My first children's novel

I've been rather quiet on this blog for a while.  It's for a couple of reasons: first, I've been sending the first and second novels to agents and waiting for replies.  I've had several positive ones, but none positive enough: nobody has yet offered to take me on.  I've also been writing.  I've found it difficult and dispiriting writing whilst being rejected by agents.

However, last night, I finished my first children's novel.  I've got two young adult novels finished, and a third on the go, but I started this one on a family holiday with my two girls and their cousins.  Catherine's sister, Jenny, was reading them Terra, by Mitch Benn, and I was frankly a little jealous that she was getting to read to them, and I wasn't.  So I started writing something for them to read.  They're 6, 7, 8 and 10, and an idea came to me.  I wrote several chapters that week, reading them to the girls as I wrote them, and finished it off last night.  I need to send the completed version off to Jenny to read to her girls, after I've done some editing.

It was great fun to write, and I had a number of good suggestions from the girls.  I'm going to edit it (see above), tightening it up and checking that the vocabulary isn't too difficult.  It's aimed at 6-11 year olds - girls and boys - either as readers themselves, or to be read to them.  It's fairly short - around 13,500 words, or 11 chapters before editing - and hopefully nice and fast-moving.

It's called Keith, my magical, talking sword, and it's about how much trouble a magical, talking sword can be to you.  Particularly if you're only at primary school.  It's supposed to be funny (the girls laughed a lot), and it was a lot of fun to write.  It has a main character who's a girl and two friends - a boy and a girl - and I've already got at least a couple of other lined up in the same series.  I'm looking forward to approaching agents with it.

Adult readers - a reprise

So, partly as a result of my previous post about getting feedback from adult readers, I accepted the offer of a few friends who said they'd be happy to read my a novels.  I've got 2 readers - both colleagues - reading Hacking the Dragon and 1 reading Big Brother's Little Sister, with his 13 year old daughter reading it, too.  I'm hoping that a good FB and Twitter friend will be happy to read the latter, too - she is, after all, the person who after whom the main baddy is named.

And 1 of them has already finished, and read the book really quickly.  I'm very, very grateful, and looking forward to his feedback.  Very much.  Except that I'm also quite nervous about it.  He's already mentioned that he found it a real page-turner, which is a great relief.  In fact, it's probably the very best thing he could have said, because the thing I'm most interested in, as far as my readers go, is that they want to read to the end and find out what happens.

But what else?  Is the characterisation awful?  Is the plotting obvious, or just unconvincing?  Is the pacing too quick, too slow?  I don't know.  Maybe there are some plot points that don't hold together.

We'll see - I have only myself to blame for asking for more feedback, but if I'm ever going to be a published author, or expand my readership beyond a few friends and family, then I need to be ready to accept that other people are going to read it.  And that they won't like everything they read.  Sometimes because what I've written needs work.  Sometimes because the style doesn't suit them.  Of course, in the latter case, it's their fault, because my writing is, in fact, perfect, and doesn't need any work at all.

Or something.

Anyway - I'm looking forward to hearing the feedback.  Whatever it is (almost).

Big Brother's Little Sister - revision finished

It's done!  I took advantage of a quiet couple of days with the rest of the family away to complete the first revision of my second YA novel, Big Brother's Little Sister.  It's written for a slightly older audience than Hacking the Dragon, and at a little over 117,000 words, it's a lot longer too (Hacking the Dragon is currently around 65,000).  The main difference, though, is that it's a lot darker.

The themes they have in common is that they both have strong female protagonists, and in both cases, there's only so much help they can get from the adults in their lives to resolve the major problems that arise in their lives.  Pretty much everything else is different, though, including the worlds which Lena (Big Brother's Little Sister) and Kate (Hacking the Dragon) live.  Lena's world is technologically very similar to ours, though the political milieu is more right-wing, whereas in Kate's world, there are computer systems running people's houses and most adults have the Chip, a direct brain interface which, well, can cause problems.  That said, computer systems feature heavily in both - I'm keen to encourage characters (and my readers!) to engage with technology, whether they're boys or girls.

Now I need to decide what to do with it.  Hacking the Dragon is currently seeking an agent, but I've not got that far with Big Brother's Little Sister yet.  I think I need to find a few friendly readers to get their views, and to decide whether J, my eldest, is going to be happy with the darker outlook presented by this novel.  I think she'll be fine, but I suspect we'll spend quite a lot of time talking about the more adult themes that the book presents.

More later, but for now, it's time for a cup of tea (and maybe that chocolate éclair that's sitting in the fridge downstairs).

Favourite authors: Melissa Scott

The Womens Room UK is a great organisation which seeks to help the media in the UK find female experts on all sorts of topics, and was founded as a reaction to the under-representation of women's voices in the media.  It's a great group of people, and has a very active following on Twitter at @TheWomensRoomUK.  Today, they asked people to name their favourite female authors, and I chose Melissa Scott.

I can't remember when I first came across Scott, but I think the first of her books I read was Trouble and her Friends.  I hesitate to pigeon-hole her work, but it's broadly science fiction, and often has an element of cyberpunk.  It's also always refreshing, but what really stands out for me is the positive LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans) characters that she introduces.  A number of the books explore issues of gender and sexuality, but mostly, the characters are just, well, there, and the question of their sexuality, in particular, is incidental: it's just part of who they are.  There are times when this - or their gender - may be relevant to the main plot, but often it's not.  To give an example, I've just re-read The Shapes of Their Hearts, where one of the characters, Traese, is a woman living on her own with sporadic, but non-physical contact with another woman.  Is there a longing there for a deeper relationship?  She (Traese) also speculates briefly on whether two or more of the other (male) characters may be more than partners in the professional sense, but this feels like an honest and unforced reflection which fits effortlessly into the story.

I also like the fact that Scott's main characters are often female, and as the protagonists in both of my novels (Hacking the Dragon and Big Brother's Little Sister) are girls, I wanted to nominate her because her writing was part of what spurred me on to write books for my daughters.  She's exactly the sort of writer that I hope they'll grow up to read when they're a little older.

Whilst writing this, I've discovered that Scott has her own Twitter account at @blueterraplane, so go and have a look/follow.

Revising and editing - some pitfalls

When I started writing, I didn't realise how much time I'd spend having to rewrite what I'd first written.  There seem to be a number of reasons to revise what you've written, and here are the ones that come to mind:

1. you've come up with a brilliant idea which you're going to have to change a number of earlier passages to sew in.  This is usually, in my experience, during the middle of the first draft, and is a great feeling.  The problem occurs later, when you realise that what you've written in ignores the thread that you'd been on when you wrote it the first time round, and you need to spend even more time revising later on.
2. you realise that you need to tighten things up generally, so you need to pull out some passages.  The problem again occurs later, because the passages you wrote were more integral to the plot than you realised, so you have to re-re-edit.
3. you realise that you need to cut things down because your word count is too high.  You choose some unimportant paragraphs, which clearly have no major relevance to the plot.  See above (2) for exactly the same drawbacks.
4. you decide to improve characterisation, because a particular character was, at most, 1-dimensional.  You add more information about them which either contradicts what you wrote before, or changes what they would have done in later passages, requiring a much more major revision.
5. you discover that what you wrote reads as if it were rubbish, and it contradicts or destroys a major plot point, but when you look at it in detail, you just realise that you wrote it in such a way that it was very unclear, and a little tweaking will allow your reader to follow what you meant to say much more clearly.
6. you discover that what you wrote reads as if it were rubbish, and you're entirely correct.  The problem here is that you really did write rubbish, and it may have been compounded by any of the previous points.  This is a big one, and may require you to start again.  But it's only words, right, and at least you realised before you sent it to an agent.  You did realise, right?  

So, revision is vastly important, but there's a danger that when you come back to a piece of writing having let it rest for a month or more - as everybody says you should - that you're out of the zone of tight plotting that you were in when you wrote it, or at least believed you were in, and that it's therefore very easy indeed to mess things up royally as you revise.

But that doesn't mean it doesn't have to be done.

I didn't mention a final mistake that you might have to edit out.  You might have made some insane decision when you started writing the piece that looked, at the time, as if were bound to win you a major literary prize, or maybe a Nobel, but which, in retrospect, just shows that you should ensure that you're entirely sober when you start plotting.  I should point out that nobody would ever do something like this - it's the equivalent of writing your narrative from the point of view of a baby elephant - but if you were to do anything quite so crazy, it might be time to think about some major changes.