TITLE CHANGE ANNOUNCEMENT

Hello and - ack - happy Monday, my cinnamon rolls! I know a Monday post is unexpected, but don't worry, I'll still be posting on Thursday to announce the winners of #Zolahpalooza (and if you haven't entered yet...er...why not? Get on that!). I've burst onto cyberspace today to break some news which I hadn't planned to share until next week but... well, an Amazon listing intervened, and I'd rather you hear it from me first.

So, a few weeks ago I had an email from Candlewick Press - Walker Books' American sister company and the US publisher of The Name of the Blade trilogy. They wanted to talk about the title of the third book in the trilogy. You see, although FRAIL MORTAL HEART had always been the name of the book (literally since I came up with the idea for the series in 2010, as the titles were one of the first things I thought of) and everyone liked it a lot... history, in the form of two other recently published or upcoming books, had overtaken us.

Screenshot of OneNote page from 2010 showing the haiku that inspired the titles

Those other books were, of course, MORTAL HEART, the third book in Robin LaFever's His Fair Assassin Trilogy, and THE MORTAL HEART, a Beautiful Creatures novella by Kami Garcia and Margaret Stohl. These authors are all NYT Bestsellers and their books are huge, especially in the US. I, on the other hand, am only a bestselling author in Germany (Hallo, schön Deutsch Leser!) and otherwise my books are sort of... let's say... petite in sales terms. And thus, this strong similarity in titles was a problem. Not for them, so much - but definitely for me.

It is a fact universally acknowledged that in the world of publishing sometimes there are strange coincidences which seem to spring from the shared zeitgeist of creative energy that most writers swim around in on Twitter and Facebook and the blogosphere all the time. There's no connection between Robin LaFevers or Margaret Stohl or Kami Garcia and me, and obviously none of us knew that we were busily writing books or novellas with startlingly similar titles until it was kind of too late (for me, anyway).

I admit that when I saw the announcement of the title of Robin's book my heart sank a bit. When, just under a year later, the cover for FRAIL MORTAL HEART was released, several US blogs picked it up and made fairly stinging comments on the fact that I'd apparently been too stupid to realise 'That title's taken!' I even had a couple of not very delightful Goodreads messages about it. By the time I saw the Beautiful Creatures one, it kind of felt like the universe was trying to tell me something. So the email from my US publisher was not out of the blue.

They had a suggestion of what the name could be changed to, and it was a good suggestion - but because the title was part of the haiku (which is in the book) and also quite a significant line of the heroine's internal dialogue, it didn't really work. Plus, I already had a new title in mind, which would scan as part of the poem and convey the same idea within the book. And that title was:

FRAIL HUMAN HEART

Not that much of a change at all, really. I confess I do feel a pang for the word 'mortal', but I think this works equally well *and* it has alliteration going for it. In order to keep things tidy, it's been agreed that this shall be the final title for both the UK and US version of the book, which obviously necessitated some quick work on the part of Delightful Designer on the previously released UK cover (we don't have artwork for the US one yet, so nothing has to be messed with there). Here is the amended cover for the Walker Books UK paperback:

AND - which is what prompted this post to be written today in the first place - Amazon pre-orders for FRAIL HUMAN HEART are now live! So if pre-orders are your thing, have at it.

Read you later, darlinks!

A PEEK INSIDE THE NOTEBOOK...

Hello, my well-iced cupcakes! Sorry for my blogging absence last week. I'm afraid I caught two bugs one on top of the other and I pretty much lost the full seven days. I'm still recovering, but at least I feel mostly human now. That was my NaNo efforts out of the window, though. I think I've learned my lesson now that it's happened three times: the universe does not want me NaNoing. I can take a hint!

Today's post is one that I promised on Twitter to the delightful Dear Readers Jenni (@JuniperJungle) and Lucy (@ChooseYA) aaages ago, after I posted a screencap of part of the original page of notes I made back in 2010 when I first came up with most of my ideas for THE NAME OF THE BLADE. So here is me finally getting to it, half a month later.

I've mentioned on the blog before that I use a programme called OneNote - a sort of virtual notebook which lets you open up new pages and tabs and jam random notes all over the place in no particular order - to keep track of my messy, developing ideas as all the elements of a story start coalescing in my brain. It's not really the same as brainstorming. It's just jotting things down, actually, but it's better for me than a normal notebook (le gasp! No, I still love normal notebooks and my stationery fetish is intact, I'm not a pod person, honest!) because after writing the notes you can move them around, add things, take things away, change the size or colour, add hyperlinks or paste in reference pictures, and generally make a mess of the virtual page without *literally* making a mess of the page, as you would if you did this on paper.

For this reason, while showing you any of the actual notebooks I used to write the trilogy (nine of them!) wouldn't be very interesting because most of the pages are barely legible and all of them are a mess, showing you screencaps of my OneNote pages is not only possible but feasible. And since Lucy and Jenni assured me it would be fascinating... here we are.

 

This is a continuous screencap of my very first page of notes for THE NAME OF THE BLADE, written over the course of about four or five days of furious inspiration in 2010 - and then added to over the following year. As you will be able to see immediately if you've read any of the books, my original ideas were all over the place and many of them evolved or changed completely between starting to scribble down ideas and the book actually being written and then ending up on shelves.

For instance, if you look at that first double column of notes, you can see that in the beginning I was working on the assumption that this would be one book. So all the events that ended up being spread out over the course of TNI and DH are jammed together. And initially Rachel and Jack weren't sisters. Rachel was going to be a babysitter/au pair who got killed early on to underline the terrible threat of the Nekomata. But when Rachel appeared in the story - with her mild OCD, bossiness and common sense - she was far too good to be squandered that way. So she ended up getting her own viewpoint and storyline! Good going, Rach. There was also a bit of confusion about everyone's names that I'm a little puzzled by now...

However, some things - like the haiku which gave the series its individual book titles and guiding theme (that the powerful, passionate love mortals are able to feel within their finite lifetimes is terrifying and awe-inspiring even to such ancient forces as the ones surrounding them in this story) stayed exactly the same. I actually wrote the haiku within minutes of the idea of a warrior trapped in a sword appearing in my head - and as my ideas kept getting bigger and bigger, realising that there were three book titles in there was part of how I knew it was going to be a trilogy.

The blurred section, by the way, is a bunch of mythology stuff that's going to be revealed in the final book. And since no one but my editor and agent have read that yet, it didn't seem fair to splash it around and ruin things for everyone else. If any other notes up there seem like massive spoilers, they're probably things that I actually changed later on, so I've left them because they won't do any damage to your reading pleasure.

You can see down the right hand side that I have other pages for each individual book - which is where things get really detailed and spoilery. There's also one called THE NAME OF THE BLADE which was my series bible, so to speak, keeping track of who knew what when and all the little niggly details that I needed to remember. And finally there's one called The Name of Love, which is a short story in the universe that I've been working on intermittently.

Every book that I've worked on over the last few years has a notebook like this in OneNote. Since most of my books are standalone most of them have less tabs - but not all. For instance, #BaBBook has just as many tabs because I've been doing in depth research into Japanese flora and fauna and food and house construction and a host of other things, and I've got a mini-encyclopaedia filled with reference notes, pictures, and links.

I hope this was interesting to someone, anyway! Thanks for pushing me to post it, Jenni and Lucy! Read you later, my lovelies.

FRAIL MORTAL HEART COVER REVEAL

Hello, hello, hello, my lovelies! This post was originally supposed to be for yesterday, but I've been miserably ill since Saturday and today's the first day that I could be bothered to do more than tap out 140 characters on Twitter. However, I think the under-lying fabulosity of the post kinda makes up for the delay, so I'm just going to go ahead and call it even (especially since even now I know that 99% of you are busily scrolling past my words to get to the shiny shiny cover reveal below, you impatient heathens, you).

So, anyway: The Name of the Blade Book Three - FRAIL MORTAL HEART. It haz a cover and it is beautimous, and since it was shared with the lovely guests - hey guys, it was amazing to meet you! - at the blogger tea at Walker Books on Saturday (wherein I made my second flying visit to our country's fine capital in as many weeks and picked up this weird bug which may have been down to the salmon sandwich I ate on the train, and that's a lesson for you, my children - if they don't have ham then just say no to train sandwiches) and there are slightly blurry, not-really-forbidden glimpses of it circulating all over Twitter, I've now got permission to rip away the veil of secrecy officially.

And yes, that was the longest sentence that's ever been written on this blog. Yes, I am doing it on purpose to mess with you, oh patient and rare 1% who are actually wading through all this before getting to the image. I love you, my babies! Never change!

Fine, fine, I'll shut up. Here it is!


It's coming right up, right next!


Well, just a bit further down.


And a little more.


Leeetle more.


Just a bit


Tiny bit.


Now!

Um. Yeah. Do I even need to describe the amount of flailing, squeeing and unbearable smugness that is emanating from Marriott Towers right now? No? I thought not. As I said at the blogger tea - my cover has a dragon on it. LIVE ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.

Also, this:

Click to embiggen. Do it. DOOOO IIIIITTT.

That is my trilogy guys. It's *this close* to finished. And actually being serious for half a second here - I am so, so proud of Walker Books for once again kicking #racefail and whitewashing in the soft dangly bits and giving my books cover art that not only accurately reflects the ethnicity of the characters within, but celebrates it with an airpunch and a HELL YEAH WE NEED DIVERSE BOOKS BABY. At my publisher they not only acknowledge that they need diverse books, they really and truly want them, and treat them with the respect they deserve. How awesome is that?

Thank you to Annalie (Wonder Editor) and Maria (Delightful Designer) and also Larry Rostant, the photographer (who doesn't have a nickname because I haven't met him so it seems like it would be taking a liberty) for making my dream covers a reality. Wow, guys. Just. Wow.

OK, before I go, a final reminder that I, along with amazing fellow YA authors Emma Pass and Kerry Drewery, will be at the Lincoln High Street Waterstone's this Wednesday doing a panel event - Heroines of Teen Lit - with readings, a Q&A, signing, and super special swag (although I'm not bringing sweeties this time because... well, I've been too ill to go and buy any. Sorry *Sad face*). No need to book tickets or ring ahead - just turn up at 6:30 and we will be delighted to see you!