Veiled Dreams

This book comes out officially on the 26 July. You can pre-order it, though … please do if you feel so inclined.

I’ve worked on this book for a while. Then it got put away in a drawer and left for a while longer. It was a very welcome project after I finished my Ph D. It felt easy to write after all of that serious engagement with what is a young adult novel and could I make it work?

John Hunt Publishing have been very easy to work with. They are very business-like and just get on with things. There is a solid community of writers associated with the publisher and their web site is full of ideas to help you promote your book. There are lots of author forums that are helpful as well.

Would you believe I came across them because I follow one of my students on Twitter? She told me she’d got a publishing deal for the novel she’d been writing on one of my modules. I looked up the publisher to see if they seemed all right and they looked so good I wondered whether I could send them something myself.

Veiled Dreams is a young adult romantic fantasy. At one point I was sharing an extract of it with a critique group. I read my work out loud. As I got to one particular part every single person in the group made a note. Oh dear, I thought. They don’t like it. Ah but they did.

I wonder whether you’ll be able to guess which scene that was?  I’ll give you a little clue. It’s in Jan’s first scene.

Enjoy!          

                

The Final Edit – does it really exist?

My novel for young adults, Spooking, comes out on 13 April with Crooked Cat. I’m currently checking the final edits. This is a combination of accepting – mainly – those suggested by the editor and adding a few of my own. We’ve used Track Changes, but I’m currently reading out loud a “clean” version of the text – and notice that a few new mistakes have crept in – probably because it’s hard to see the text properly with the changes showing.  

Now, this novel has been around a while. I completed it in 2009 and it has gone out to a few agents and editors. I’ve had some positive rejections, including one from an agent who read the full script and said “I liked it but I didn’t love it. If you don’t get this placed, please send us your next one.” Naturally, I’m delighted that Crooked Cat like it. I’ve considered every bit of feedback I’ve been given and in many cases followed suggestions or reworked bits that others thought were not working. And I’m still tinkering. I’ll have to stop early next week: Crooked Cat want it back then.

I have a similar novel, Veiled Dreams, that I also want to get out and am actually making some changes to that in view of the comments made by Crooked Cat on Spooking. An agent recently said she though the narrative voice was a little odd. All of a sudden I’m agreeing with her. This novel has also been tucked away for many months and it was pretty well perfect when I put it to bed, I’d thought. Even my beta-readers had agreed. Yet now I’m making changes.

The latest novel is generally the best and I have high hopes for Potatoes in Spring. I have just a handful of edits to do on this, including the read out loud one. I wonder how long it will be before another one is better?

And so we go on learning. Thank goodness for editors. They save us from ourselves when we get too bogged down with all of this. And if it wasn’t for that deadline they gave us, we’d go on forever. Indeed, I’ve been known to edit as I read out my work at events.    

Book Covers

I get excited about book covers. I’ve had four to be excited about recently. I’ve been sent one for my 9-11 novel Kiters due out next spring, one for my Young Adult book Scum Bag. Also, one for my other Young Adult novel Veiled Dreams and last but not least, the one for our anthology Making Changes. It’s always seeing the cover which gets me excited. I’m not so precious about getting the book in my hands. I might just open it and find another typo or start editing it again. But the fact that some editor has found it good enough to give it a cover – now that is something! This is what my darling is going to look like when it goes out into the world and my darling is indeed going out into the world.
Unfortunately, I can’t share three of the covers with you yet. They’re not released. I can, however, share Making Changes with you. It’s out on 13 November. Preorders are accepted for that now. So take a look.

Veiled Dreams

I started reading the final proofs for this yesterday. I’m actually rather pleased with it, although here is the usual problem of wanting to alter last minute bits, and of course it’s actually too late for that.

I finished Veiled Dreams almost exactly a year ago. it was the project I took on after I’d completed my PhD, whilst I was waiting for the viva, and then afterwards.

And it is good. I’m even thinking that it is slightly better that the one I’m currently working on. That is a little disturbing. I suppose I should remember that I haven’t finished editing Spooked.

Both of these are young adult texts and they do contain some quite explicit details about sex. I feel this is a little daring, but I do get sick of it being glossed over in much of the material I read. So, I feel justified in including it, though worry about readers’ reaction, and perhaps more importantly, the reaction of those gate-keeping adults.

I think one of the reasons I like Veiled Dreams better is that I am more in love with Jan, the boyfriend of the main character, than I am with Tom, the main character in Spooked. We do get Jan’s point of view, and we are touched by how much he cares. However, most of the time we get Christina’s and we’re actually then drawn into loving Jan more because she keeps getting it wrong. She’s feisty and passionate, so we do like her too.

Tom? A good egg, generally, touchingly in love with Amanda. But de we get close enough to her? It’s perhaps something which will be more firmly there after I’ve completed all of the editing.

So, is this an alarming winding down or is it proof of the importance of editing?

Schools TourContinued

Schools Tour Continued
I have now done six visits and it is getting amazing. Apparently, my publisher was contacted last week by the mother of one of the children who’d heard me speaking. This lady runs the Holloway Arts Festival and wants to book me for that.
The kids are great in all of the schools and the teachers are mostly nice, though there have been some oddities. I drove over 150 miles to one school. I arrived at 9.45 for a 10.00 start. I was greeted with “Oh, I wasn’t expecting her until 10.00.” Well, what did they want? Did they want me to risk being fifteen minutes late instead?
Sometimes the staff seem to have their own agenda. At another school I kept being interrupted so that the teacher could tell the children how well they were doing. It seemed to be more about whether the children could behave well rather than what I had to say. They were well behaved and the odd one or two who lost concentration were not disruptive. More disruption was caused by the teachers trying to discipline them. On one occasion, I was left to find my own way out of the building. Thank goodness my own teaching experience made me confident about what to do.
But these are the exceptions, and on the whole, the teachers are lovely, too. The interaction with the kids has been amazing, and do I now have a title for “The Veiled Princess”? Veiled Dreams? Courtesy of Brookfield House School, where I was yesterday.
All of the children have been well behaved, though I have seen one or two examples of boredom. Time to up the game, I guess. I think I need to teach all the primaries how to make a Lombardy knot.