A productive weekend!

The Boy Who Came To Play – Chapter Five written, edited and awaiting approval by my two main readers! So far, so good and apparently it's 'brilliant'.

I'm finding writing in the first person really enjoyable and love the way I just write whatever comes into my head without having to think too much about story lines, plot and characters. In this book there are only two main characters, Loveday and Sam, so the conversation between them just flows. It's kind of like writing a diary or a running commentary on their lives. So different to my first novel!

The more I write, the more inclined I am to change the title of the book. Sam IS the boy who came to play but he's also so much more than that... hmmm... decisions, decisions :)

A poem... but not by me :)

I know this blog is supposed to be about my work, but my daughter (who is 8) wrote this poem and it's so lovely, I thought I would share it.

I had a horse and Caramel was her name,
She had a really shiny coat and a long and silky mane,
She loved to gallop across the fields, she loved to run and play,
But she was the only horse in the field,
Until Toffee arrived one day.

My lonely days are gone, she said,
Now I've found another horse,
As they ran off into the sunset,
And lived happily ever after, of course!

She's a natural!

An extract from The Charm, Chapter One

George unloaded the mower from the trailer that he towed from the rear of his battered old Land Rover and wheeled it down the side passageway, through the gate and into the garden. The grass was lush and long and green, but within ten minutes it resembled a miniature football pitch, resplendent in alternating pale and dark green stripes. He fetched his trowel and started turning over the earth in the borders, fishing out weeds and stray stones as he worked.

‘What the devil is that?’ he muttered as he forked over a clod of earth, revealing a pink, waxy, coin-shaped object from the soil.

He picked it up, wiped it on his trousers and studied it closely.

‘God only knows what that is,’ he said to himself, tossing the charm into the garden refuse sack, along with a pile of rotten leaves, grass cuttings and wilted flowers from a spring now past.

For a fleeting moment, a lonesome cloud drifted in front of the sun and the garden fell into shade. A gentle breeze whispered through the newly-emerged leaves of the ancient rowan trees that stood guard, like soldiers, around the perimeter of the garden. And precisely one mile away – across the fields of flourishing wheat, peas and barley – a certain Joseph Edward Hardy breathed in a long, deep lungful of sweet, fresh air. It felt good to be alive.

From Joe to Lorna

Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me 
Anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no!
Don't sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me
Till I come marching home

Don't go walking down lovers lane with anyone else but me
Anyone else but me, anyone else but me, no, no, no!
Don't go walking down lovers lane with anyone else but me
Till I come marching home

5000 words...

This last week of the school holidays has been better than the first (I spent most of the first in bed ill) and I've had lots of opportunity to write. I've completed the first two chapters of The Boy Who Came To Play and have clocked up 5000 words already. Only another 45,000 to go...

I'm not following any schedule for this novel at all. I'll try to write as much as I can every day (quite tricky when you work full-time) and go with the flow. But a little part of me hopes to get it written before the summer holidays so that I can enjoy six weeks off work! Last year, even on holiday, I spent the whole summer on my laptop writing The Charm! But I loved every second of it :)

Chapter One complete!

I spent yesterday writing the first chapter of The Boy Who Came To Play and finished editing it today. I'm taking a very different approach with this novel as I did with The Charm. I planned The Charm meticulously and before I even wrote it, I knew what was going to happen in every single chapter, making it extremely straightforward to write. Of course, things changed and evolved as I wrote it and one very major twist in the story only sprang into my mind about ten chapters in, changing the dynamics of the book drastically.
But this time I am going in totally blind, feet first. I know the plot of the story, the beginning, the middle and the end but that is it. I've not even written a synopsis. I am also writing this book in the first person present tense, which is making it great fun to write, and to read back.
The main character is a thirteen-year-old girl and when I write, I almost become her. It helps having a fifteen-year-old daughter around the place. She's an endless source of amusement in our household!! She read the first chapter last night and loved it, saying some parts made her 'really laugh out loud'. Which is exactly what I wanted to happen.
My target reader is Young Adult – aged twelve to possibly fifteen – so this book is at opposite ends of the spectrum to The Charm, which falls into the Dark Romance genre and is most definitely for big people!

Welcome to my blog!

Hello! This is my very first blog on my brand new blog site!
I have wanted to write a book for as long as I can remember and have tried several times over the years but usually, due to lack of time, my projects have fallen by the wayside and got forgotten about.
But in June 2012, while I was driving back home from my lunch time stint at the village school, something happened to me which I couldn't explain... and so the seed was planted for my debut novel, The Charm.
After spending the summer going over and over the storyline in my head, I then spent several months writing a detailed synopsis, drafting the chapters and getting ready to actually write the book! In April 2013, I wrote the prelude and so it began.

Here is a passage from the prelude. I hope you enjoy it.

She looked out of the window and up at the sky. The moon above her, suspended in an inky infinity of stars, was getting larger by the day, moving from new moon to full moon. Tonight the moon was a waxing moon. Tonight was the perfect night for casting spells.

She moved into the centre of the room and walked slowly round in a full circle, sank to the floor and, with trembling hands, carefully lit the candle. She placed the rose petals on the china plate and unscrewed the lid from the bottle of lavender oil, tipping it forward slightly so that three precise drops spilled out and landed silently onto the petals.

‘Love’s truth burns bright, I welcome my soul-mate on this night’.

She tilted the burning candle so that hot, molten wax dripped onto the petals. Her delicate fingers moulded the warm wax, petals and oil together into a coin-shaped disc and when it was cold and hard, she pushed it underneath her pillow. And there it stayed for six more moons, until one cold, dark, frosty night in mid-November, when she retrieved it from the safety of her bed, tiptoed barefoot into the sparkling garden and buried it beneath a rose bush still in full bloom.