September 2009 Archives

The Society of Authors sits in a leafy Kensington suburb. Yesterday, I attended a CWIG discussion there with Anne Cassidy and Beverley Birch on the panel. 

What a difference a week makes. Having bemoaned my solitary industry, I seem to have been blessed with writer activities of all different sorts over the past five days to cheer my soul and send me on my way to more writing this weekend.

Today I have enjoyed being part of Nicola Morgan's blogging coffee morning, over on Help! I Need A Publisher. I met several new people remotely, and read other fascinating blogs. This has all been done to raise funds for Macmillan Cancer Support, but also to bind together an Internet community of writers and readers. I don't know how Nicola does half of what she does. Can she sleep, I wonder?

Earlier in the week, I received a copy of the Danish edition of the Sisters of the Sword book that I contributed to under the pseudonym of Maya Snow. What a great edition and lovely surprise. Here it is, photographed out in my back garden. (I need good light for the little camera on my mobile phone.) I rather love this highly dramatic cover! That poor girl is suffering.

My sister, Mandy, also came over to take a new author photo of me. Mandy is a teacher, but has also self-trained as a digital photographer. You can see her work at www.amandaherbert.com. I am so proud of my sister. She is almost completely self-taught, and a real lesson in that great truism that craft can be learned, but you're born with talent. She has a great eye. If the two of us take a photo of the same subject I end up with a snapshot and Mandy ends up with art. I am flattered that she agreed to take some photos of me and we had a lovely time, laughing in the back garden as we behaved in a fairly silly manner. Below is one of the end results. Now, all I need to do is persuade my boyfriend, Ian, to help me update the website with the new photos. Are you reading this, Ian? Remember that curry I bought you? Wasn't that kind of me? Do you want to return the favour?

I also met up with two old publishing friends to eat crisps and drink wine. Crisps are editors' canapes - Walkers have seen us through many an evening and I hope we'll devour more crisps together over many more years.

So, a busy week filled with friends and books. Just the thing to set me on my way to the next bout of revision and writing. Wish me luck!

I'm having one of those days. Actually, one of those couple of days. I'm feeling unsettled. Partly this is to do with a book I'm reading, recommended by my friend Jon. It's wonderful; I love it. It's called Daphne by Justine Picardie and it's right up my street. Partly plotted around the Brontes and their home in Haworth in West Yorkshire, Justine's carefully researched details have sent my thoughts flying back to when I was a university student and spent a summer working at The Bronte Parsonage. The steep cobbled main street, the Black Bull, the tourists, the moors - oh, those gorgeous moors. It was all such a long time ago and at a turning point for the 20-year-old me. It's unsettling to think back and remember a summer when I was young and still learning how to cope with all that life was throwing at me.

I'm trying to convince myself that getting rid of stuff - more precisely, words - can be a good thing, hence the colourful picture of a skip. Today's writing has been one step forwards, one step backwards, adding, deleting, sanding down the corners of the new plot thread and trying to make everything fit. I'm getting there, but it's not as satisfying as solid, new writing where you can watch the word count creep up. Still, I don't feel too worried. I took a break from writing last weekend to run in the Great Yorkshire Run (yes, apparently running 10k counts as a break) so I am feeling reinvigorated and ready to do another day's writing tomorrow.

I first met Michelle in a swaying boat on the Thames. We were both attending a party thrown by Working Partners for UK editors working in the children's publishing industry. I was there as a WP employee and Michelle attended as an editor at OUP. It was only towards the end of dinner that she quietly mentioned she'd written a children's book and it was about to be published. That book was The Thirteen Treasures and it has since won the Waterstones Children's Book Prize of 2009. The novel has a wonderful rambling house and a grandma with secrets, unconventional fairies and bullying gnomes who speak only in rhyme. Best of all, it's partly inspired by Essex, not far from where I live in Walthamstow! Michelle has kindly agreed to be interviewed as part of my latest blog entry and there were several questions I wanted to ask her.

 Hi Michelle! Thanks so much for joining us today.

Hello! Thanks for inviting me.

I loved reading about those spooky Essex woods in your novel. For a place so close to the urban grit of London, it definitely retains a rural mystery and atmosphere of its own and is riddled with history. Did you explore these woods much as a child and did you always know that they'd feature in The Thirteen Treasures? 

I only went into the woods once as a child, when I was about ten. It's one of the strongest memories I have of my childhood. A group of friends and I had been talking about the deneholes (big, cave-like holes in the ground within the woods) which we'd all heard about but never seen. So we decided we were going to! It was one of the few rebellious things I did as a child - my mum had always banned me from going near the woods. I remember feeling excited, but scared, too, that we were about to find out whether these fabled deneholes really existed, and they did. One of the boys in the group pretended to get drawn over to the railings round the deneholes by a 'magnetic field' which scared the life out of the rest of us until we realised he was joking.

 

The main thing that struck me was how disorienting it was in the woods, even though it's quite a small area. If it hadn't been for the sound of the traffic drawing us back to the road it would have been  easy to get lost. I was a bit shaken by it all and owned up when I got home, which got me grounded for a month. It was more than ten years before I went back for research after I'd begun The Thirteen Treasures. At the time I started the story I hadn't thought of the woods; it was only when I was a few chapters in that I decided to use it.

 

The scene where Tanya's hair grows and grows to fill a room made me feel quite ill -  and I mean that as a compliment. I could really imagine the slippery sensation of all that hair beneath my feet! Was this a conscious twist on the Rapunzel story and how much did traditional fairy tales influence the writing of The Thirteen Treasures?

When I wrote the hair scene I did think of Rapunzel. It was impossible not to, but I knew I wanted it to be something very different in the way that Tanya is aware of the implications if anyone sees her, whereas Rapunzel's hair is more a testament to the time she's been in the tower rather than being a sign of magical goings on. Thinking about it now, though, I suppose another common factor is isolation, although I wasn't thinking on that level consciously at the time. I am a big fan of traditional fairy tales, especially the more gruesome ones or those that don't have happy endings, so I think I did want this feeling to come across.

 

How has the writing of The Thirteen Treasures compared to the writing on the sequel, The Thirteen Curses? There's always lots of time to develop a manuscript when you're still unpublished, and sometimes a contract for the next book can - erm - focus things somewhat more. Has this been the case for you?

Yes, focus is the word! Along with panic, at times! It's been an altogether different experience, very challenging at times, as I've had only a year to write the second book as well as working full-time. When I wrote the first book I'd just finished uni and was only working two days a week, which I see was a complete holiday now I look back. Before The Thirteen Treasures I'd only really written short stories before, so I suppose I was sort of teaching myself and learning about the way I want to write as I went along. The good thing about the second book being a sequel was that the world and characters I'd developed in book one were already set up, and the characters' motivations already in place, all of which made it easier. Because of needing to get the cover artwork briefed I also had to provide a synopsis, which was really valuable in helping to plan the story, and which I hadn't done the first time round.

What have been the differences, experiencing the publishing process from a writer's perspective, as opposed to an editor's? Has anything surprised you?

It might sound odd but I find it hard to separate the two. I signed with my agent about two weeks before starting work in publishing, so as soon as I started in the editorial department I was mentally applying a lot of the things to myself in little 'what if' fantasies before I got the book deal. I was surprised by how early covers are designed - often before the manuscript has even been delivered - because the sales teams sell the books into the trade months in advance. I've also become a lot more aware of the importance of keeping up momentum, and that ideally, you don't want too big a gap between books being released, which was something that wouldn't have occurred to me if I wasn't working for a publisher.

Have you learnt anything about plotting - always so difficult - from your writing experiences so far? Do you plan meticulously or just throw yourself in?

 

I always plan, and usually in a fair amount of detail although I don't mind changing things once the whole draft is down. As I mentioned above, having a synopsis was key for keeping me focused. I used it to plan my chapter breaks and everything. There was a bit of a foggy area in the middle which I didn't really know how I was going to deal with it until it arrived. Consequently this was the hardest part to write and I did end up making more notes because of it. I realised about halfway through The Thirteen Treasures that planning is what works for me. Even though I didn't do a synopsis until I was trying to get an agent (I left it until last out of sheer dread) I had started to plan a few chapters ahead and make bullet points for what was within those chapters. Perhaps not surprisingly, a lot of the early, unplanned chapters got cut in edits.

 

You appear to get a lot of inspiration from things you come across - hidden stairs in a pub, a charm bracelet you picked up in a junk shop. Has your imagination always been sparked in this way, and do you think you have a strongly 'visual' imagination, thanks to your illustrator's eye?

 

My imagination is sparked by something visual if there's some kind of intrigue or history to it, but at the same time I can get the same level of intrigue from a newspaper article, so it's probably a mixture of both. Having said that, my family laugh at me for having lots of ornaments and knick-knacks, so maybe I do like to surround myself with things that are nice to look at!

 

Thanks so much. I hope this has been as interesting for any blog readers as it has been for us. Michelle's next book, The Thirteen Curses, is out in January 2010.