Money has not changed hands

... although I did send homemade chocolate chip cookies in the post, which may or may not have influenced the outcome.

The first review of Looking For Buttons, by the charming and erudite Norfolk Bookworm can be read here.

I think I should probably go and bake some more biscuits.

A teensy teaser

Great excitement after a rather too long period of silence.  Looking For Buttons is about to get its first review (even though it's yet to be published).  I shall, of course, post a link here as soon as it appears.

Picture imperfect

If you want to be a writer that anyone's heard of these days, you need a blog.  It helps if you post things on it occasionally.  But.

But.  But.  But.  But.  But.

But what do you do about the design?

Right, I thought.  Time to make the blog look a little more inviting, a little more like a shop window for the book (it's called Looking For Buttons, by the way - if you hadn't realised that, this blog is not doing its job).  So I fiddled about with templates and settings and tweaked and generally made a complete hash of the whole thing.  Obviously I'm going to have another go at some point, although not today as typing time is limited by the after-effects of falling down stairs last night (sober, uncoordinated feet, mildly embarrassing, very painful).  I'm just wondering whether looking at other people's blogs counts as inspiration or plagiarism?

It was so much easier when I used to make books by hand.  Perhaps that's it.  Excuse me, I'm off to copy out all 120 000 words of Looking For Buttons and illustrate it in felt-tip pen.

C'est nest pas un blog post

Had the decorators in.  Does it look any better round here?

Ms Frankenstein regrets

I've tried to move on.  I really have.  I've bought shoes.  I've bought myself jewellery.  I would have my hair cut if the salon were open on my day off, but since it isn't I shall progress through mildly unkempt to becoming prey for yeti hunters until I can get there at the end of the month.  I've even tried a little flirtation with others but all to no avail.

I am still in love with Fergus Palmer.

Now on paper, this is no bad thing.  He is kind.  He is charming.  He is witty.  He is also very tall, somewhat Scottish and has hair of the most spectacular shade of auburn.  He's about my age, he's got a good job, his own flat, his own car.  On paper, he's just what I should be looking for in a man.

That's the snag, those two words: 'on paper'.

For Fergus, my lovely, dearest Fergus is entirely fictional, supposedly confined to the pages of Looking For Buttons, in which he isn't even the heroine's love interest.  Yet here I am, sitting here with the laptop on my knees, sighing in a distinctly piney* fashion for a figment of my imagination.

Surely I'm not the only one who does this?  I've been falling for fictional men for as long as I can remember but when I started to write I never suspected it would happen with one I'd created.  I have the nasty suspicion that part of the trouble I'm having getting going with the next book is that I've yet to get over Fergus sufficiently to produce anyone to take his place.

But isn't this what writers do?  We put together people in a curious hybrid of doll's house and photofit and if we get it right by some elusive alchemy they step right into our heads and let us report on their lives.

I just wish he'd take me out for dinner while I'm doing it.






*piney as in yearning unrequitedly, not piney as in forest-fresh

A little ado about nothing

I wrote a little anxiously a while ago about the dangers of over-editing.  I knew I needed to make alterations to Looking For Buttons but I wasn't at all sure I'd know when to stop.  In the end, after far too much faffing about I read an excellent book by Jane Wenham-Jones that gave me the boot up the rear I needed.  I got stuck in.  I read.  I reread.  I tweaked.  I cut.  I rewrote.  Occasionally I laughed and then felt sheepish at laughing at something I'd forgotten I'd made up.  But I persevered.

Until tonight.  Right, I thought, time to do some writing.  And nothing sprang to mind.  Nothing at all.

Oh, I hear you sigh with no noticeable sympathy, another post about writer's block.  But no!  This was quite a different class of nothing.

I have nothing more I want to do to Looking For Buttons.  My subconscious seems quite happy to leave it alone.  So it's time to print out the manuscript, give it one last check for typos, and then send it to the next agent on my list.

I would like to celebrate, but unfortunately the Difficult Second Novel has woken up and is demanding attention.  Excuse me, I have plotlines to organise...

This is not about me

Looking For Buttons started out as an idea: what happens if your teenage crush goes on to become a worldwide star?  How do you get over them when their face is everywhere?  I started playing around and soon I had a set of people in my head, doing things that I wrote down.  After a while, I found a beginning and got to the middle, which was actually where I started, and eventually I reached the end.  Gosh, I thought, I've written a whole book.  And then I thought about trying to get it published.  The problem with publication, however, is that people might read it.  People I know.

I'm a thirty-something woman writing about a thirty-something woman and it's my first novel, so readers may assume the book is in some way autobiographical.  It's started already.  One of my guinea pigs read an early draft.  She rang me: "Charlie [the Hollywood star] is a mixture of X and Y, isn't he?", X and Y being two gentlemen of our acquaintance at university.  Another claimed delightedly to recognise herself in yummy mummy Poppy on the grounds that she is married to a man in Poppy's husband's profession - which she wasn't when I began writing the book.

The thing is, I didn't set out to write barely disguised portraits of my social circle (actually, these days it's more of a social arc: I don't get out much).  It's fiction.  Poppy is not a sketch of my friend, she's a figment of my imagination.  And Charlie is simply Charlie (though he'd dislike being thought of as simply anything).  But now, as I prepare to send out the manuscript to another agent, I'm starting to worry.

What if people I know read it and think it's about me?  What if my friend who isn't Poppy reads the whole thing and ends up mortally offended?  What if my family read it and think this is the sort of thing I get up to?  And, most alarmingly of all, what if X or Y reads it and thinks the book is about them?

Excuse me, I have some nervous editing to do...