we make it so, by pushing a narrow, reductive take on what male and female mean onto children and telling them 'this is what you are'. There is simply no reason for young children to be treated or act differently based on their sex, other than the fact that we, as a society, want them to be different.

What a terrible thing to do to a child, right? How awful to bombard them with films, TV shows, music videos, books and toys and toy catalogues (not to mention unconscious assumptions on the way that children should develop and behave) and try to force them to conform to unnatural, artificial ideals of gender, without any good reason.

What are kids, especially kids who don't enjoy the roles arbitrarily assigned to them based on their reproductive organs, absorbing from this?

Looking at these Wordles makes me think of all kinds of other things that worry me. Like the commonly held idea that boys don't read because not enough 'boy books' are on the shelves, and that the dominance of women editors and writers in Young Adult and Children's publishing is somehow hurting boys and preventing them from becoming readers. The arguments about this are summed up beautifully in this article by YA author Maureen Johnson - and the comment trail is particularly interesting.

Why is it so impossible for us to expect a boy to read a book that has a girl main character? Why is the idea of reading about a girl so disgusting to boys that, apparently, they won't even go into the bookstore because they have to pass by books with girls in them? What are we teaching boys - and girls - about the value of their role in society by encouraging this, and by placing the blame on female authors and editors intead of a society that raises boys to look at girls (and anything that may be considered to be 'girly') with contempt? Especially since we're also raising the girls to believe that they must conform to 'girly' behaviour and interests in order to be 'normal' and 'natural'?

It's not normal and natural.

Babies, love, perfect nails and romance are awesome. So are battles, dragons, flames and heroes. What I want to know is, why can't both sexes be interested in both without being shunned by our society? Why, 500,000 years after modern man first emerged as a species on earth, are we still trying to play by the strict rules of a hunter-gatherer society that died out with flint axes and stone circles?

And will people like me still be asking this question in another hundred year's time - or a thousand?

BLLLLEUUURRRGHHHHLLL...

2011-11-02T02:34:00.000-07:00

...as I said to someone on Twitter. No, seriously. That was about the height of my wit at 7:30 this morning, and I'm afraid I've not moved on much since.

Yesterday was the first day of Nano, and it brought with it just over 2,000 words of Big Secret Project Book Two (YAY!). It also brought with it a strange bug which has given me a fuzzy head, achy joints, an extremely sore throat, and this creeping red rash on my face and neck (BOOO!).

And I need to try and hit my Nano target again today. Folding after just one day would be too pathetic for words. But since I'm still feeling like the grey slimy thing that one of my cats left on the doormat, those are about the only good words I'm going to be capable of, I think.

See you on Friday - when hopefully I'll look and feel and WRITE less like a grey slimy thing and more like, you know, a person.

*Waves feebly*

*Totters away to wWriting Cave*

BIG SECRET PROJECT TEASER #4

2011-10-31T01:08:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers! I wish you Happy Monday - as it's a very happy Monday for me. The Scalpel is working again, and tomorrow NaNoWriMo starts and I can get to work on Big Secret Project Book Two. Yippee! I've got so many ideas I've been a little worried my brain might pop.

And so it seems only fitting that I should post a Big Secret Project Book One teaser today. This will probably be the very last one, since I don't want to give all the plot away (it is a Secret Project still, after all). As always, when a book is not officially sold yet, this snippet is subject to change major or minor, or even deletion. So enjoy it while you can - and tell me what you think in the comments!

Click the cut to read more.

“Ideas?” I asked softly.

“Try talking to her,” Shinobu said in whisper. “She might not understand what you’re saying, but maybe she will recognise your voice.”

“Just don’t make any sudden movements,” Hikaru advised. “Because one slip, and – ”

“I get it, thank you.” I cut him off before he could terrify me more than I already was and crept slowly towards the fox Jack.

She was beautiful – slender, compact and muscular. Her pelt was dark red, with no white at all, and her paws, the tip of her tail and her ears shaded to chocolate brown. I thought she was a bit bigger than a regular fox, but I wasn’t an expert on the species.

“Hey,” I said quietly. “You’re kind of cute as a fox, did you know? You’d get such a kick if you could see yourself.”

One of Jack’s large ears quivered a little, but she didn’t turn her head. I left the shelter of the last free and froze, unable to force myself to walk any further. It was just too scary out there in the open. I got down on my hands and knees – I was already as filthy as a human could get, so who cared? – and crawled up to the edge of the cliff.

“This is definitely an experience, right? Maybe not one to share with the grandkids, though, unless we want them to think we’ve lost our marbles and ship us off to the old folks home.”

I clamped my hands on the triangle shaped peak of stone and slowly eased myself down so that I was lying flat. Jack tilted her head slightly, as if she was paying attention to my movements. She lifted one paw, and I tensed.

Don’t, don’t, please, please don’t...

She put the paw back down.

I sighed. “Jack, you know what would be really awesome? If you’d make this easy on me and just come over here. Because, I’ve got to tell you, I think I’m developing a bit of a thing about heights, and you aren’t helping.”

I inched my leg up and over the peak, sucked in a deep, calming breath, and sat upright.

For the first time, I could see what Jack was gazing at.

London spread out in front of us, every bit of it green and shining and growing. Where home had skyscrapers, I now saw verdant green mountains cloaked in mist and topped by gargantuan trees that must have been taller than this house. Where home had roads, there were white, winding paths, glinting rivers and waterfalls. And forests - forests that stretched as far as the eye could see. A gust of that warm, scented wind made me teeter in place, but I was too spellbound to care.

GOOD NEWS BAD NEWS

2011-10-28T00:49:00.000-07:00

Hello all - I'd love to say 'Happy Friday' but it's more a mixed Friday, really. There is, as the title suggests, good news and bad news.

The good news is that I finished my revision of Big Secret Project Book One late on Wednesday and sent it off to Super Agent. So...the die is cast, as Shakespeare would say. Now I just have to cross my fingers that she loves it as much as I do. And that I'll be able to share information with you about it soon because IT. IS. KILLING. MEEEEEE.

Ahem.

The bad news is that this morning I had a wee accident with The Scalpel, my laptop. And now it's not working at all. I'm typing this on my ancient back-up model and trying to figure out what I'm going to do about that, as the Scalpel is just under a year old and is *is* insured, but then again there's my no claims bonus...ach, boring adult stuff like that.

Anyhow, thanks to everyone for their positive contributions to the Mary Sue discussion following Wednesday's post. I was dreading the comments a little bit, but so far it's all been polite and friendly, which is a relief.

Now I leave you, to brood over my courageous laptop comrade, who has fallen in battle.

WHAT WOULD MARY SUE DO?

2011-10-25T23:18:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers! Happy Wednesday to you all. I've decided that it's finally time to follow up on my most-read post ever. I have girded my loins, donned my flack jacket, and cautiously boarded the train back to Crazy Town (carrying some sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper, and a spare pair of socks, in case of emergency, as all travellers to Crazy Town should).

Yes, Dear Readers. That's right.

Today, we're going to talk about Mary Sue. Again.

Many of you will be aware of the internet firestorm that descended on this blog after I made a post asking reviewers and critics to reconsider their use (and misuse) of the term Mary Sue - but if not, you can find the post, and read the extremely interesting comment trail, here.

In the wake of that post and the response to it, several other authors weighed in on the discussion, with their particular takes on why seeing 'Mary Sue' scattered all over the place like an unwise fashion epidemic (neon leg warmers? Puffball skirts? Mullets?) made their souls die a little. I'm isolating here the responses that particularly struck a chord for me and made me look at this whole debate from a different perspective.

Firstly we had the wonderful Sarah Rees Brennan (who-I-kind-of-want-to-marry-Omg) telling ladies that they are ALLOWED to be both flawed and awesome: in fact, flawsome.

Next Holly Black (Saint-Paul-on-a-pogo-stick-HOLLY-BLACK!) very thoughtfully pointed out that a Mary Sue is only a Mary Sue in fanfic because she's stealing the narrative from the true leading characters. In original fiction, where she IS the leading character, she's just doing what a hero or heroine does.

Then not long ago adult urban fantasy author Seanan McGuire (whose-October-Daye-books-are-literally-on-my-TBR-pile-right-now-holy-crap) made possibly the most telling post of all for me, wherein she teased out an aspect of the situation which I hadn't consciously analysed before: that reviewers are calling Mary Sue on any female character who is sufficiently heroic to actually carry her own story.

When I wrote that original Mary Sue post, obviously I had no idea how much of a landmine I was stepping on in terms of anger and defensiveness from certain readers (which is why I eventually stopped responding to comments and emails on the topic). But at the same time, I also had no idea how much of a groundswell of support there would be from other authors, authors who'd been witnessing this phenomenon themselves and feeling just as disturbed by it as I was. I had no idea, basically, how bloody right I was.

I rant a lot, about a lot of subjects, and I always believe in what I say. But as I saw the response to my Mary Sue post gaining momentum, as I saw more and more women writers admitting how sad and disheartened and hopeless this term made them feel, it began to dawn on me that this wasn't just me ranting about a pet peeve anymore. It wasn't just that Mary Sue was an inaccurate way to criticise female characters, that it was badly defined and contradictory and annoying.

It was that the overuse of Mary Sue was damaging the quality of critical response to original fiction AND encouraging anti-woman sentiment hidden under a thin veneer of concern for Strong Female Characters.

Mary Sue is a lot more important than she first appeared, Dear Readers. Not just in herself, but because she is symptomatic of a much wider problem: how women are treated and represented in our society.

And how is that? Well, to sum it up, let's take a look at this lovely little poster (which I know you've all probably seen before) which puts a series of male comic book characters in the same pose that artists chose for Wonder Woman (with WW herself at the bottom for comparison):

This has been doing the rounds on the internet for months, and we've all had a good laugh about it. Because that's what we socially aware Feminists DO when we're confronted with evidence of the over-sexualisation of women in the media. We laugh about it.

The problem is that it's not really funny.

If any male hero was really drawn posed like that on any page in any mainstream graphic novel, the words 'Ridiculous!' 'Inappropriate!', 'Demeaning!', 'Disgusting!' and most probably 'Gay!' (cringe) would get thrown at it so fast that you'd hear a wave of sonic booms. But female characters continue to be drawn this way. And female actors continue to be posed this way in films and on TV. And female models do the same pose in ads and on the catwalk.

Why? Because its OK for women to look ridiculous and inappropriate, for them to be demeaned and disgusting (and most definitely gay, so long as they're happy to let hetero blokes watch them at it).

In fact, it's more than OK. It's expected. It is REQUIRED. So much so that no one even sees it as demeaning or inappropriate or any of those other emotive words. They just see it as normal. *I* see it as normal. So what if I spend around a quarter of a film averting my eyes from lingering shots of a female actor's rear end, bust, legs and lips, and walk away without being able to remember the character's name? I probably don't even notice because That's Just How Films Are (this is called the Male Gaze and is a topic to be fully explored in another post, Dear Readers).

Basically: Male heroes get to save the world. Female ones get to stand there and look sexy, dammit.

Considering that we're constantly - but constantly - exposed to this worldview, is it any wonder that most of us have trouble clearing enough space in our heads to tackle female characters fairly?

I don't believe all reviewers (especially the female ones!) want to see women characters over-sexualised and treated as nothing more than unthreatening eye candy. But what I do believe is that this bombardment of EmptySexyHotObject images has made it hard for us to see women AS ANYTHING ELSE.

Which is why when female writers produce female characters with depth and agency, they get accused of wish fulfilment.

There's an unconscious assumption that any female protagonist or any important female secondary character written by a woman must necessarily be an idealised author insert/wish fulfilment character. Otherwise no female character would get to tell her own story in her own voice, and have her experiences treated as interesting and worthwhile. That's the real flaw with the term Mary Sue and the way that reviewers are applying it to original fiction. Female characters are not parasites sucking away the limelight that rightfully belongs to their male counterparts. Women do deserve their own stories. Their own voices. Their experiences are interesting and worthwhile.

Female protagonists are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own stories.

And the more successful they become, the more female writers are being treated like cuckoos in the nest within their own industry.

Look at this. And some of the comments in this (brilliant) post by Maureen Johnson. Examples of people stating that they want women to stop all this silly writing of theirs, and let men do the job instead. Examples of people stating, without irony, that women need to stop producing these girly books full of girl characters for girls to read because that is somehow stopping BOYS from reading! Let the men write manly books for men because...well, just because! Boys are important! Stuff girls! Who cares if THEY read or not? They're just there to look sexy, dammit!

These are the attitudes and assumptions that all women, and all readers, are fighting against.

I'm not saying that the misuse of the term Mary Sue is responsible for All The Sexism. But it is a really worrying symptom. It's an internet term, mostly used by internet savvy folks - and the Internet is the place where, for my money, a lot of the really smart booktalk happens. This is the place where readers find like-minded networks of friends, where a lot of promising young writers get nurtured. And where you find courageous, honest reviewers who really know the YA category - reviewers whose reviews we NEED because they are willing to put their heads above the parapet and call out misogyny and racism and homophobia and bad writing and abusive fictional boyfriends (all stuff that worries me too)!

Let me make it clear that I love readers. I love reviewers. I love bloggers. I WANT you guys to keep doing your thing. I want to keep on reading reviews of my own work (positive and negative) which teach me useful lessons and help me to develop and improve as writer BECAUSE they are not written for my benefit. I want to be able to click on Amazon or Goodreads or Book Depo and see fifty different reviews of the books I'm thinking about buying from all different perspectives. If you think a character is badly written or developed or unrealistic? I 100% support your right to scream that from the rooftops.

But the unconscious cuckoo-in-the-nest assumption betrayed by the use of Mary Sue as a term to denigrate female characters (and authors!) in original fiction is stealthily poisoning a lot of that healthy, necessary debate about YA books. It's harmful to the young readers we should be encouraging, the young reviewers we should be embracing, and the developing writers we should be supporting online.

Why does it have to be this way, Dear Readers? What do you think?

What would Mary Sue (by which I mean a complex, fully realised, awesome female character) do?

(With thanks to the lovely writers who double-checked this post for me and stopped me from commiting pure Feminist Rage Smash. They know who they are!)

NaNoWriMo: FOR REAL

2011-10-24T00:51:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Kaz Mahoney for this logo!

Hello, hello, hello, Dear Readers! As the dread, chilly fingers of Monday once again winkle us out from the over-stuffed, cloudy warmth of the weekend, I bring you some momentous news:

I have signed up for NaNoWriMo!

For those of you who have no idea why I'm typing out apparently random combinations of vowels and consonents, I'll clarify. That's National Novel Writing Month, where writers from all over the world join together in their attempt to write a novel (here defined as a work of fifty thousand words or more) in the month of November. Yes, that's right. 50k in 30 days. Yes, it does sound utterly impossible - we'll come back to that later. In the meantime, here's a link to the official NaNo website.

My participation is provisional on me finishing revisions of Big Secret Project Book One before the end of this month (since the rules of NaNo state that you must work on something new) but I've got my fingers firmly crossed that I'll manage it. Actually, I'm really looking forward to it.

I've never really had much interest in NaNo before. I've seen lots of writers talking about it, including one lovely member of my lovely writer's group, but since every year when it rolled around I was either in the middle of revising something, or writing something else - and I'm not the kind of writer who enjoys working on more than one project at once - I just didn't bother to enquire further. So if I DO manage to get my revisions done in time, this will be my first ever time participating in NaNoWriMo.

Frankly, it's all Twitter's fault. And by Twitter, I mean writer-pal Cat Clarke and blogger-pal Vivienne DaCosta. They were all excited and enabling about it. They made it sound like huge fun instead of a hassle. Before I knew what I was doing, I was signing up.

My NaNo project will be - no huge surprise here - Big Secret Project Book Two! Which is part of the reason I'm looking forward to it because, you see, 50k in 30 days is not as impossible as it sounds.

Firstly, if you write 1666 words (that's about seven handwritten pages for me) per day every day, you'll succeed. Since I try to write about ten pages, or 2000 words per day, between five and six days of the week, and sometimes manage more, that's not out of the realms of sanity.

Secondly, when I was writing Shadows on the Moon, and I took my customary two weeks off before starting the revision process, I got a wild hair and actually wrote 40,000 words off a Twilight spoof novel (yes, yes, I know it's been done - and no, no, you are NEVER going to see it). And that was while I was working thirty hours a week at my soul-destroying office job. So if I can write (on average) 2857 words per day while working in The Pit of Despond (and having my soul destroyed, let's not forget that) surely I can write 1666 per day as a full-time writer while my soul is pink-cheeked and rosy?

And since the first draft of the first book of Big Secret Project is 73,000 words long - and I hope the second book will follow that pattern - 50k would be huge chunk of work done, leaving me lots of extra time for revising it and making it the best it can possibly be.

Here is my brand spanking new NaNoWriMo profile. I shall be updating it with my word count throughout the month of November, if you're interested to see how I'm getting along.

I also have reason to believe that I will be giving you more news about Big Secret Project some time in the near future - so keep your fingers crossed!

RETROFRIDAY - TO CRY OR NOT TO CRY?

2011-10-21T00:06:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers - and a happy, happy Friday!

A couple of days of solid work on revising Big Secret Project Book One have put me in a much better mood than the one you saw on Wednesday (sorry about that - hope no one was traumatised), as have other factors which I'm not really allowed to talk to you about (but never fear, I'll share as soon as I'm given the OK). So don't worry. That beastie with the fangs and the manic eyes is well-and-truly back in the box
.
For today's RetroFriday I have once again trawled through the perilous archives of the Zoë-Trope to find an article that some of you may not have seen before, or may enjoy reading again. I give you:

TO CRY OR NOT TO CRY?

Today, I have been crying. Not wailing, sobbing, or beating my breast, mind you. A few dignified, crystaline tears slipping down the cheeks, the odd sniff. That sort of thing. But fear not. Nothing bad has happened to your favourite author (second favourite? Third? Fine, an author you might have heard of once, maybe). I've just been re-writing some emotional scenes in FF.

I quite often get a little het up when I'm writing. I don't set out to do it. I'll just be reading some dialogue out loud to myself and suddenly there's a catch in my throat. Or maybe there's no dialogue, and I'm working hard to capture a certain, intense moment in a character's life, and suddenly PLOP, there's a tear there on the page. There have definitely been times when I've finished my day's work with swollen nose and eyes, and headed straight for the chocolate stash. Shadows on the Moon was probably my weepiest work - but TSK and DotF had their moments too. FF is coming out somewhere near Shadows, but I haven't finished revising yet. It may get worse (O Joy).

Since I've always been this way it never occurred to me to question it, and I probably assumed that most other authors were the same way (whether they admitted it or not) up until recently. I remember reading a quote once that said 'No tears in the author, no tears in the reader' and thinking: Well, I've got that covered anyway.

But it turns out there are some authors who scorn this kind of rampant emotionalism, and who say that it's all just silliness and getting carried away. Do carpenters weep over their dovetail joints, these writers ask? Does an engineer get emotional when applying his wrench? No! Writing, they say, is a craft, like any other, and in order to use the tools of craft correctly one must maintain a proper emotional distance and realise that IT'S ALL JUST FICTION ANYWAY FOR CRISSAKES!!!

And hey, before we start badmouthing these guys - we're talking Maggie Stiefvater, Meg Cabot and Veronica Roth here. People whose success and opinions need to be respected. I do respect them.

I'm not just not sure I really agree.

Of course I can see, logically, where writers who say things like this are coming from. Anyone who feels the way they do is absolutely right - when it comes to their own work. But it seems a little prescriptive to be implying that people who do get very emotionally involved with their characters are just being silly. Writers, like all people, are famously individual. One writer's block is another writer's inspiration.

Yes, writing is a craft. A craft like carpentry or engineering. It has its own tools and it can be learned and improved with practise. But it's also an art (I'm not being pretentious here, because I think anything, really anything, can be an art if you love it and do your absolute best with it and believe in it). And contrary to common belief, the stuff of a writer's art is not words. Words are the medium. Just like a glassblower uses glass as a medium in which to capture light, so a writer uses words as a medium to capture emotion.

That's what being a writer is all about, right? Whether we want to make people laugh, or get angry, or feel sad, or happy, the important thing is that they feel. We create characters and stories and worlds with the specific intention of influencing a reader's emotions, of changing their feelings in this minute with our story. A writer of fiction wants to engage the reader's heart - and sometimes, some of us need to invest our own to get that. If I can't believe in a character enough to forget, now and then, that they're not real, then I don't think my readers will ever feel my characters are real at all.

On the other hand, fairly recently a very successful author Who Shall Not Be Named (*cough*LaurellKHamilton*cough*) annoyed and amused a lot of authors, including me, by putting out a blog post where she claimed that writing her novels was so emotionally painful for her that it resembled being dismembered, and that she was bleeding on her keyboard. Which. You know. Euw. And her major point seemed to be that anyone who doesn't feel this way is a BIG FAT SELLOUT FAKE and NOT A REAL WRITER.

Eeep. Pretty sure I don't agree there either. Any activity which caused such intense pain that I felt like I was bleeding all over the place would not be for me. Isn't writing supposed to be fun? Yes, it's hard work. Yes, it's emotionally draining at times. Yes, it can also be frustrating and (let's not forget) BADLY PAID. But if you hate it so much that it hurts you, for Sweet Baby Jesus's sake stop it. Whether you're doing yoga, competitive tap-dancing or ecologically-friendly beaver wresting, there is a difference between 'good pain' (muscles working, sweat rising, feel the burn) and bad pain (oh my god with the ouchy and the stinging and the make it stttooooppp). We writers might like to pretend that we're all eccentric oddballs for laughs, but this level of angst is bordering on some kind of personality disorder.

I guess what I'm trying to say here is: there are a lot of people in the world who will be telling you This Is How To Be A Writer. Some of them will say things that seem dead on. Others will apparently be talking some strange crazy language that sounds like a penguin gacking up its breakfast. Take what you find useful and move on, and, ultimately, do what works for you and makes you want to write more.

Because no one likes Mr Judgy-Writer-Pants.

MY WEEK SO FAR: An illustrated History

2011-10-18T23:20:00.000-07:00

Normally, when people say 'A Picture is Worth a Thousand Words', I get really huffy. You know, just on principle. But today...today, I find that I have no words. So pictures will have to do.

As you know, Dear Readers, this week I was intending to start work on revisions of Book One of Big Secret Project. Now, every book is different, and with some books the revision and re-writing before I send the draft to my agent and editor is a dread thing. But Big Secret Project makes me so happy, Dear Readers. It gives me giggles and rainbow sparkles and fluffy unicorn lulz. So when I say that I was eager to begin work on the revisions, I'm understating. In fact, the idea of diving back into my beloved project made me feel like this:

Monday morning came, and as you also know (if you were paying attention) I was unearthed from bed quite early by a distress call from my mother and her ailing computer. But after a few hours of pressing buttons and swearing and burning offerings to the Tech Gods, I got it up and working and was able to return to my own computer and my beloved BSP. And I was pleased:

But then, when my mum came back from work, there was another distress call. Her computer was Doing It Again.

Further fiddling, consultation with a Computer Support Person, and a bucketful of tears later, we came to the realisation that the problem with my mother's beloved laptop was not one that could be fixed by mere human intervention. And the Tech Gods weren't listening. And as the only computer literate person in the immediate vicinity, it was going to be my job to jump in there and do damage control.

Complete system back-up while the thing was still whirring away. Quick research on the cheapest alternative model and an order. Quickly checking and writing down all the passwords for various websites and systems that my mum never bothered to remember because she had the computer set to automatic login. A million tasks presented themselves to me, and took up pretty much the whole day. At the end of it, I staggered away and collapsed in front of the TV, brain dead.

But at least I could get to work tomorrow, right?

WRONG.

In an act of such painfully annoying efficiency that it makes me want to sharpen my teeth with a pencil sharpener and then bite someone, somehow the replacement computer arrived yesterday morning, less than twenty-four hours after I ordered it.

This was the cause of great rejoicing for the aforementioned mother, but not so much for me as it was of course going to be my task to set up this new computer, transfer every single file and folder from the old one to it, download all the freeware (like iTunes, VLC Media Player and various anti-virus and malware programmes) and introduce my mum to scary new features like a power button and power socket in a completely different area than she was used to. In other words? No writing on Tuesday.

But tomorrow! Tomorrow it's all going to be fine, right? Computer crisis averted! Nothing to do but write, write, write!

Er...no. Because just after dinner I got a call from the plumber telling me that he and his crew would be coming around to do fiddly work in my attic in order to make my boiler safe. And anyone who can write with workmen traipsing through the house, demanding cups of tea and making the dog go into a barking fit every twenty seconds is a better man than I am Gunga Din.

My current mood?

That little scree-scree-scree noise you hear? That's me sharpening my fangs after all.

Lesson: do not keep writers from their words. IT MAKES THEM DANGEROUS AND UNSTABLE.

*Chomp*

A QUESTION OF UPSTAGING

2011-10-17T01:05:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers. I'm not sure I can quite squeeze out a 'Happy Monday' this morning, as today I was woken at 6am by a panicked call from my mum. She'd gone to check her emails before leaving for work, and found that her laptop wouldn't start up. At all. Black screen of death. Horror.

I couldn't fix it before she had to leave, but two and a half hours later I was able to boot the thing up and now I'm back at my own computer guzzling coffee and trying to stuff my brains back in my ears.

So! Onto a question that came to me via email from a reader called Rachel. She asks:

"What do you do if two of your characters want to be the main character? I have a 10 year old boy and a 20 year old woman, and the boy should be the main character, since it's technically his story, but I feel like the woman has a story to tell as well, and I don't want to give her too much voice in case she just floods the actual story. What can I do?"

I call this upstaging, and it's a surprisingly common problem. In fact, looking back, I'd say I've had this problem in every single book that I've ever written. Just to make it a bit clearer: upstaging is where a character who was originally supposed to be minor or secondary turns out to have such life and magnetism that every scene they're in warps around them, pulling attention away from the main character and the main story.

When it happened to me while writing The Swan Kingdom and Daughter of the Flames, I dealt with it by panicking and cutting those upstaging characters down to mere shadows of their former selves. Being forced to do this left me with a nagging sense of guilt which I've never quite escaped, and which hasn't been helped by readers repeatedly mentioning that they wished they'd learned more about these characters, and asking me for their backstories. Readers can sense that strange magnetism pulsing away even though those characters are barely on the page anymore.

When I came to write Shadows on the Moon the same problem reared its head in the form of Akira. She was originally planned as a rather cold and emotionally distant character, lonely and cut-off, someone who would serve as a warning to the heroine about the perils of her chosen path. Instead, she immediately manifested as funny, charming and brilliantly, vividly ALIVE. And of course I panicked, just like normal. But by then it was too late, because I was so in love with her that I couldn't bear to cut her down. I just couldn't.

So...

I let her do what she wanted.

Which sounds completely mad. She wasn't the main character! How could I just let her go off and take over the story? She wanted to act in ways that completely messed up my plan for the plot! She made my main character a different person! She intruded into places she was never supposed to be!

And she made the story TEN TIMES BETTER.

You see, I don't think that your secondary character really wants to take over the story. She just wants to make it better. Your subconscious brain is telling you that you have a chance to make your main character more realistic and complex, and your main story deeper and more compelling. But you can't do that by working on that character and story directly - you're already doing the best there that you can. You need to do it indirectly by utilising the magnetism that this secondary character brings to the book and by using their story to reinforce the main one.

Look at this secondary character and her backstory. Look at what she wants. Where is she intruding? What is she changing? What does she want to say? Search for the ways that her story, her personality, parallel the main character and main plot. Search for the ways that they differ.

Just as Akira's story of transforming passion and love serve as a negative image of Suzume's feelings in Shadows on the Moon, I think you'll realise that if you give this character a bit more room to grow, her journey will complement and reinforce the journey of the main character and make the book richer, more complex and more moving than it ever could have been without her.

I hope this is helpful, Rachel!

Just a quick reminder today as well - I've had a few emails of the 'Please read my story and tell me what you think' variety lately. Here's a link to my website page where I address this, but in short - if you send me stories or samples of work, I can't and won't read them.

See you on Wednesday, folks!

EVERYTHING IN THE BOX

2011-10-14T00:55:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers! It's Friday already, and time for me to bring out that impassioned post on grammar that I meant to share on Monday (before I started ranting on a completely different topic. Yes, my name is Zolah, and I am a rantaholic).

On Sunday I started work on Book Two of Big Secret Project. Within a few pages I'd introduced and killed a couple of new characters and had given myself a regulation case of the shivers. Satisfied with my work, I retired to my sofa with ham sandwiches and re-runs of Friends on the Comedy Channel. And Twitter, of course.

Not long afterwards I was very glad I had, as that was where I came across this brilliant article about the misuse of the term 'the passive voice'.

Basically: when writing in English, you will come across passive constructions, where the object within the sentence is being acted upon rather than being active, eg. rats are often eaten by cats, vs. cats often eat rats. These constructions are neither inherantly bad nor good (with thanks to my friend Pembe!).

Yes, it's generally a positive thing to try and keep your constructions active, especially if you are writing about action. And yes, over using passive construction can definitely weaken your writing. But there are times when you will inevitably need to use a passive construction, as the writer of the article points out, in order to vary sentence structure, or to impart important information. That is why the passive voice exists in our language.

However, anywhere you go on the internet for writing advice, you will find people talking about the grammatical passive voice as if it was the same thing as bad writing.

The people who pass on this advice are normally well-meaning - but the problem is that a lot of them honestly do not understand what 'the passive voice' IS. Because 'passive' is a word writers don't really want applied to their work, they believe that 'passive voice' means 'bad' and 'active voice' means 'good' without exception. Grammatical passive voice becomes synonymous with something that they call 'passive writing' - flat, boring, unexciting writing - even though they're not the same thing at all.

Attempts to universally enforce this idea, teaching writers to avoid the passive voice as it if were a smelly, creepy uncle lurking in the corner at the family Christmas get-together, can result in prose which reads as if it was written by a non-native English speaker who hasn't quite grasped the rhythm or syntax of written English. It obscures the very information you are trying to convey.

This got me thinking about the reams of writing advice that I trip over online every single day and how I, personally, ignore pretty much all of it. In fact, the second that I see a list with a title like 'Eight Things that Make Editors Stop Reading' or 'Five Secrets for a Great Opening Scene' or 'Ten Common Mistakes First Time Writers Make' I hear a faint booming noise - my attention breaking the sound barrier as it flees from yet another samey list of boring old dos and don'ts.

What really gets my goat is that almost any list like this starts with an admission from the list writer that one-hundred-and-eleventy-thousand writers have broken their rules and still been rewarded with bestsellers and private jets and unicorn rainbow sprinkles. But despite this admission, they go ahead and post those good old rules anyway, usually with an assurance that following them will (despite all evidence to the contrary!) increase your chances of getting you your very own bestsellers, private jets and unicorn rainbow sprinkles.

If you know that your rules don't work, why bother sharing them?

Don't let me wrong! I think it's wonderful that there's a thriving online community which supports and encourages young or beginner writers! I think places like Absolute Write and QueryChecker have a lot to offer a learning writer and I think that a lot of the principles they commonly espouse are excellent! And let's not forget that I love to discuss the craft of writing and offer advice myself!

But I also think that anyone who tries to tell you the 'rules' of writing is full of bullcr*p.

I have first hand experience of this, because back before my first book came out (when it was under contract, and edited, and just waiting for its publication slot) I became a member of a writer's forum. I got into some furious fights with other members who honestly did think that they knew 'the rules', and who insisted on repeating them to any newish writer who asked for advice. No matter how many times I pointed out that telling other writers never, ever, ever to use first person, or prologues, or dream sequences, was restrictive and inaccurate and a bit boring, they were convinced that those were The Rules, and breaking them would result in death or, worse, rejection.

This old video lists a few of the topics that I got into heated debates about over and over and OVER:

Just to make it clear? This video is pure sarcasm. I've broken every one of these so-called rules in my published work. Show, don't tell? Broke it. No prologues? Broke it. Don't have characters look in mirrors or at their reflection? Broke it. Dream sequences? BROKEN IN EVERY SINGLE BOOK I'VE EVER WRITTEN.

And I believe that my books are stronger, better, more unique and more moving because of it.

Writing is a craft, and it's a very good idea to learn the underlying principles - grammar, spelling, pacing, plotting, characterisation. But it's also art, which means that once you understand those principles, you're allowed to play around with them as you please.

The only thing that matters is that your use of language conveys the ideas or emotion you wanted. That's it. That's all. If you made someone see or feel what you wanted them to see or feel, you did your job.

People may be outraged by this idea, but then, people were outraged by the work of Monet, and Picasso. If Monet and Picasso had allowed themselves to be frightened into complying with the 'rules' of painting, the world would have been deprived of some of the greatest art ever.

As a writer in the English language (which I'm assuming most of my blog readers are) you have an astonishing, wonderful array of tools in your toolbox. You have basic, everyday tools and fine precision instruments and big heavy mallets. You have whole layers of tools which you can fiddle and experiment with, which can be used alone or in conjuction with other tools to achieve a rich, ever evolving series of affects. Some tools may not be for you. There might be sections down there at the bottom that gather dust because they don't suit you. But that's for you, the craftsman and artist, to decide.

Don't let anyone else steal tools away from that box by telling you that they're too difficult, or that editors won't like them, or that you're not old enough or talented enough or bestselling enough to use them. And if someone tries to take away the keys to the box? Punch 'em in the mouth.

Everything is in the box for a reason. And the box is yours. Use it wisely, use it well. And for the love of sweet bippy, Dear Readers...have fun with it.

SHADOWS ON THE MOON TRAILER - THE DIRECTOR'S CUT!

2011-10-12T00:33:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers - and happy Wednesday to you all!

Some of you may be aware that late last week the original Shadows on the Moon book trailer reached 1,000 views, which was a cause of great smileyness and joy at Casa Zolah.

Now, I promised back when the trailer was first launched that if this happened, I'd persuade my publisher to let me upload the extended version, which had some extra juicy bits. And I'm very happy to say that they've given me the OK to put it on my personal YouTube Channel.

So here it is! Let me know what you think!

STILL EXPLORING WONDERLAND

2011-10-10T01:17:00.000-07:00

Today, I had a blog post about grammar planned. It was going to be thrilling, controversial and epic. But then I woke up and saw something. Something that enraged me so much that it was either post, or explode.

This article. This. It's called No More Adventures in Wonderland and it basically mourns the loss of childlike adventure and enchantment in children's stories, and says that children's and young people's fantasies are being edged out by adult anxieties which writers are apparently projecting into reader's brains.

There's so much I'd like to say about the blatant wrong-headedness of this article.

I'd like to ponder how, in one paragraph, the writer can admit that more children and adults are reading today's YA books together than ever before, and then, in her closing paragraph, state that modern children's and YA novels lack the ability to '[bridge] generational divides'.

I'd like to marvel at how can she can praise J.M. Barry's famously twisted, melancholic Peter Pan, apparently without ever noticing its sinister undertones, and then criticise Harry Potter for its darkness and completely miss the colourful, funny, disgusting, WONDERFUL world that J.K. Rowling created and which fills children (and adults!) the world over with smiles and glee ('Alas! Earwax!').

But mostly, I'm just brain-boggled by the fact that she is apparently seriously suggesting that in a world where Suzanne Collins draws her inspiration to write a book about child warriors from news footage about real life child warriors, today's children's writers should try to find out 'what children [want]' by spending lazy afternoons in boats or public parks with the privileged offspring of the wealthiest five or ten percent of the population.

Because, you see, the privileged offspring of the wealthiest five or ten percent of the population are the children we all ought to be writing for. They're the default setting. They're the 'normal' kids. The kids who've seen darkness - death, poverty, abuse, bullying, illness - in their own lives? Well, they're not anything like the writer of the article, are they? They're not like the kids of anyone she knows. They are outside her experience, just a hazy and troubling smudge on the edges of her awareness which it is so much more comforting to ignore.

So they don't count.

What a shame we can't all go back to that halycon Golden Age of civilisation where J.M Barry and Lewis Carroll cavorted in the warm summer sunlight with pink-cheeked infants - real children - while thousands of other children - you know, the ones who didn't count - languished in poorhouses, orphanages and on the streets and probably never learned to read at all, let alone survived to be adults.

Clearly life held so much more:'...redemptive beauty, cathartic humor and healing magic' back then.

Right.

WORDLE IS TEASING YOU...

2011-10-07T00:40:00.000-07:00

This is the Wordle that I made the other day for a book I intend to write in the future. As you can see, the story has a tentative title of Barefoot on the Wind (some of you may recognise this title and remember it from an unpublished story that sometimes shows up in my writing credits. I've been waiting for a chance to use the title again, since I love it).

This is not Big Secret Project. In fact, it's barely a twinkle in my eye. But I have written a synopsis for it, and on a whim fed that into the website. As always, Wordle did its strange magic and created this, which tells you so many wonderful and intriguing things about the story, I can't even stand it.

Go on! Make some guesses! What do YOU think it's about?

AGENT APPRECIATION DAY

2011-10-05T00:13:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers - and welcome to Agent Appreciation Day here on The Zoë-Trope!

Okay, Okay. I know that the actual, official Agent Appreciation Day is December 11th. But I can't wait that long, so you'll just have to put up with this now. Capice?

Not very long ago (just over a year, in fact) Zolah was in a serious quandry. After having been represented by the same agent since 2007 - and her very first published book - she had been forced to part with her former agency, and was now...gulp...unrepresented.

It's a chilly, alone-in-a-spooky-house sort of feeling to be unrepresented in today's market, Dear Readers. Zolah did not like it. At all. And so she went about trying to get herself a new agent. A confession: she had bookmarked the websites of several top notch agents many long months before the events that caused her to split from her first agent. She liked to sit and gaze at them, and sigh longingly. But actually contacting them was a different thing. Frankly, the prospect was so nerve-wracking that she thought she might throw up a little.

Finally, with shaking fingers, she managed to get herself to dial the number of one of the agents whose website she had been gazing at longingly. And lo! The agent was nice! And friendly! And knowlegible! And interested in reading Zolah's published books!

And Zolah was pleased.

But at the same time, she felt a twinge...just a twinge of anxiety. Because, you see, she had just done exactly the same thing that she did the first time she got an agent. She'd contacted only one agent and agreed to an exclusive submission without talking to any others, something that books and the internet had told her was a very silly thing to do. Even though the agent in question was absolutely lovely, Zolah suddenly felt that she'd repeated a pattern of unprofessional behaviour. But it was too late to do anything about it. Right?

Not so. Soon afterwards Zolah was speaking to her editor about her quandry, and her editor - having pointed out to Zolah very gently the unprofessional thing she had done - recommended that Zolah wait until the limit on the exclusivity period of her submission to that first agent (which was only a week), and speak to at least one other, just to make sure she had explored her options. The editor happened to know a wonderful agent who represented many wonderful authors. Why not speak to her and see how it went?

And so, about a week later, Zolah dialled another agent's phone number with cold and trembling fingers. She had already agreed to meet with the first agent, who continued to be lovely and enthusiastic and everything that Zolah could have wanted, and was really only doing this so that she could tell herself - and her editor - that she had been sensible. She was pretty sure this agent wouldn't be interested in her anyway. This agent represented people that Zolah worshipped on bended knee.

The phone rang. The agent answered.

Something magical happened. Something just...clicked. Within five minutes Zolah was giggling helplessly while, on the other end of the phone, the agent laughed too. The pair talked for about half an hour in the most informal, relaxed way. Zolah barely noticed when she stopped shaking and a sense of contentment and rightness crept over her. She agreed to send this second agent some samples of her work, and hung up with a huge grin on her face.

This agent was The One.

Zolah continued to try to be sensible. She met with that first agent she had contacted, and found her just as marvellous as her reputation had painted her. She spoke to The One again and was thrilled to find that The One wanted her as a client. She sat down and made a list of various factors that she ought to consider in her choice and thought very hard.

But deep in her heart, that decision was already made.

A little while later she signed with Nancy Miles of the Miles Stott Children's Literary Agency. Otherwise known as The One. And occasionally Super Agent.

I shall now move out of third person to say that Nancy (The One, Super Agent) and I have been working together very closely in recent weeks. Stressful things have been going on and I've freaked out a few times. And I cannot believe - CANNOT BELIEVE - how lucky I got when she agreed to be my agent. The levels of support and attention my agent - my agent! whee! - has given me have been completely above and beyond the call of duty and have helped to keep me sane somehow through all the ups and downs and the waiting (the endless, endless waiting).

I have it on good authority that The One (Nancy, Super Agent), being a very busy lady, doesn't read this blog. So I'm not really saying all of this for her. I hope she already knows how much I appreciate her anyway. Today is my Agent Appreciation Day. I need to take a moment to say to the world (and God, Buddha, Allah, The Fates, and anyone else who's listening): THANK YOU.

Thank you for getting Super Agent (The One, Nancy) to actually want me as a client, and stick with me through all this, so that I could finally understand those writers who talk about their agents with such love and respect. Thank you for Nancy Miles (Super Agent, The One).

That's all, World. Back to your regularly scheduled shenanigans.

A VISIT FROM THE MUSES

2011-10-02T23:54:00.000-07:00

Hello, my lovelies - I hope you all had a nice weekend? I did. And certainly a productive one.

On Saturday, after I'd done my normal household chores and shopping, I sat down with my notebook and produced a detailed, six page outline, with bullet points, for the scenes I wanted to start on Sunday. The scenes I've been referring to on Twitter as The Big Fat Final Scenes (well, it goes nicely with Big Secret Project, right?).

I did this because I had SO much going on in these final scenes and there were so many ways things could play out, that I really wanted to nail the choices down and block it all out before I started work for real. That way, instead of staring at a blank page and being faced with a million things to decide, I could launch right into the action. Some writers do this with note cards or Post-Its or with clever graphs, but generally when I'm feeling a bit overwhelmed I find the best thing to do is scribble until I feel better.

Which I duly did.

Sunday rolled around, and despite oversleeping and therefore getting up with a headache, I was in my Writing Cave and ready to begin work shortly before nine o'clock. I hoped, with determined optimism, to get about ten handwritten pages completed, which would translate (normally) to something like two thousand words when typed up. A nice chunk of pages that would get me right into the action.

I popped in my favourite Big Secret Project writing playlist (you can find it here) and started writing.

Then I wrote some more.

And... a bit more.

My hand started to really hurt. I stopped, ran it under cold water, and then warm, and then cold again. Then I went back to my notebook.

I noticed that my clock said it was lunchtime. After stretching my hand again and wondering why it was hurting so much, I counted the pages I'd written that morning.

It was twenty-one.

Hmmm. That was quite a lot. Around twice what I'd expected to write the whole day. Things were going well. I went off thoughtfully to have some lunch, walk the dog and apply a cooling gel strip to my hand.

When I came back, I went onto Twitter and asked for opinions. I had written twice as much that morning as I expected to. The Muses, who, being capricious and contrary, often make one of their rare visits when a person is already in their Writing Cave scribbling their brains out, seemed to be in my corner. It was possible - JUST possible - that if I kept on like this, I might be able to actually finish my handwritten draft today.

This. Actual. Day.

On the other hand, my first handwritten draft doesn't really count because I still have to type everything up later and revise and re-write and polish it. And my arm and fingers were very sore. And I usually spend the afternoons typing my morning's notes up so that I can get a fresh start the NEXT morning. So...what did everyone think? Should I push on and go for it? Or stop now and start typing up and re-writing?

The vote was unanimous. Push on.

Notebook open again. Fresh pen, since the old one was getting a bit faint and scratchy. Music on. Write.

And write.

And write.

I got to an emotional bit, and started crying. I wrote through the tears.

The tears eventually dried up.

Finally, the words THE END escaped from my pen.

I was looking at the first, very tough, handwritten draft of Book One of Big Secret Project. The book so big and secret that I can't even tell you about it yet.

I still have to do a lot of work on this manuscript. Not just the typing and revising and polishing, but then printing it out, leaving it for a minimum of two weeks, re-reading it and revising and polishing again.

But all the same.

Today, I wrote forty handwritten pages - roughly (it may prove to be slightly more or less, typed up) eight thousand words. Today, I strained my hand and carried on writing even when it hurt so badly I could hardly hold the pen. Today I dripped tears all over everything and swiped them off and kept the words coming. Most of all, today I was happy. Completely and totally happy, joyous and free and in my element in a way that it's almost impossible to explain to anyone who doesn't have something they're passionate about (whether that's writing or reading or painting or singing or baking or running or doing their make-up or making sculptures out of discarded plastic picnic forks) in their life.

This is what being a writer is all about. These enchanted moments when everything goes wrong but it doesn't matter because you want to write more than anything, and you do.

And here, just for kicks, are a couple of shots of the two notebooks that I have filled up writing Book One of Big Secret Project, and in which the enchanted words THE END are scribbled out in blue pen - one of the most beautiful sights a writer can ever see.

And now... onto Book Two. *Grins*

COMPETITION WINNER (That I should have announced on Monday. Ooops.)

2011-09-30T00:19:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone - happy Friday! I hope you're all (by which I mean the British ones - sorry rest of the world) enjoying this wonderful Indian Summer we're having.

As long as I can remember I've thought the phrase 'Indian Summer' was enchanting and lovely, and I've always longed to be able to use it in conversation. And now I can! Hurray!

Another hurray for the fact that yesterday I finally managed to get my passport interview sorted out, and, barring mishaps, I should have my very own passport sometime in the next two weeks. Now if I ever make any money I can actually go places other than the UK! Although if the weather continues like this, I won't want to...

Back to business. Today began with an Oooops as I belatedly realised that I promised to pick the winner of last Friday's Ten Things I Love Giveaway this Monday. But I completely forgot because of that comment from the girl who was made to feel ashamed about reading YA at college, which caused me to feel an overwhelming need to get my rant on. Sorry about that, everyone!

Just to re-cap, I asked people to tell me their list of Ten Things They Loved in the comments before midnight on Friday, and promised I would randomly pick a participant to win a signed copy of Shadows on the Moon. I'll probably throw in a few associated goodies like magnets and postcards as well.

Having had a few bolstering sips of coffee, I've duly crunched the numbers through Random.org and the winner is:

(Drumroll Please)

JOANNA FARROW!

Congratulations, Joanna - please email me at z d marriott at gmail dot com and tell me your address, and I'll get your prize in the post for you as soon as I possibly can.

Commiserations to everyone else, but there's always a next time on my blog, so don't feel too depressed about it. Have a wonderful Friday and a great weekend, and I'll see you all on Monday!

THE LOVE THAT KILLS

2011-09-28T00:34:00.000-07:00

Hello Dear Readers, and welcome to another delightful Wednesday on the Zoë-Trope!

Today I'm going to talk about love. And not just any love. The deadly kind.

I am not referencing here the sort of feelings that a slender brunette who has never quite fitted in instantly and inexplicably develops for the marble cupcake Adonis who wants to follow her around and watch her sleep and also rip out her throat and chug down her florally scented tastyblood. No.

I'm talking about this: R.J. Anderson's comment about beloved scenes on Twitter.

R.J.'s Tweet yesterday got me thinking about this kind of love. The love that a writer has for her work.

Well, obviously not all of her work, since about 50-90% of the time that you're working on a first draft you're likely to be under the impression that you are trying to chip the words out of solid granite by hand, with only a blunt spoon for assistance.

But there are...certain scenes, aren't there? Scenes that are just a little bit special to you. Often these are the scenes that presented themselves to you right at the beginning of your thinking process about the story, and which made you go: 'No way! That would be SO. AWESOME. And COOL! It would be Awesome with a side of Cool Sauce!' and thereby motivated you through coming up with an actual plot and setting and characters.

In fact, scenes like this are what motivate us through all those bits with the granite block and the blunt spoon. We tend to think about them wistfully, imagining all the ways that the AwesomeCoolSauceness could play out. What if the whole place just exploded? What if the hero literally bounced right off the wall? What if there were, like, shooting stars omg?

These beloved scenes become a kind of comfort blanket for the frazzled writer, I think. Sure, sure, this scene that we're writing now sucks with the force of a thousand black holes. Sure, sure, that last chapter was about as convincing as a politician promising 'change' (ha ha). But AwesomeCoolSauce Scene will be different. It will go exactly to plan. It will blaze off the page with all the beauty and intensity of the very first time you snuggled a kitten. Dammit, AwesomeCoolSauce Scene WILL BE PERFECT (Writer Hulk Smash!).

Except...yeah. No it won't.

I have a very good friend who is working on a book at the moment. She's completed several stories before and has always been interested in the craft of writing, but this manuscript is different. It has caught her imagination and her love in a unique way, and for the first time she's seriously talking about seeking publication. I'm very happy about this, because, having talked to her in great depth about the story and its characters, I'm convinced that the book is going to rock the world's socks. However...

My friend is having trouble with her climax.

Right since the beginning of her ideas process with this book, she's had a plan for how the story and characters were going to resolve themselves. She wasn't perfectly sure how she was going to get there but she did know, with crystal clarity, just how it was all going to end. And for a long time that that knowledge motivated and inspired her. But now it's become like a brick around her neck. Every time I talk to her she's this close to launching into the climactic scenes, and then the next time we speak she's all downhearted because somehow she wrote and wrote but just didn't get there.

Her writerly brain has now invested this scene with so much importance, so much significance, that any attempt she makes to actually write the thing just seems wrong and terrible and off. So subconsciously, her brain is forcing her to swim against the tide, words stretching out in front of her as she frantically paddles but never gets anywhere.

You might think that I would have some sort of handy-dandy advice to offer my friend, to quickly and simply extract her from this fix. But unfortunately I am by no means standing on any kind of creative high ground when it comes to this issue. I was in a very similar position when I was writing FrostFire. The whole book had always been working towards a certain outcome, and this outcome had never altered despite me rearranging the entire plot and giving all the characters a sex change multiple times.

As a result, the climax to my story had grown in my head until it was - had to be - the most heart-rending, beautiful, perfect climax to a book that I hadeverwrittengodammit. I got stuck in the preceding scene for over a month, completely unable to move forward. How do you start the most beautiful, perfect climax to a book that you haveeverwrittengodammit? HOW? What is the most beautiful and perfect first line? First word? I was paralysed by the weight of responsibility - paralysed by my desperation to not mess up this beautiful and perfect scene.

Eventually, some very strange tactics got me through the block. Like, taking a cold shower in the middle of the day and writing in my towel with wet hair and eating about four bars of chocolate as I typed until I felt sick, kind of tactics. Frankly, I don't recommend them.

Here's the nub of the matter. The thing that paralyses us because we cannot bring ourselves to admit it. The truth about AwesomeCoolSauce Scene. No matter how much we agonise over it and visualise it and long for it, we will never actually write it.

That's right. AwesomeCoolSauce Scene is never actually going to exist anywhere but in your brain. The moment you start taking those awe-inspiring, beautiful and perfect ideas and start pinning them to the page with words, some of their awe-inspiringness and beauty and perfection will, by definition, evaporate.

I'm willing to lay my life that no writer in the history of the world - not Shakespeare, not Dickens, not Yeats, not Austen or Bronte or Jones - has ever managed to write their AwesomeCoolSauce Scene. I'm willing to lay my life that they never even managed to write that beautiful and perfect first line, or even a beautiful and perfect first word.

But does that mean that we, as readers, don't look at their words and feel completely transformed by the beauty and perfection of their words and lines and scenes? Does that mean that we cannot and will not yell: 'Holy Cr*p, this scene is So. Awesome! It's so cool! It's AWESOME WITH A SIDE OF COOL SAUCE!'

HELL NO.

And by torturing ourselves into a small, gooey puddle with the idea of our impossible perfect scene, we are depriving our potential readers of the chance to read THEIR perfect scene.

So what to do?

Well, here's what I've learned (and if other writers reading this have solutions of their own, please feel free to chime in there in the comments):

1) You can distract yourself from the responsibility of writing AwesomeCoolSauce Scene by making yourself hideously uncomfortable as you write. But, like I said, not really endorsing that one so much.

2) You can try to fool yourself by saying 'I'm not actually writing AwesomeCoolSauce Scene here. I'm just practising. Scribbling. Making notes. That DOES NOT COUNT!'

3) You can go the other way and outline the Hell out of this scene, using coloured pens, bullet points and a graph so you know exactly what to do, right down to where the characters have to stop to breathe. This gives you a sense of confidence going in, even if you diverge from the outline as you write.

4) This one is a complete last resort for me, because I am hopelessly linear in my process. But of course, if you feel AwesomeCoolSauce Scene hanging over you like a threat the closer you get to it, you can always skip ahead and just write that sucker so it's not freaking you out anymore.

5) Try coming at the scene from a different perpective, like writing the first part from a different character's POV, even if you've no intention of using it in the final version. It might help you to avoid the intensity of knowing it. Must. All. Be. Perfect.

In closing - loving the idea of a certain scene and using this to motivate yourself = good. Loving the idea of a certain scene so much that it literally kills your story (or you, from pneumonia) = very bad. Stay safe, kids!

A QUESTION OF READING

2011-09-26T01:11:00.000-07:00

Hello, and happy Monday my lovelies. Yes, it is happy, really - I mean, you didn't die in your sleep, did you? And nor did anyone that you love/like/are moderately fond of? Then it's a win.

So today I'm tackling a reader question which came in from an Anonymous commenter:

"I've just started college; I'm 17 years old next month. I'm taking English Literature because it's my favourite subject, but I feel like a baby because I discovered yesterday that most people in my class read 'adult' books and I'm still in the YA section. Is it stupid that I feel like crawling into a hole and dying, to never pick up a YA book again? I feel like such a baby, should I stop reading YA and move on to 'older' fiction?"

Oh, sweetie! This question makes me want to scream and run around in circles and bang my head against the wall until the sweet oblivion of a fractured skull takes away the pain. Not because of you! Because of this cray-cray world we're living in, where being judgemental and prejudiced is so damn trendy.

I'm guessing someone sneered, didn't they? It might have been the other students, maybe a teaching assistant or even a lecturer. They asked you what your favourite book or author was, and when you told them an author or book they didn't know, and you explained that s/he/it was YA, they sneered. Maybe it was a flicker of an expression before they said: 'Oh! How nice!' or maybe it was a full out, pitying laugh followed by some nasty little remark.

Or maybe it wasn't even that. Maybe everyone was having what seemed to be this enormously erudite discussion about Faulkner or Chaucer or Franzen and you immediately realised that mentioning Pullman or Rowling or Pratchett would make you stick out like a Goth Rocker at a Justin Beiber concert.

But whatever happened, suddenly all your joy in reading and books and the English language - all the things that you went to college to nurture and develop - withered away and you felt like dying.

Here's my verdict on these people and this environment that have already started to make you feel insecure and unhappy and lesser.

Screw 'em.

Seriously. It's not you. It's them. You are an articulate, open-hearted, wonderful person. It shines out even in those few lines you wrote there in my comments trail. It shines out even though you were writing from a cold place of anxiety and doubt. THERE IS NOTHING WRONG WITH YOU.

You are a young adult. You enjoy reading young adult literature. In what sort of strange universe could that possibly make you a 'baby'? You're the person young adult literature is aimed at! You're the person I'm holding in my heart the whole time I'm stringing words together and blubbing over my keyboard and revising until my brain burns. You're the one I'm desperately hoping to reach. You're the one that makes it all worthwhile.

Now, look - maybe I'm biased. I'm a young adult writer myself, after all. It makes sense that I'd want young people to read young adult fiction with excitement and happiness rather than shame, or worse, give up reading YA altogether. But I'm an adult myself, and guess what 75% of my reading material is? That's right. YA fiction.

And my writing friends, some of whom are enormously successful bestsellers? They're all adults. Between 50-90% of their reading material seems to be young adult.

What about my other friends? The doctor, the IT specialist, the civil servant, the librarian? The teacher, the accountant? OH LOOK! They all read YA too!

Why is that? Why do so many adults read heaps of YA fiction? Why does YA fiction seem to be outselling adult fiction disturbingly often? Why are so many films being made from YA books right now? Because YA is good literature, that's why. It's just as well written, just as experimental, just as beautifully characterised, just as complex, just as worthy as literature aimed at adults. The only difference in most cases is that the protagonist is younger. And, as you may or may not know, many YA books come out these days in twin editions, with one lot of cover artwork aimed at adults and a second aimed at younger people. Often when YA books are sold in different countries, there's a debate over whether they should be marketed at adult or YA markets because these books are so strong that, basically, anyone can love them.

It's great that some of your fellow students enjoy books from the 'adult' section of the library or bookshop. There's some fantastic stories there! In truth, I spent much of my own teens reading adult books, mainly because I'd already gone through all the children's and YA books in all my local libraries and the adult sections were much bigger. For a while I even forgot how much I'd loved YA books. But when I got older I was drawn back to all those old favourites. I was drawn to discover new ones. I was drawn back to YA.

As an adult, with adult responsibilities and a full-time job, I realised that I loved reading books aimed at YA, and writing stories intended for YA, more than I had ever loved ANYTHING. I decided to devote my life to YA books. That is some strong shizz, yo. YA is strong shizz.

But this isn't just about YA. It's about the fact that, in this life, there are always people who seek to make themselves feel better by making other people feel worse. The people/person that sneered at you, or the people/person who held forth on their favourite books in a way that was no doubt intended to impress everyone with how terribly grown up and clever they were while making you all feel childish and stupid? That's what they were doing. They have chosen to do that in this case by setting themselves up as arbiters of literary taste. And I'm sorry to say that even if you stopped reading YA books RIGHT NOW, that wouldn't be enough.

They'd be on your case because you read books that were science fiction or fantasy. Or because you read books with romance in them. Or because you read books by female authors. Or because you read historical fiction.You can't win, and trying to do so will just make you miserable.

I've been exactly where you are. I went to college with amazing GCSE results, a bright and eager reader and writer, exactly the sort of person that everyone there should have been keen to support and develop. And instead, I found college incredibly isolating. In my case it was because I didn't have as much money as the other students, because I was pretty sure there was no way I could afford to go to university. Everyone around me, from my contemporaries to the lecturers, made assumptions about me - where I'd been, where I was going - and I tried to fit in with that. I wanted to avoid being sneered at and bullied like I had been all my life so far, so I suppressed my real personality.

When everyone was talking about the amazing holidays they'd had abroad, or the West End shows they'd seen, or what they were doing over the weekend, I smiled and laughed and hoped no one would notice that I had nothing to add. The lecturers told me off because I never went along on field trips, never thinking that it might be because I couldn't afford to.

In the end, of course, everyone began to sense that something wasn't quite right. Rumours started. My fake personality caved in. I ended up dropping out, and that's something I've regretted ever since. But even more than that, I regret that after so many years of being true to myself at school, I allowed my desire to fit in at college push me into pretending to be something I wasn't. It was doomed to fail from the start. The only way to deal with feelings of insecurity and uncertainty - the only way to deal with the people who seek to make you feel insecure and uncertain - is to laugh at them.

Listen to me now. It might take a while for this to sink in, but I'd like you to remember these words and think about them from time to time, because I think they'll help.

Your goal in life is to be an interesting, fully rounded person who cares about other people, but doesn't let them influence her. Your goal in life is to be funny, and strong, and kind. Your goal in life is to be happy. Your goal in life is to be the best version of you, with all your unique strengths and desires and dreams. Your goal is never, never, never to change yourself, or try to be like any other person.

Go forth and be proud, Anonymous YA reader. You're following in the footsteps of giants like Phillip Pullman, Terry Pratchett, Robin McKinley, Tamora Pierce, Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Le Guin. You're following in my footsteps. But the path you take is your own, and no one can turn you from it, unless you let them.

Go forth and kick some ass.

TEN THINGS I LOVE

2011-09-23T00:30:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers - and happy Friday! Isn't it lovely to see Friday again? It never gets old, does it? Today's post is brought to you via a meme (borrowed from the lovely Steph Burgis' Blog), wherein you take a moment to list ten things in your life that you love and are grateful for, just to remind yourself how lucky you are (and I have been tremendously lucky, I know).

So here we go:

1) Being a published writer. It might sound strange to list this as a thing I love, but it's true. I really do love being a writer, a published writer. I love this life. I spent my whole childhood, my teens and my early twenties longing for this outcome, bargaining with higher powers (and fairies, and the spirits, and fate and luck and any other supernatural thing I could think of) If only I could get published... And now I am. And I've got an unspeakably wonderful agent, a complete dream editor, the best readers ever, and I get to do this full-time, at least for a while. How wonderful is that? Sometimes I still have to stop and take a minute to absorb the fact that it's really, really real. I hope I always will.

2) Finbar Finley Finbarsson the Third. Needs no explanation, really. I mean, just look at him!

3) My online YA community. The people that I've met online - mostly on Twitter - have been an absolute Godsend to me. You may remember my Insecurity: I Haz It post, where I talked about how lonely and isolated I had felt in the past as a writer in my small, rural community. Family and friends tried to be supportive but the simple fact is that calling your sister or friend at work at three in the afternoon to say: '3k today, wahooo!' is likely to get a very puzzled reaction indeed. Online, that statement gets you virtual high-fives and hugs and genuinely interested questions about your WIP because the YA writing/reading community - bloggers, readers, writers both published and aspiring - GETS IT. I can't tell you how amazing it is to have a group of friends who get it. I love you guys!

4) My writing group. We've been around in one form or another since about 2002, but in 2004 the lovely Barbara decided to give us a name, The Furtive Scribblers, and we've never looked back. Most of my very best ideas for stories and situations and characters have evolved from the convoluted, tangenital discussions I have with my writing group that start out about unicorns as a mythological representation of innocence and end up with psychosomatic injuries. That this bunch of learned, educated, well-travelled, well-read individuals all gather together on a regular basis to, basically, talk crazy - and that it really works! - is a wonder and a joy to me.

5) Clouds and water. I'm so lucky to have access to wild green spaces in my day to day life. When I'm frustrated, sad, blocked or just restless, a long walk among the sighing grasses, looking at the clouds and the reflections in the water, eases my soul like nothing else ever has.

6) Books. Books, books, books. Do I need to say anymore here? There are a million authors I could thank for expanding my mind, my understanding, my heart and my soul, but basically...I love books. Even the books I hate, I also love in a strange way. Books. I love you.

7) Trains. Waiting at the station, watching the other trains pass by, leaving a blurred white snapshot on the back of my eyelids of incomplete faces peering out of the windows. The muffled, melancholic sounds of the announcements over the tannoy, mentioning places and routes that seem oddly exotic even if I've been there before. Getting on my own train, watching the other passengers from the corners of my eyes and making up names and stories for them based on the fact that they wear a red tie with a blue suit or that their shopping bag has a rainbow badge on it. And then, as the train pulls away, popping my headphones in, taking out my notebook and just writing. Writing faster than I ever manage to do in real life - because being on a train, sitting still and yet travelling - isn't real life. It's unreal, and it's quiet even though it's noisy, and private even though it's in public. On Tuesday I did a three hour round trip and managed to write nearly twenty notebook pages, which translates to about 5,000 words. A normal day's work in my Writing Cave (between six to twelve hours) produces 2,000 if I'm lucky. So yeah, you bet I love trains.

8) My iPod. At the click of a finger I can conjure up any mood I wish. Need to feel sad? Wistful? Angry? Determined? Pumped and optimistic? Joyful and relaxed? I have a playlist for it, trust me. My dad, when asked what music he likes, just says: 'Ask Zoë. She has all the music'. And he's right. I do. Right here on my trusty iPod.

9) Papermate Nylon Blue Tuck nylon fibre tip pen with 1.0mm line width and blue ink. Not fancy, not expensive, but still my favourite pen in the whole wide world.

10) You. My Dear Readers, questioning, funny, clever, creative, persistent and perfect as you are. I wouldn't swap you for anything.

QUICK CONTEST: List Ten Things YOU Love in the comments before before midnight tonight, and one randomly chosen winner will receive a signed UK paperback copy of Shadows on the Moon. This giveaway is open internationally. I will pick the winner on Saturday and announce on Monday. Ready, steady...Go!

BIG SECRET PROJECT TEASER #3

2011-09-20T23:36:00.000-07:00

Hello and Happy Wednesday, Dear Readers (whoa, a lot of capitals in that line)!

Today, as the faintly golden fingers of dawn crept through the gap in my curtains, I blinked, stretched, sighed - and experienced that sinking feeling known as 'Oh Cr*p, I've Got To Blog Today' which descends on a hapless blogger when they have completely forgotten to think of anything to talk about. This was not, I hasten to add, because I don't love you all with a deep and passionate devotion. It's because I wrote eighteen notebook pages of the first draft of Big Secret Project yesterday and that pretty much sucked my creative juices dry.

So since my lack of a witty and sparkling blog topic is really all Big Secret Project's fault, I thought it was only fair that Big Secret Project help me out of my blogging dilemma by providing an intriguing snippet. As always, since I'm still working on this book and it has not been sold or edited, everything you read in a teaser is subject to massive change or even deletion. An interesting fact about this section: the character name comes from a lovely blog reader who bid in the Authors for Japan auction. She won the right to have her namesake in this book, and if she checks the blog today, this will be her first sight of the result.

Teaser hidden there under the cut. Let me know what you think...

Bel Downing swore when the lights in her tiny office started to flicker. Her finger slammed down on the ‘Save’ icon, and she sighed with relief when the command executed successfully, without the computer crashing.

She reached for her mug of tea, found it contained only cold dregs, checked the time and swore again. No wonder her back was killing her. She had to stop doing this. It wasn’t like the British Museum was going to spring for overtime when she was writing her own dissertation.

When the lights stopped blinking she shut down her computer and had a long, spine-cracking stretch, trying to decide what takeaway to hit for dinner. She was weighing up noodles versus pizza when she heard a sound echo down the empty corridor outside.

“What the – ?” There it was again. That was definitely a meow. How had a cat gotten into the museum?

Remembering the chaos wrought by a trapped pigeon a few months before, Bel got up hastily and pushed the door of her office fully open. She peered up and down the shadowy corridor, but there was no sign of any living creature there.

She debated going for one of the night watchmen, to help her search. But what if the animal was on the move? In the five or ten minutes it would take to fetch help the stupid animal could have gotten into anything. Another meow made her mind up. The sound was coming from the Japanese rooms. She headed in that direction, passing the shadowy statue of Kudora Kannon as she entered the first room. Her footsteps echoed softly, and Bel debated putting on the powerful overhead lights. She couldn’t walk around in the pitch dark, but then again a sudden flood of light might scare the cat into hiding. After a moment she switched on the display lights instead. The soft spots highlighted the exhibits and gave her enough light to move around without falling over anything.

Bel heard another pitiful meow and felt a momentary pang of pity for the lost cat. She wasn’t much of a pet person, but all this noise must mean that the poor thing was frightened, and wanted to be found.

“Here, puss,” she said, making kissy noises as she moved deeper into the gallery. “Here, kitty. Where are you? Come out.”

There was another meow, right behind her. She turned quickly and gasped, mouth falling open.

One of the exhibits – an ancient grave offering, a stone roughly carved into the shape of a cat – was broken. Shards of rock glittered in the display case amid a pool of dark liquid.

The viscous fluid, thick as blood, flowed down the sides of the broken exhibit’s pedestal and somehow squeezed out under the sealed glass of the case, dripping onto the floor. As she watched, it seemed to bubble, spreading further. Torn between disbelief and fasination, Bel hesitated, then took a step back.

Her shoe squelched. She looked down and saw that in the few seconds she had stood gaping, the black liquid had circled her feet.

The hairs all over Bel’s body raked up as a low, wicked chuckle echoed through the gallery. One by one, the display lights all over the room began to wink off, plunging the room into deeper darkness.

This can’t be happening. This isn’t real.

Bel turned to run.

THE RETURN

2011-09-18T23:56:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers! I have returned from my holiday sojurn and the blog hiatus is officially over!

It seems a lot of stuff has been going on while I was away. A scandal over a well-liked agent reportedly asking a pair of respected authors to 'de-gay' their story set fire to the internet, with people either taking sides or refusing to believe any of it. I've got lots to say about this topic (as you either know, or can find out here and here), but I feel as if every possible opinion has already been explored so thoroughly that it's pointless to try and find different ways to express what has already been stated extremely well by others. So I'll just post a link to this excellent round up of the whole thing on the redoubtable Cleolinda's Blog, and say that I feel incredibly lucky to work with an agent, an editor and a publisher who have always supported me in my quest to reflect the world's real and beautiful diversity in my work.

Also, Zolah favourite and author of the fantabulous Demon's Lexicon Trilogy Sarah Rees Brennan revealed that she had been keeping secrets from us, working on a very, very, very exciting joint project with beloved YA fantasy author Justine Larbalastier, and that their book already has a cover and everything. I nearly died of squee.

Lots of other interesting things have been going on as well, but those were the ones that caught my attention the most. I have also (for those who remember what I said before I went away and perhaps were wondering) had some News about Big Secret Project - but not the sort of news I can really share, since things are still up in the air. More on that when I can.

And now - onto the holiday pictures! When looking at these you need to bear in mind that I managed to arrange to stay in a small, wooden cabin on the side of a mountain in the Lake District during the one week in the year when the entire of Cumbria was being lashed by Hurrican Katya with 70mph winds and torrential rain. So a lot of the pictures I took were unuseable because I got blown over mid click or had rain on my lense. Sometimes I didn't even dare take my camera out. But I persevered. In fact, I was so anxious to get you photos of one place that I went back a second time when the weather was a little better and tried again!

My favourite one is the second to last there - but I'm quite proud of all of these. I do love to take photos! What do you guys think?

NEW HAIR! NEW HAIR!

2011-09-09T00:19:00.000-07:00

Hello all! It's Friday (Friday, Friday!) and tomorrow I depart for my week-long, internet-free sojourn in the wilds of the Lake District. But yesterday I made an even more perilous journey. To the hair stylists!

Because, lo, these many long weeks ago, I made my faithful Dear Readers a promise. That if/when the blog reached 300 followers, I would die pink or purple streaks in my hair. I had decided to get a haircut at the same time, and asked you all to vote on what I should go for.

Just for perspective, here's a shot of me just after I got up yesterday morning, with shaggy dishevelled hair:

So after I hauled that shaggy mop down to the stylists, what DID I go for?

Floopy hair! A shoulder-length layered bob with a heavy fring (bangs, for you USians). I love it! It's still long enough to put back in a bun or ponytail if I want it out of the way to wash my face or whatever, but short enough that it feels loads lighter and very different. I'm told it makes me look younger, too, and there is NOTHING wrong with that.

But what about our purple streaks, you cry! You didn't chicken out, did you? No, no, my babies - your lack of faith hurts! I would never go back on a promise to you. Here are your streaks:

One on each side, like racing stripes! I had them placed under my hairline so that when I turn my head they flash through the blonde, and I can show them off by pulling the sides of my hair back or braiding it. Nice, eh?

Of course the question now is...what should I do if the blog reaches 400 followers? Suggestions in the comments! And remember - this is the last you will see of me for a week. I'll be back, with holiday snaps, on the 19th of September. Take care of yourselves, Dear Readers :)

WEDNESDAY FIVE #2

2011-09-07T00:18:00.000-07:00

Yes, the middle of the week has rolled around again - and once again I have been so embroiled in work, work, work that I have failed to come up with a scintillating new topic for you. So: Random Wednesday (hey - you at the back - no booing on my blog!).

Thing the First:

Yesterday I passed 50,000 words on Big Secret Project! 51k, in actual fact. It's been a long time coming, what with the FF re-writes, so I'm chuffed and excited and very happy to be heading towards the explosive, climactic scenes. I don't want to jinx myself, but barring hideous mischance, I think I should definitely have a complete first draft by the end of the year.

Thing the Second:

I'm hoping to get Some News about Big Secret Project next week. It's all a bit complicated because the News might not be anything definite, and anyway I'm going to be in a cabin in the woods with no way to communicate with you and spotty mobile phone reception which will make it hard for anyone to talk to me. But if I do get News, I shall share it on the blog next week. If I don't say anything, take it that there was no News (this is publishing, folks - all the speed and transparency of an iceberg creeping down a mountain).

Thing the Third:

I love my agent. I adore her. I bless the day that my editor said to me, 'You know who might be a really good fit for you?' and mentioned her name for the first time (even though I had already been worshipping her from afar for a while before that, I hadn't really had the courage to approach). Nancy, you may or may not be psychic, but you definitely rock.

Thing the Fourth:

Tomorrow, I visit the hairstylists. Who knows what will happen to me in there? If something goes wrong, tell my dog I love him. I regret nothing.

Thing the Fifth:

The Shadows on the Moon book trailer has, disappointingly, stalled at just over 850 views. Now, if you think back to when it was first launched, I promised that when it reached 1000, there would be extra features on offer. In fact, I'm pretty sure I've convinced the lovely people at Walker Books to release the Director's Cut version of the trailer, which is longer and has extra exciting bits. So if, while I'm away on my internet free sojourn, you guys were to spread the word, share the trailer, and boost those viewing figures up? I might be able to celebrate my return by posting that. Get on it:

SURPRISE SIXTH THING:

The final line from Chapter Fifteen of Big Secret Project, which I wrote yesterday! Adult language warning:

"Holy shit,” Hikaru whispered.

And with that, I bid you adieu! See you on Friday with new hair pictures.

A QUESTION OF WRITING

2011-09-05T00:11:00.000-07:00

Hi Everyone! I hope you all had a fantastic weekend. I've not quite managed to get my characters talking to me again, but they are at least muttering sullenly instead of going quiet as soon as I walk in. So that's progress. Right? Right.

In other news, as some of you noticed, we hit 300 followers on Friday! Whooo! I can hardly believe it. I've made an appointment to get my hair dyed and also cut (eeep) this week. I'm not going to tell you in advance exactly what I'm going to get done, other than what you already know, which is that pink/purple streaks are involved. You'll just have to wait until Friday when I post the pictures.

Now onto some writing questions from my Dear Readers.

Firstly, this question came from Rebecca, via email:

"I just wanted some advice on how to get through a really tough part in my writing. I recently started a new story and I really love the idea and how I'm going to develop the characters and relationships but I'm stuck on a part in chapter 1 that is essential to the story but not the most interesting part to write, compared with what's going to happen in the next chapter and following chapters. I keep on stopping and daydreaming about what's going to happen after I've written this part, but I can't get to it because I need to finish the first chapter first. Does this ever happen to you? How do you inspire yourself to really work through the tough parts to get to the better parts?"

Aha, young grasshopper! Let me direct your attention to my post on Writer's Kryptonite where I talk about this problem and how to fix it. Namely, the scene that's boring the pants off you? It may be vital - but it's NOT vital for it to bore the pants off you. Give it a twist and find a way to make it exciting for yourself so that it stops being a slog and starts being something you're eager to work on. Your readers will also thank you!

The next question comes from Cam, via comments:

"I'm working on a fantasy, and while I'm pretty happy with the plot, I'm looking for ways to flesh out my characters' homes and cultures. I would like them to feel unique, not just mildly European. What are some good ways to do this? Is it something I should worry about later, when working on rewrites?"

Other writers may feel differently about this, but I'd say that leaving the decision about your characters culture until re-writes is the WORST thing you can possibly do.

Try to imagine Zira from Daughter of the Flames being who she is, making the choices she makes, living the life she does - in a vaguely European world, with no meaningful religion, where all the people are the same race. You can't, can you? Because Zira would be a completely different person and her world would be an utterly different place without those factors.

In treating the ethnicity, religion, social status and race of your characters like an after-thought, you risk making some really worrying mistakes in terms of your depictions of diverse characters. This is because you're not seeing these people as fully rounded individuals whose personalities and decisions are a result of many factors - including their background and upbringing. You're treating their ethnicity and culture as a costume that they can shrug on over their pre-existing traits, which will add colour and interest to the story, but not influence the development of plot or character in any meaningful sense. That way lies madness. That way lies a cast of straight, white, male, able-bodied, vaguely Christian characters who react exactly the way that straight, white, male, able-bodied, vaguely Christian people do in every situation and think the way that straight, white, male, able-bodied, vaguely Christian people think - DESPITE THE FACT THAT THEIR SKIN MAY BE BROWN OR THEY MAY HAVE DISABILITIES OR LADY PARTS OR WORSHIP THE GODDESS KALLISSH OR FANCY PEOPLE OF THE SAME SEX.

If you want to create a richly textured and unique world for your characters then it needs to be an integral part of the story you're writing, not just window-dressing. The universe of the story and the ethnicity, race, social background/status and religion of the characters should be a huge factor in the way the story develops.

My advice to you on how to do this world building work is (predictably!) to look at the real world. The setting of Ruan was inspired by a documentary series on India and a Sunday afternoon programme about Lake Tanganyika in Africa. The religious tensions and the different races came from thinking about the Norman invasion of Britain in 1066 and the situation in the Middle East. Go to your local library and check out as many reference and non-fiction books as you can about different cultures and their history and read them. Read about Russian Cossacks and Indian Rajas and Bedouin Tribesmen and French Revolutionaries and British Imperialists and Chinese Scholars. Listen to world music. Watch documentaries, programmes by National Geographic, and news reports. Something will spark in your brain, and from that spark a blaze will grow. The whole world is out there and it is a fascinating place. Use it!

OK, finally we have an email from a lady who wishes to remain anonymous:

"Describing has always been my strongpoint and I've just found out that it's all I'm good at. I can never think of a full storyline and if I improvise my work gets really bad. I read lots and see so many great stories and ideas from other authors but can never think of any of my own that I have the patience and endurance to stick with. If I write, I end up stopping at the 2 pages mark just because I've run out of things to write. I don't know how to plan my work properly or sustain a story. Would you be able to help me?"

Firstly - you are not alone. This sort of issue, where a writer struggles with figuring out What Happens Next and gets stumped after a few pages, must be one of the most common ones I come across. As a result (and luckily for you!) I have written maaaaany many many posts on the topic. Let me direct your attention to:

Neverending Stories

Isabel's Question (and I advise you to click on all the links within this link, too)

Lexie and Elise's Questions

Hope this is useful, everyone! I'll see you all on Wednesday.

A LETTER TO MY CHARACTERS

2011-09-02T00:06:00.000-07:00

Dear Characters,

Exactly what are you trying to tell me?

Speak up! I can't stand all this muttering you young people do these days - in my day people spoke their minds so everyone could understand them. I can tell that there's something going on. I can hear you whispering behind my back and I'm bright enough to notice that you always fall silent when I walk in. Just what is the problem?

I mean, here we are, 70% through this wonderful story which - I fully admit! - you've helped me with in the most generous way. The plot has developed in all kinds of interesting and unexpected directions thanks to your input, and so many exciting things are going on right now. We've been looking forward to this section of the book since we first started writing it together, and I thought we'd be skipping through fields of daisies, hand-in-hand, at this point.

But suddenly you've changed.

You're dragging your feet. You keep sighing and looking over your shoulder and finding excuses to stay just where you are in this flaming scene where we've been stuck for a week. Instead of witty banter you're giving me grammatically correct dialogue with all the spark and humour of oatmeal.

I just can't tell what you're THINKING anymore.

Obviously there's something you want to share. So come on - out with it! I'm happy to listen to any concerns you've got. You want to add something? Take a few steps back and handle that last bit of action in a different way? Make time for smooching or a blazing row? Whatever you want, I'll do it!

We've been such good friends for so long. I can't cope with this silent treatment. Talk to me again, that's all I want. I know that our relationship is strong enough to survive, so long as we keep communicating.

Just stop ignoring me. Please.

Much love,
Your Worried Author

WEDNESDAY FIVE

2011-08-31T00:35:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers! Congratulations on making it to Wednesday despite this dull and dreary excuse for summer weather that we're having. Today I bring you a random sampling of the shenanigans which are consuming my attention currently. And just to round the whole thing up, we'll call it:

WEDNESDAY FIVE!

Thing the First:

Direct your attention to the right of this post. What's that? No, your eyes do not deceive you. The blog is only four followers away from those purple streaks I've been promising. It barely seems like an eyeblink since I was shaking in my shoes over singing the blues to celebrate 200 followers, and now we're as near as dammit to 300. Meanwhile, there have been many helpful and thoughtful comments on whether I should cut all my hair off or not, which have left me...undecided. So I'll get back to you on that one.

Thing the Second:

Shadows on the Moon has topped 1000 adds on Goodreads. I know, right?! And FrostFire has just appeared there too, so if you feel like adding it to your To Read shelf, go right ahead.

Thing the Third:

Oooh, we're into exciting territory here. The American hardback of Shadows on the Moon is now available for pre-order on The Book Depository and Amazon! There's no cover as yet - it's not finalised, and Candlewick like to keep their artwork under wraps until a bit closer to the release date anyway. But it's there! You can see it, you can order it, it's really, really REAL.

Thing the Fourth:

OMG! There's going to be an audiobook of Shadows on the Moon, released simultaneously with the US hardback in April next year. It will be available on CD or as an MP3 download, produced by Brilliance Audio, who are a really wonderful company with an excellent reputation. I've never had an audiobook made of any of my books before and I'm so stoked to hear what the story sounds like in someone else's voice.

Thing the Fifth:

Slightly less exciting for you guys, but very exciting for me, this one. In September I'm going away on holiday for the first time in about four years. I'll be staying in a log cabin in the Lake District and I will have NO INTERNET ACCESS. Scary but necessary if I'm to do anything different from my normal day-to-day activities while I'm away. This means the blog will be on hiatus for one week, from the 10th of September to the 17th. But never fear, we'll be back to a normal posting schedule the following week.

So - what's your Wednesday Five?

BIG SECRET PROJECT PLAYLIST

2011-08-29T00:16:00.000-07:00

Hello, my lovelies! Today I am filled with the desperate urge to talk to you all about Big Secret Project. In fact, I am so full of beans that resisting the desire to spill them is causing me to feel a teeeensy bit nauseous. But, as you all know very well, I'm not able to talk to you about Big Secret Project right now in any meaningful way (although I promise I will as soon as I can!) and so instead, I decided that I would share with you my playlist for the part that I am working on right now.

This might tell you all kinds of interesting things about the story...or it might not. Heh heh. Being annoyingly cryptic is the next best thing to spilling the beans.

On with the playlist!

A bit different from previous playlists, I know! What sort of idea does this give you about Big Secret Project? Feel free to guess/speculate in the comments :)

WAKE UP AND SMELL THE REAL WORLD #2

2011-08-26T01:49:00.000-07:00

Happy Friday, Dear Readers! Today, I bring you a little follow-up to last week's post on diversity in fantasy.

First of all, I urge you to read these very interesting posts - the first one about about the movie business, and how film students, even film students who were female or not-able-bodied or not-white found themselves caught up in responding to headshots of potential actors a certain way, and a response in which isolates the fact that when you try to point out this kind of unconscious prejudice, you're often accused of prejudice yourself.

As the writer of both these posts point out, the warped view of the world we're all presented with near-constantly means that none of us - NONE OF US - is free of ingrained prejudice. I freely admit that I'm not. What matters is to be aware of this, and willing, when you have a response to something, to examine it and be honest about where that response comes from.

Let me elaborate. What is the usual reaction among your friends and family if you hint that something they have said or assumed may spring from prejudice? I'm willing to bet that any suggestion that they are not perfectly liberal, prejudice free, shiny-bright and unbiased is met with defensiveness and anger. 'I'm not a racist/sexist/ableist/homophobe!' they shriek, their brains filled with images of Neo-Nazis, of evil, sweaty monsters, of vile, chuckling villains. 'How can you SAY that about me?'

Anger and defensiveness are a really good warning sign - because people only get angry and defensive when they have something to defend. That 'something' is their own image of themselves, the comfy assumptions that allow them to walk through the world feeling content with who they are. They know they're a good person, not a hateful, chuckling Neo-Nazi. Therefore they cannot be a racist/sexist/ableist/homophobic.

Except that they probably are.

I am. Every prejudice that those angry, defensive people have? I have too. They lurk there in the back of my mind, pretending that they're 'instinct' or 'common-sense' or 'realism' when actually, they are just bigotry.

That doesn't make me a horrible, hateful, chuckling Neo-Nazi. It just makes me not perfect. That's all. A work in progress. A person who is willing to be honest with themselves and the world.

And in admitting that, I become a far more able to recognise and reject prejudice than I ever was when I was striding through the world in my insulated bubble of I'm-A-Good-Person ignorance, refusing to admit that my actions could *possibly* be influenced by evolutionary imperatives to reject those who are different, and centuries of religious and secular bigotry, and a mass media who refuse to represent the world as it really is.

The moment you let go of that image of yourself as a perfect, shiny-bright 'good person' who couldn't possibly harbour prejudice, is the moment you will begin truly working AGAINST prejudice. Honesty is the key. Honesty is the thing that allows you to confront your own ingrained assumptions about other people, your own prejudice, and then put those things aside so that you can act, as much as possible, as if you were NOT prejudiced.

Try it. Go ahead. It doesn't hurt, I promise. Take a deep breath, and then say, out loud: "I am not perfect. I am flawed. I have ingrained prejudices. I will do my best to recognise and overcome them."

Doesn't it feel like a weight off your chest? To admit to yourself that you don't have to be perfect, that it's OKAY to have nasty, knee-jerk reactions to things, sometimes, so long as you're willing to make sure no one else suffers as a result?

Now that we've gone there, I link you to this post, which was prompted by the original Wake Up and Smell the Real World post, and which in turn prompted THIS post.

And the reason that response post is crucial? Is that as a creative person who tries to embrace diversity and who writes about a lot of characters who have experiences and come from backgrounds nothing like mine, I'm going to make mistakes. I'm going to write characters or create plots or situations that rub people up the wrong way. Some of those reactions will come from people who've put up with bigotry all their lives and who are just godammned sick of tripping over everyone else's privilege. And they're unlikely to give a flying pamplemoose about my ongoing project to kick bigotry in the behind. They're just going to say 'YOU SUCK' and walk away.

And that's OK. That's really the whole point of this post. It's not anyone else's job to educate me, or give me a pat on the head for trying really hard.

The correct response to having someone notice the fact that, despite my endeavors, I'm still flawed and unconsciously prejudiced, is NOT to flee back into the I'm-A-Good-Person bubble, claim that the ones telling me I suck are horrible, nasty, ungrateful and prejudiced themselves, and say sulkily: 'Fine! I'll just write about straight, white, able-bodied people from now on and THEN YOU'LL BE SORRY!.

Nor is it to curl into a ball on the floor, weeping, and bash my head repeatedly on the tiles chanting: "I am a terrible, horrible, no-good bigot who should be flayed UNTIL SHE IS SORRY!"

It's to listen to what other people have said, acknowledge that those reactions to my work are valid and true and real, and then decide if I can learn from them. Don't get me wrong. It is hard. But it's necessary. Because, I'm coming to realise, it's not enough for writers (or actors or artists or politicians or firemen or teachers or dog-walkers or CEOs) to write the change that they want to see in the world.

We have to BE the change we want to see in the world, and keep on being it, even knowing that we'll never be perfect - only better than we were before.

OK, I've been rambling on for a while here, so let's sum up. In order to fight prejudice in our day to day lives, we must:

Step out of the I-Am-A-Good-Person bubble and admit that we are imperfect and flawed and prejudiced, like the rest of the world
Be honest with ourselves when we say or do something as a result of prejudice
Accept that fighting against prejudice is our own responsibility & our own choice and no one owes us gratitude or enlightenment as a result
Allow other people to tell us when we mess up without dismissing what they feel or fleeing back into the IAAGP bubble again, or trying to drink bleach because we STILL aren't perfect
Rinse. Repeat.

Does this make sense? I hope so. Honestly, you guys are better than a therapist! Let me know what you think in the comments.

FROSTFIRE TEASER

2011-08-24T00:10:00.000-07:00

Hello, Dear Readers! Congratulations on making it to Wednesday. As a reward, I bring you an enticing snippet of FrostFire, which regular readers will know is the companion novel to Daughter of the Flames, and which is sheduled to come out from Walker Books in the UK in July next year.

Related to this - I'll probably be setting up a FrostFire page here and on my website soon, so if you've got any thoughts on the information you'd like to see there, tell me in the comments and I'll do my best to provide it.

In the meantime...let me know what you think of this teaser!

I went in low, swinging at the Gourdin’s leg. Moving fast for such a bulky man, he brought his right axe down, catching my axe-blade on his pick. His other axe flicked up to catch Arian’s sword in exactly the same way. The rebel twisted and pulled his axes expertly. I staggered forward a step, fighting to hang onto my weapon.

Arian let go of his sword and leapt away. The sudden release of tension made the rebel lurch, off-balance. I wrenched at my larger axe. Metal screamed, and the weapon went flying from the Gourdin’s hand. I bared my teeth in a grin of triumph. One axe down, one to go.

Arian reached under his jerkin and pulled out his weighted baton as the Gourdin took his remaining axe in both hands and aimed a side blow at my gut. I got my weapon down just in time, deflecting the blade with the iron langet.

Arian surged into the fray and drove the end of his baton into the rebel’s stomach. The man went white and stumbled back, almost bouncing off the wooden frame of the doorway .

Trusting Arian to guard me, I took an underhand swing at the rebel fighter’s legs that forced him to twist sideways. He struck at my back – Arian blocked the move with the baton, losing a chunk of wood in the process. I danced back and then edged forward, trying to find a space to cut at the man again. As he angled away, clearly believing me and my axe to be the greatest threat, Arian dived in beneath me and smashed his baton into the man’s knees.

The rebel bellowed as his legs buckled and he crashed to the ground. At the same moment, I jabbed the iron-bound head of my axe into his temple. There was a crunch as the metal met the rebel’s skull, and he slumped to the floor, lying half in and half out of the doorway.

Arian got to his feet and retrieved his sword. Together we jumped over the giant’s legs, landing in a large, echoing space, full of shadows.

The room was oddly shaped, with many sides, and was mainly taken by with roughly made wooden furniture – long tables and stools. It looked for all the world like the Hill Guard’s mess tent. I had braced myself for more enemy soldiers, but the room was empty.

“They left only one man to defend the doorway? That’s crazy.”

“They didn’t believe attackers would get this far,” Arian said, his gaze searching the room. “The inbred belief that they were invincible was the reason the Sedorne lost the war. Come on, we need to keep moving.”

We searched the room cautiously, backs to the wall, until we found a doorway. There was no door in it – a rail above indicated a curtain had once hung there, but no more. Arian eased through the gap, still plastered to one wall. I took the other side. The corridor was wide, with a towering ceiling that disappeared into darkness. The only light was from thin window slits high up. I still couldn’t hear any movement, no voices or footsteps. It was eerie.

Arian was running one hand over the wall. Then he ducked down and seemed to be touching the floor.

“What are you doing?”

“There are embrasures here for lamps, but they’re empty. And I can feel dust on the floors. I think this part is disused,” he said.

“That makes no sense. It’s directly off the main room,” I said, feeling the hairs on the back of my neck lift. “Can I have your baton? There’s no space for an axe here.”

“Take the knife instead,” he said, handing it to me hilt-first. “You’re more used to an edged weapon.”

We moved forward, weapons ready. I expected to see light at any moment, but instead the place grew darker. It was like venturing into a cave. I was thankful that at least there was no slime or bats. Yet.

“This place is massive,” I whispered as we came to a circular chamber with four more empty doorways leading off it. Even lowered, my voice echoed off the walls.

“We’re going to have to risk a light,” Arian said. “I’ve got a candle in my belt pouch. Hold this.”

He pushed the baton into my free hand, and, after some muttered swearing and scraping noises, a light flickered to life. Then he took the baton back and let some of the molten wax drip onto the end before sticking the candle to it. Now the baton served as a candleholder as well as a weapon. He held the light up high, but the tiny flame didn’t offer much illumination – just enough to keep us from stumbling over our own feet.

“Maybe we should go back and try another exit from the main room?” I suggested.

There was a muffled cry from one of the corridors and without another word we both rushed forward.

A QUESTION OF PUBLISHING

2011-08-22T00:34:00.000-07:00

Hi everyone - I hope you all had a great weekend! I've been having a wonderful reading binge and actually managed to make a dent in one of my TBR piles, so I'm happy about that, even if the pile will probably magically double in size now just to spite me. Or maybe grow teeth or something...

Today I'm going to tackle a couple of reader questions on the theme of publishing. The first question comes from a reader who wishes to remain anonymous and says:

"i searched the internet and looked at thing all over the place that claimed the would send work to a publisher and all that but asked for money. And then my mom said how if i sent my stories over the web that they could be claimed as anyone's work and so i got worried how do you find a publisher? And once you do that do you need an entire story ready to be printed or can you have just a chapter or even just an outline?"

Whoo! You're starting right at the ground floor here - back where I was when I first decided I wanted to be a writer those many long years ago. That means my answer needs to cover a lot of ground, and it won't be possible for me to go into as much depth on various issues as I'd like. So first of all I recommend that you get hold of a copy of the most recent Writer's and Artist's Yearbook. This book is updated every year and it is filled with detailed and informative articles which tell you how to go about making a submission to a publisher and how the process works. Any questions that you have left after reading my answer can be found in the W&AY.

I'm going to tackle the last part of your question first, because that's the bit which shows a basic and all-too-common mistake about the way in which publishing works. You're asking how to find a publisher BEFORE you've got a manuscript to offer them, as if they were a plumber or something, that you can look up and have on standby for when you need them.

That's not how it works. You've gotten confused here between PRINTING and PUBLISHING. A printer will take any old stack of pages that you offer them, charge you some money, and turn it into a bound booklet or even something that looks like a book you might find in your local bookshop. And then you'll have a box in your living room filled with five or ten or one hundred copies of something that looks like a book. That is not being published. That is getting something you have written bound up.

This is how getting published works, Anon. You write a book. It needs to be a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end. Then you need to revise and rewrite it and make it as good as it can be. Then, and only then, you go looking for a publisher - because before that point you literally have nothing to offer a publisher. And then, if you have written something that's really good, the publisher will pay YOU to publish your book - and that process will involve helping you to revise and rewrite it even more, then designing a cover, then printing up thousands of copies of the book and making sure they arrive in bookshops all over the country or even the world. And they will NEVER NEVER NEVER charge you a penny for this. In fact, they will pay YOU for the privilege.

You and the publisher will split the profits on every copy of the book that is sold. The publisher gets a much higher cut of the profits than you, because printing and distributing copies of the book costs thousands of pounds. But - repeat after me! - they will NEVER NEVER NEVER ask you to pay them any money.

However, these days most writers do not approach a publisher directly. That's because, before the publisher will take your book and do all those things I mentioned, they will negotiate a legally binding contract with you, which sets all the details in stone. And, like all businesses, they will try to get the best terms for themselves they can, which means that (at a very basic level) they will try to get you to accept the lowest percentage of profits possible. Also, as you've pointed out, you don't really know anything about publishing, or which editors might like your book. And if you send a manuscript straight to a publisher, they will put it right to the bottom of their pile of books to be read because it comes from someone they've never heard of before.

This is why most writers, rather than looking for a publisher themselves, will attempt to find a literary agent. A literary agent is someone who makes their living by spotting talented writers and signing them up. They will sometimes help you to edit your manuscript to make it as good as it can be. They will then use their extremely detailed knowledge of publishing houses and editors to decide who out of the entire publishing industry might love your book and want to publish it. And when they send your story out, the publisher will see that it comes from a professional agent and put it much closer to the top of their pile of books to read. Then, if a publisher does decide they want to publish your book, the agent will negotiate the best contract for you that is possible, trying to get you the best terms and the highest percentage of profits. For doing this, they will take between ten and fifteen percent of the money you earn on any contracts that they negotiate on your behalf.

Other than that ten to fifteen percent, which the agent will deduct from your earnings before sending the rest of the money to you? Good agents will NEVER NEVER NEVER ask you for any money. And you can find the addresses of pretty much all the agents in your country in The Writer's & Artist's Yearbook.

And finally, no one is going to want to steal your work or claim it for their own. For more information on why you don't need to worry about that, check out my Tips page here.

Let's review.

Write a book. Rewrite and revise it until it's as good as it can be
Get The Writer's & Artist's Yearbook. Read from cover to cover.
Try to find an agent, using the address and following the rules in the W&AY.
NEVER NEVER *NEVER* PAY ANYONE ANY MONEY.

Okay? Okay. Good luck!

Next question! This comes from Aimen, and asks:

"Is it possible to send a manuscript to a publishing house based in a different country? If so, does this actually hinder the publishing/editing/revising process in any way or make it harder to communicate with your editor/agent? Or do agents only ever take up authors in the country which they themselves live? I know that its probably not that hard considering that, well, I'm sitting in a really tiny island in the middle of nowhere and writing an email to a writer in England xD, but what is the general view? Or does that depend on the publisher? If there is no difficulty and it is possible to send it elsewhere, like the US - is it advisable or does that merely complicate the publishing process further?"

Excellent question. I'm not an expert on this because, as you've already pointed out, I do live in a country which is a major publishing hub. But authors from different countries get published in the UK all the time, and the same is true of the US. One of the biggest sources of income for most writers/publishers is the sale of 'foreign rights' - that is, licensing publishers in other countries to produce translated editions of books. And, as you've also already pointed out, it's laughably easy to communicate with people in other countries now.

My advice to you is to approach agents first, rather than publishers. Agents mostly now accept email submissions (publishers often still insist on a hard copy, where they will accept unsolicited manuscripts at all) which not only cuts down on your postage costs, but hopefully reduces the waiting time for an answer. When an agent looks at a manuscript they will assess how good it is, what work might be needed on it, where it could fit into the market, how professional you seem and if they think they could work with you. The fact that you live in another country may or may not affect their feelings, but that's going to be personal preference - and for every agent who wants to work with people in their own country, I'm sure there are five more who don't care if the book is great.

I'll let you in on a secret. I've never met my agent. She lives and works in Wales, and I live and work in the far North of the UK. But that's never stopped us from having a fantastic working relationship, or stopped my agent from doing a brilliant job of looking after my interests. And my agent also has a great relationship with my publisher, even though THEY'RE located in London. The truth is that it's all going to come down to the quality of the story you've written, and how you present yourself.

Good luck to you as well, Aimen.

I hope that's been helpful to everyone! If there are any more questions about writing or publishing, pop them in the comments or email me through my website, and I'll do my best to answer next week.

See you on Wednesday!