MERMAID MADNESS

Hello, hello, hello, Dear Readers! I hope you've had a great week since you read me last. Thank you so much to everyone who reached out to me after my appeal in that previous post; I appreciate every single person who got in contact. I know that it probably wasn't easy for many of you to email a stranger out of the blue, and even though I've told you this individually in private, I think you also deserve to have your generosity, courageousness, and beautiful creative spirit acknowledged collectively and publicly here too. You're all amazing.

I'm not replying to comments on that post anymore because frankly the discussion there ballooned out of control in a way that the Blogger comment function is simply not designed to handle. Please consider emailing me if you'd like to get involved as well. I have now completed a detailed synopsis for Codename: DtH incorporating the spirit of as much of the advice I was given as possible, and sent that off to Super Agent. I'm waiting for her to get back to me about it, and then we'll hopefully pitch it to my publisher.

In the meantime I've been writing deleted scenes for the Frail Human Heart blog tour that's going to start at the end of the month (more on that when the details are finalised) but this was interrupted for a little while by a spate of what I've mentally dubbed The Mermaid Madness online, when I noticed a certain post on US author Maggie Stiefvater's Tumblr, made my own version, and then fabulous fellow UKYA author Keris Stainton took it to Twitter.

To say it caught on would be a bit of an understatement. For a couple of days there everything was mermaids and nothing hurt. The delirium seems mostly to have passed off now, but I thought it would be nice to share the results anyway. So first of all here's Mermaid Me:

The only thing that actually resembles me here is the hair - bit that is 100% accurate

Then Alexandra from The Swan Kingdom:

Zira from Daughter of the Flames (this is after she's crowned queen and has let her hair grow out a bit):

And Suzume - or rather, Yue - from Shadows on the Moon:

But the biggest demand on Twitter was for Mermaid versions of the Name of the Blade crew. So here's Jack:

 Hikaru:

And Mio and Shinobu:

Annoying that only the male mermaid had a weapons option, yes - but let's pretend it's Mio's day off or something!

Plus Mio by herself:

Yes, Mermaid Mio has more than one outfit. I couldn't give her a sword - there were no swords - so she got glowy magic instead

And as I type this, I realise I never did a mermaid version of Rachel, which doesn't seem fair? So I'd better go and get on that, hadn't I? Purely, of course, or fairness' sake...

*Skips away, cackling*