Book Two jitters

Happy Holidays everyone!

It’s been a fun, family-and-food-filled week, with not much time for blogging or writing – in fact, I’ve given myself the holidays off as they’re jampacked enough already! But in between the mince pies (or pince mies as they’re known in Lofty’s house) and the far too copious glasses of champers, I’ve been finding the time to fret. A lot.

What on earth could someone with a shiny new book deal think to fret about over the Christmas hols?

Yes, Lofty took me to a hotel with this view to celebrate my book deal & I’m still fretting!

Book two, of course! That big, massive mountain hiding behind the shadow of 2012, just waiting to appear.

I actually conceived The Oathbreaker’s Shadow as two books, so I know exactly how the whole thing is going to end. I know and love my characters, and I’m looking forward to getting in touch with them all over again. But the thought of putting all the actual words down on paper and in a relatively confined stretch of time (compared with the first one that is – I don’t think I’ll get six years to tinker with it this time, I’m not George RR!) is definitely scary!

Of course, this time around I’ll have a deadline (I do like a good deadline!), professional help (from my super agent and editor) and a bucketload of motivation (having a reading public will do that to you). But for some reason, driving down a dark road on a chilly English night, I was overwhelmed by the thought of that mountain I’m going to start climbing in less than a week.

And please no one mention the eventual book one edits that are going to come around. More mountains ahoy.

Someone pass the Christmas chocolates!

A Lucky 13 blog

Today I’m blogging over at the Lucky 13 blog. This week’s theme was ‘Interview with your Villain’ – so much fun! And although I wouldn’t say that Prince Khareh was necessarily a ‘villain’, he is certainly an ambitious character… whatever that may entail. Well, why don’t you judge for yourself?

Too Close for Comfort: An Interview with Prince Khareh of The Oathbreaker’s Shadow

Finding my Agent: It’s All About Timing! (or Path to Publication, Part 2)

At the end of part one, life was getting in the way of my publication dream, and it was a good thing!

2010 was a big year for me: I changed jobs from working in non-fiction to SF/F (basically my dream publishing role), and I published my first non-fiction book for teens. But making all these big changes was throwing another fact into sharp relief: I still wanted to be an author, and that dream could still be realized alongside my full-time job (luckily I have a great role model in the inimitable Jane Johnson).

I’d revised and rewritten Oathbreaker until it was almost an entirely different book from the one that was first finished in 2007. Even the central idea (of the promise knots) had changed completely. That’s when I decided that it was OK to give querying it another go, before I would devote time over to a new idea that I had brewing. The work seemed to pay off, and the first two people I queried, I got full requests from – no partials this time.

I sent off the manuscripts with baited breath, and then I did what most writers in the modern age do now… I turned to Twitter for solace:

Getting an Agent: a Learning Experience… (or Path to Publication, Part 1)

Originally this was supposed to be one post about my agent journey, from first query to “the call”. But when I finished writing it out in full, it turned out to be more than enough to cover at least two blog posts! I think mine is a story that proves that perseverance is the key…

Yesterday I spent a couple of hours trawling through the archives of my old e-mail addresses.  In amongst the gushy teenage love letters, last minute uni assignments and tragically cheesy job applications, I found the very first time I attempted to query a literary agent with a piece of my writing.

The Luckiest blog on the Internet

Thank you so much everyone for your support yesterday — it was really overwhelming and emotional.

I just had to pop over to Verla Kay’s Blue Boards to share my news as well… I’ve been a long-time lurker on those boards, and they helped me with my query way back in 2009 (and that wasn’t even the first time I queried this book – but more on that later).

I also took time yesterday to join The Lucky 13s - a blog dedicated to debut YA authors launching in 2013.

You can see my introduction post here. My favourite superstition was to do with the A.A. Milne poem ‘Lines and Squares’ – have you read it? That poetry collection, When We Were Very Young, is one of my absolute favourites.

Putting on my editor hat for a second, I’m super excited that two of my fellow Lucky 13ers are actually two of my authors! At Voyager we don’t buy a lot of YA fiction (our notable published exception being the exceptional Wither by Lauren DeStefano) but if there’s a certain submission that comes in that we know will have crossover appeal to our adult audience, we’re keen to snap it up! That’s part of my brief as a commissioning editor to look at that part of the market, which works for me as it’s my favourite.  

Now for a weekend of celebrations! What with the HC Christmas party tonight and the SF/F Editors of London lunch & drinks tomorrow (which is always, as you can imagine, raucous), it’s going to be a busy next few days…

the BIG announcement

This year, I have already received the absolute BEST Christmas present ever. After getting the OK last night over cocktails with my agent and editor, I am thrilled to be finally able to share my news with everyone. And so, without further ado…

The Oathbreaker’s Shadow will be published by Random House Children’s Books UK in Spring 2013! 

This is basically my reaction:

(You know Random House, right? The fabulous people behind these books and many, many, many more:)

My absolutely brilliant editor is the lovely Lauren Buckland, who offered me a two-book deal and who has been really welcoming to me so far (see the aforementioned cocktails). And so many thanks have to go to my super-agent Juliet Mushens from PFD – she has kept me sane throughout this whole entire process! That’s a tough job, believe me.

But okay, okay, what’s the book about?  This was my query pitch to Juliet:

For fifteen years Raim has worn a single blue string tied with a small knot around his wrist. Raim barely thinks about it at all; not since becoming the most promising young archer ever to train for the elite Yun guard and not since his best friend (and the future Khan) Khareh asked him to become his sole Protector. But on the most important day of his life, when he binds his life to Khareh’s, suddenly that string on his wrist is all he can think about – it bursts into flames and sears a blood-red mark into his skin. The knot contained a promise of its own – and now that promise is broken.

Scarred now as an oath-breaker, Raim has two options: run, or be killed.

Raim flees deep into the vast desert to live in Lazar: the colony of exiled oath-breakers. It is there he hopes to learn how to clear his name and return home to keep his promise to Khareh. Except in Lazar, he discovers that his scar from the burnt thread marks the first step on the path to becoming a sage, with the ability to perform feats of magic straight out of legend. The trade-off: he will remain tarnished as an oath-breaker for the rest of his life. Can he forgo his honour for immense power? And even if he did want to clear his name, how can he keep a promise he never even knew he made in the first place?

I’m excited, thrilled, and bewildered beyond belief. All I can say now is — here’s to 2013!

The first book

The Oathbreaker’s Shadow is not the first novel I’ve written.

It’s the third. Two other books are buried deep within my computer files, never to see the light of day. But when I occasionally dig them up out of the archives, those books - and especially those characters - fill me with such a warm sense of nostalgia (as long as I ignore the terrible writing!). I still love them, even if they will never be read by anyone ever again!

The first book felt like a major accomplishment for me. I was 15, in high school, and in need of some kind of creative release. I lost myself in two things during those years: writing and the strange world of the internet. But writing came first. That first book topped out at 35,000 words. Yes, hardly novel length (just about novella length) but it had a strong start, a pacy middle and an absolutely godawful ending. But it had an ending, which was big for a girl who started many things and hardly saw any of those ideas through. The book was a time-travelling tale of two modern-day teenagers who, separately, end up in Tudor England (one as a wealthy young lady at court, the other as a poor urchin boy running around the streets of London). There was a love story (featuring the popular YA trope ‘insta-love’ – don’t judge, I was 15!), and a dancing scene which pretty much replicated on paper the dance from Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet.

Yes, this is exactly the life I wanted for myself when I was a teen - so I wrote it into my books!

Unfortunately, by the time it got to the end, I couldn’t figure out how to get them back into modern times in an exciting way, so they were transported to a strange interdimensional-portal-type-place where they met their real parents (my two MCs were estranged brother and sister, of course!) who were professional time travellers… it got weird, let’s put it that way!

But those two characters – whose names were Tagwen and Sterlyn (I trawled the baby name websites) – were my two first loves. Their dreams were my dreams, their stories were my stories. And those characters have featured in every story I’ve written since. Up until my first major rewrite of The Oathbreaker’s Shadow, my main character was called Sterlyn — until I realized that a name with very English origins probably wasn’t the best for a Mongolian/Asian-based world! But calling him ‘Sterlyn’ in the initial draft gave me this strange sense of familiarity and safety — I had written a whole book with him before, and I could do so again. It felt a bit like stepping into comfortable shoes — although the rest of the world I was exploring was new and different and challenging, I knew I could get through it because I had a main character I knew inside and out, backwards and forwards. I just had to find the right story — the right frame — to put him in, and I knew it would turn out all right.

Anyone else sometimes return to those ‘shelved’ books? And if so, is it with trepidation or nostalgia or a bit of both?

Writer friends

Yesterday I had a lovely long Skype chat with one of my best writer friends, Adam Parks. We met in my last year of university, when I was already about 20,000 words in to Oathbreaker’s Shadow, but was hitting a lull. We used to meet at Starbucks Yonge and Bloor between classes or after work, and sit for hours with our laptops typing up our respective novels. In between these epic typing sessions, we used to fight (a lot) about books, writing, fantasy tropes and creative ideals — the day he told me that he had never enjoyed a fantasy novel written by a woman I almost stormed out — but those debates and deep conversations fueled my desire and engaged my brain in a way that even university wasn’t doing. Adam used to use his charm to get free Americano refills from the girls behind the counter, so it worked out all around.

Starbucks Yonge/Bloor, where most of Oathbreaker was written -- image from brianyee.ca

I think every writer needs writer friends, in real life as well as online. Adam – philosopher, psychologist, and all around creative-soul that he is – pulled my writing out of mediocrity and made me think about the layers that get produced in your writing that you don’t even realize. How that scene I wrote about my MC quietly preparing himself for his big fight is a literary device that stretches back to Greek and Roman literature. How the desert takes on a meaning so much bigger than itself. How I really should remove some of that telling, and insert more of that showing.

Sometimes, I think there’s something vaguely queasy about labelling yourself as an ‘artist’ or to see your writing as ‘art’. There’s so much more to writing now – to the business of writing – that it’s easy to completely dismiss that other side of the coin. That’s why I’m thankful for having writer friends like Adam, who allow me to get lost in and share the creative side of what I’m doing, and not laugh at me about it. And even though now we live on different sides of the globe and only get to chat occasionally via Gchat or Skype, I know that he will always be there for me to pick his brain — and vice versa!

Do you have anyone who helps you through your creative process? And did you meet them online or in person?

NOT writing

It’s the run-up to Christmas: secret santas are being arranged, Christmas parties abound (aside: if anyone knows what to wear to a Hawaiian-themed christmas party, please let me know!) and now there is tinsel around my work computer screen (see pic).

But what is not happening? Writing. At least not for me.

Of course, I think I can cut myself a little slack over the holidays. There are those aforementioned parties to attend, more family and friends dinners than ever, and the fact that we’re almost always working months (if not years) in advance in publishing, means that work is insane. We’re currently gearing up for what looks set to be one of our busiest spring/summers ever.

But all this is hardly new. Pretty much every author I know (except for the very massive or the very lucky) has to juggle a day job, family life and a social life with their writing. And surely to make this whole writing-a-book-in-a-year thing work, you have to find some time to write every day. I haven’t quite got into that routine yet, but whenever anyone hears that I am writing/have written a novel, the same question always comes up: how do you find the time?

For me, it’s not about finding but making – I’m a write-by-hand-first kind of writer, so I have my notebook with me at all times. That means I’m often scribbling on the tube, or at a coffee shop (I am indeed that cliché), or while standing in line at the supermarket check-out. I’ve even done a Peter V. Brett a few times and typed up chapters on the Notes app on my iPhone. But I also spend a lot of time just sort of staring out into space, which probably doesn’t look all that productive but I consider it a necessary part of the creative process!

Does anyone else have any tips for juggling writing with the rest of life?

Blogs on writing and writer’s blogs

Wow, I never thought that starting a new blog would feel so scary and intimidating!

My editor-self is bleating unhelpfully: “What’s your USP? Have you figured out the SEO? How’s the google juice?”

My writer-self is typically flummoxed: “Argh – a blank white text box and a blinking cursor. What do I do?”

I even resorted to the googling “how to start a writer’s blog”. The results weren’t pretty.

But now I’ve started thinking, what is is that I, as a reader, enjoy about blogs-by-writers? For me, it’s the feeling of community, the shared experiences and the joy of watching someone else’s writerly journey unfold — and the hope that maybe one day all those important writerly moments will happen to me, too.

And so I’ve decided that the only real way to know how to have a good writing blog, is to learn from the blogs that I love already. This first proper entry is dedicated to all some of those writing blogs that I follow, love, and admire – some old, some new! But all fabulous. 

Jackson Pearce
I’ve been reading and following Jackson’s writing journey for years on Livejournal – before As You Wish got picked up by HarperTeen and she went on to multiple-awesome-book success. Now she’s the queen of the vlog; always one step ahead of the crowd!

Mandy Hubbard
I found Mandy through Jackson, at around the same time that she was shopping Prada and Prejudice and struggling with other projects (something she’s blogged about at length). Now, thanks to sheer determination – oh yeah, and quite a lot of talent - she’s not only a hugely successful and prolific author, she’s an agent too. Awesome. I professed my love for Mandy to her (I think now former) agent when I met her at the London Book Fair (random, I know!) – just goes to show how small this whole book world really is.

Elizabeth May
Elizabeth May’s blog is my new obsession, and a great example of a writing blog for soon-to-be-published authors. C’mon, adorable gifs? Interesting posts about a truly remarkable writing journey? A shiny new book deal? But back to those adorable gifs… You can’t go wrong.

James Smythe
Full disclosure: I am this particular writer’s editor (well, for The Explorer – his incredible SF work – at least). However, that doesn’t take away from the fact that I love his tumblr as a fellow writer too, and the fact that he posts inspiration pictures for his writing.

What are your favourite writer’s blogs? Are there any that I should check out to figure out how to do it well?