Inspire Me with Helen Peters

Now this is definitely my last post for a while. So I really hope you enjoy it. I'm so pleased to welcome Helen Peters onto the blog, to tell us all about the things that inspired her to write, Evie's Ghost. 

Ever since I was a child, I’ve loved visiting historic houses and imagining what life must have been like for the people who used to live and work in them. The idea for Evie’s Ghost came to me when I visited Osterley Park, an extremely grand house now owned by the National Trust. Another visitor asked the guide if the original family who lived there had had any children. The guide said they had just one daughter, who was expected to marry very well, but who eloped at seventeen with an ‘unsuitable’ man and broke her father’s heart. 

I thought what a strange life that girl must have led, as an only child in this enormous palace. I wondered whether she was lonely. And then I thought, what if a modern girl, also an only child, came to stay in that house now? And what if the twenty-first century character somehow found a way back to the house as it was in the eighteenth century, so that the two girls could meet?

One of my favourite books is Tom’s Midnight Garden. I love the premise of the boy being torn away from his own happy home and being sent to stay with his aunt and uncle in an old house that’s been converted into flats, the once-beautiful garden now concreted over. The way the house transforms at midnight, Tom’s discovery of the garden that only exists at night, and his friendship with an equally lonely girl in the past are completely magical. The book cast a spell on me and was a major source of inspiration for Evie’s Ghost.

In early drafts of Evie’s Ghost, Evie was invisible to everyone in the past except her two friends, as Tom in Tom’s Midnight Garden is invisible to everyone but Hattie. But my editor suggested that it would give the story more drama and tension if Evie were not only visible but made to work as a servant. This idea appealed to me, as I have always been fascinated by stories of servants’ lives. When I was thirteen, I read and loved One Pair of Hands, Monica Dickens’s account of how, bored witless in the debutante world of the 1930s, she shocked her family by going out to work as a cook-housekeeper. Her account of her transition from Upstairs to Downstairs is hilarious, but also a real eye-opener about the hard work of servant life before central heating and vacuum cleaners were invented. 

I had a personal reason, too, for being interested in the upstairs/downstairs dynamic. My father’s parents both came from wealthy families who employed servants, whereas my mother’s parents both came from poor families and went out to work as servants. My granddad became a gardener’s boy when he was thirteen and my grandmother went away to work as a housemaid at fourteen. I remember her telling me how horrible her employer was and how she was desperately homesick for her happy, loving family, and especially for her mother, whom she adored. In Evie’s Ghost, Evie has to work as a housemaid and the friend she makes in the past, Robbie, is a gardener’s boy. I thought about my grandparents a lot as I researched and wrote the book.

Helen's granny, when she was a Girl Guide leader after she left service and came back to work in the village. 

Helen's grandfather and his triplet brothers, aged around 15 around 1920.

Evie’s journey into the past begins when she spots words scratched into the window of the spare bedroom where she has to sleep in her godmother’s house. Her godmother tells Evie the story of Sophia Fane, who lived there two hundred years earlier and was allegedly locked up in that room for the rest of her life as punishment for a failed elopement. Evie journeys back into the past to try to help Sophia avoid her terrible fate. This part of the story was directly inspired by a similar tale I read about Hetty Walwyn, who lived at Hellens Manor in Herefordshire in the eighteenth century. Hetty Walwyn eloped with a man her family considered unsuitable, and was locked up for the rest of her life. During her long imprisonment, she used her diamond ring to scratch words onto the windowpane, which can still be read today: “It is a part of virtue to abstain from what we love if it will prove our bane.” I found this story incredibly sad, and the fact that Hetty’s writing still exists hundreds of years after her death, as the only tangible evidence of her life, felt very powerful to me.

All these stories and people inspired me and kept me going during the several years and many drafts that it took to weave the threads together into the story of Evie’s Ghost.

Summary

Evie couldn’t be angrier with her mother. She’s only gone and got married again and has flown off on honeymoon, sending Evie to stay with a godmother she’s never even met in an old, creaky house in the middle of nowhere. It is all monumentally unfair.

But on the first night, Evie sees a strange, ghostly figure at the window. Spooked, she flees from the room, feeling oddly disembodied as she does so.

Out in the corridor, it’s 1814 and Evie finds herself dressed as a housemaid. She’s certain she’s gone back in time for a reason. A terrible injustice needs to be fixed. But there’s a housekeeper barking orders, a bad-tempered master to avoid, and the chamber pots won’t empty themselves. It’s going to take all Evie’s cunning to fix things in the past so that nothing will break apart in the future…

To find out more about Helen Peters: 

Twitter

Inspire Me with Lou Kuenzler

As part of the Finding Black Beauty blog tour, I'm pleased to welcome the author, Lou Kuenzler onto the blog to talk about what inspired her to write this book. 

When my editor at Scholastic asked me if I would like to “revisit” or “reimagine” a classic story for contemporary readers, I knew at once that it would be Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty - a book I had read (and wept over) many times as a child growing up on a farm in Devon. The book was important to me - not just because it was about horses, which I loved - but because it felt real and gritty and sad. I loved how the book could make me cry - big heaving sobs sometimes. Crying wasn’t always something that came easily to me. I was sent away to boarding school at the age of seven (one of only two girls amongst hundreds of boys for my first few years away). Learning not to cry, not to be seen to be ‘a baby’, very quickly became a survival mechanism. After the first week of the first term, I don’t think I ever allowed myself to cry because I missed home. I did have my copy of Black Beauty though (perhaps not when I was seven, but certainly a few years later). I was happy to cry under the covers with my torch for the beautiful horse who is taken away from his mother, the spreading chestnut tree and his wonderful country home (no big heaving sobs in case anyone else heard me of course). I don’t think back then I had a clue what I was doing - that I was transferring my own sense of loss and estrangement onto the story. And anyway, it is a cracking adventure too!

Perhaps it was those childhood memories, my own association with the horse, that meant when I came to consider the best way to approach my modern version, I decided almost at once that it would not be told from the point of view of Black Beauty himself (as the original is) but through the eyes of a young girl. In my story it is Josephine, disguised as a stable lad, who talks directly to the reader. Josie has lived a happy and privileged childhood until she is forced to make her own way in the world when her father dies and she is turned out of her home. Desperate to work with horses, she has no choice (in Victorian England) but to pretend to be a boy. The minute she cuts her hair short and binds her chest, she is plunged into a world of boys and men. This again, of course, is familiar territory for me … although it is only now that I have been asked to write this blog that I am joining up the dots with quite such startling self-awareness. Thank you, Serendipity. You have really made me consider the true reason that Anna Sewell’s wonderful story may have always inspired me so much.

Finding Black Beauty by Lou Kuenzler is published in October 2016 by Scholastic. 

Summary

Told from the point of view of a young girl who masquerades as a boy in order to become a groom, this is the other side of the classic horse story BLACK BEAUTY. Aspiring groom Jo comes to love Beauty and when they are separated she travels to London to find him - on the way solving the mystery of her long-lost mother. A sweeping tale of a young girl and her love for a horse, and the circumstances that divide them.

To find out more about Lou Kuenzler: 

Website / Twitter

Inspire Me! The inspiration for “Magpie Soup” by Dave Cousins.

To celebrate the publication of the collaboration, Stories From The Edge, I'm so pleased to welcome Dave Cousins back onto the blog, to tell us about the inspiration behind his story in the book, Magpie Soup. 

Hi, Viv—thanks for inviting me back to Serendipity Reviews. 

Long time visitors to the blog might remember “15 Days without a Head”—my debut novel for teenagers published back in 2012—it’s where Mina, from “Magpie Soup”, made her first appearance.

She wasn’t supposed to have a huge role in that story, but the moment I started writing about Mina, I knew she was going to be important to Laurence and Jay’s story. She was one of those characters who came to life on the page. I liked her irreverent take on life, the way she gently teased Laurence and was more than happy to join Jay in his crazy six-year-old world. Mina offered the brothers friendship, help, and someone to trust when they needed it most.

Which was great—but it also gave me a problem. “15 Days without a Head” wasn’t supposed to be about Mina, it was Laurence and Jay’s story. The term ‘killing your darlings’ will be familiar to anyone who has reached editing stage with their writing, but this time it really hurt. I had to sit Mina down and, as diplomatically as possible, remind her that she was only supporting cast. Of course, she took it better than I did—but that was the moment something sparked into life somewhere in the dark depths of my subconscious—the idea that Mina deserved her own story.

I travel a lot visiting schools, libraries and book festivals, and most sessions end with a Q&A. I’m always touched when someone asks if there will be a sequel to one of the books—when readers want to know what happened next for Laurence, Jay and Mina. A few people even told me that Mina was their favourite character, and each time they did, that spark glowed a little brighter.

In “15 Days” Mina and her dad have recently moved down from Yorkshire. We know that Mina plays in a brass band and that her mum has died. I decided I wanted to go back and explore Mina’s life before she meets Laurence and Jay. 

For me, stories are centred on characters—I’m interested in people—how they cope with what life throws at them. Losing a parent at a young age is going to be a life-changing experience, so I decided to set the story on the morning of Mina’s mum’s funeral. Then I sat down and started writing, and waited to see what would happen.

That’s how I like to work—discovering the story as I write. I follow the characters, listen to what they have to say, and watch what they do. It’s not the most efficient method, and can take a long time with lots of false starts and dead-ends. Many times I’ve written tens of thousands of words before I realise there simply isn’t a story to tell, which is frustrating. But this method has also provided some of the scenes and ideas I am most proud of—they grew organically from the writing and would never have occurred to me had I sat down and tried to plot them out. Not that I’m saying plotting doesn’t work—far from it. Once I discover the story I’m trying to tell, I have to find structure and balance among the mess on the page—but that comes later.

Following Mina on the morning of her mum’s funeral led me to a song. Mina needs to feel her mum’s presence in the room full of sombre people in dark clothes, and plays one of her mum’s favourites. It’s a song Mina grew up with—knew all the words to, without ever consciously learning them. There’s a line in the song about eating soup with magpies in! It struck me as an idea a child would pick up on—the younger Mina would have wanted to know if people really made soup from magpies—like the blackbirds baked in a pie from ‘Sing a song of sixpence’. Mina remembers her mum’s explanation—

“You told me that magpies fill their nests with shiny things they like the look of, and that magpie soup was the same: a combination of all the things you liked, so it was different for each person who made it. You said it didn’t matter if the ingredients didn’t really go together—because how could it taste bad if it was made up of all my favourite things? I have to say, you set yourself up for disaster with that one, Mum.”

That was the spark. The rest of the story grew from there. By the end, Mina is able to come to terms with her mum not being around anymore because she realises that her mum will live on in her memories and all the things she taught Mina—like how to make Magpie Soup.

Mina’s mum’s favourite song is ‘Fortunately Gone’ by The Breeders—you can listen to it here.

https://youtu.be/OlFJufLRQMU?list=PL5143E0B5C2566757

“Magpie Soup” is from the new Young Adult anthology “Stories from The Edge”, a collection of gripping, thought-provoking tales by eight award-winning UK YA authors. 

From the perils of online chat rooms, doping in sport, racism and terrorism, to gender and self-esteem issues, love, life and death, “Stories from The Edge” isn’t afraid to ask some big questions. Sometimes frightening, often funny, always brutally honest, these stories will take you to where the shadows are darkest and the ground drops away. The question is, are you prepared to look over the edge?

Out now in paperback (£5.99) and eBook (£1.99) Please visit http://edgeauthors.blogspot.co.uk for details.

For more information on Dave Cousins, visit http://www.davecousins.net

More Stories from The Edge Blog Tour posts here:

http://www.yayeahyeah.com/2016/07/a-parents-terror-by-bryony-pearce.html

Inspire Me! with Olivia Levez

I'm pleased to welcome author, Olivia Levez, onto the blog. Olivia tells us what inspired her to write The Island, her debut novel, published by One World Publications.

A confession: I got the idea for a desert island castaway book rather pragmatically, after systematically trawling through my school library, looking for the Next Big Thing in teen fiction.

There was a reason for this. My beautiful, clean, polished manuscript, a dystopian-ish fantasy set in the near future, the one which had got me my agent, had come achingly close to being published, but was now languishing in my bed drawer.

I needed to start again,to  write something in a different genre. I rummaged along the teen section. Something made me think of desert islands. Swiss Family Robinson. Robinson Crusoe. Lord of the Flies. Hmmmm.

Any other island books in YA? I asked.

My school librarian lent me We Were Liars, which still is in my opinion one of the best YA books out there (along with Only Ever Yours. Amazing.) Island, yes. Castaway, no.

The superb We Were Liars, with its island setting

At the time I was reading The Panopticon by Jenni Fagan, a wonderful contemporary book, adult rather than YA, outrageous in a Trainspotting sort of way, but with a teenage protagonist. She shocks, and shocking things happen to her, but she never gives up, not really. And the ending is ambiguous, but you feel she’ll, somehow, be OK. She’ll survive. No islands in sight (although there is one tiny one, on a Scottish loch), but there was something about her character which struck me.

An edgy, brutally honest book. A spiky, difficult character.

So Fran Stanton was born: broken, bitter. A Brixton girl thrown onto a tiny island in the middle of the Indian Ocean, battling her inner demons, as well as struggling to survive.

A desert island.

I don’t know why I thought of a desert island.

Perhaps it was because I was yearning for my caravan to reopen after its winter closure. I was thinking of being by the sea again, cosily holed up and writing, writing, writing.

All those fires I’ve made with my boys on our nearest beach, the woodland walk with its waterfall, that’s like a jungle with its birdsong and the tangled trees and giant birds’ nest ferns. The rocks and the caves. I missed it all. I wanted to be back.

One of many beach fires we’ve lit on our Welsh beach

And then there was that time I got caught in a rip current, in the swollen sea. I looked back after swimming blithely towards the horizon, and there was the cave where I’d left my clothes, microscopic and at the far end of the beach. I knew there must have been a reason for having that experience. That could go in.

So gradually, all these crumbs came together: the books I’d been reading, the walks along my special Welsh beach, (so long, white and untouched, it has been used as a Vietnamese beach in a Bond movie).

And it wasn’t such a stretch of the imagination to believe that those meltingly beautiful Welsh sunsets could be, say, over the Indian Ocean, rather than the Irish Sea.

Then there was Sark, the tiny island in the English Channel where I spent my childhood holidays. We’d gone back, the year before, with our own kids, and we’d had a great time, bat-watching and star-gazing and barbecuing lobster over a campfire.

Sark, island of childhood memories

We’d taken the boys on the holiday of a life-time when they were small, and had stayed for a week on a real desert island called Tobacco Caye. Each evening we watched the sun sink, and the palm fronds wave, and the local children fish for barracuda.

Tobacco Caye at sunset. 

So, thinking about it, maybe the idea of a castaway, a desert island, was inside me all along. All these islands and coastlines came together to become Fran’s island. I wrote the beach scenes in situ on Penbryn Beach. The jungle scenes were written in the Welsh woodland that weaves its way to the sea from my caravan.

It was starting to come together. I had my setting. I had my character. But what could happen to her?

I remembered a book I’d once read, Castaway by Lucy Irvine. A real-life account of a young woman who’d ditched in her London office job and answered an advert to be the wife of a middle aged man in return for living with him on a desert island for a year. Of all places, I’d found this book in the tiny post office on Sark and read it huddled up in my sleeping bag in a tent.

I reread it, and was soon absorbed in Lucy’s horrifying attempts at survival, from sandfly bites, to extreme dehydration to the constant irritations and sniping between her and the ‘husband’.

A harrowing account of a real-life castaway

Hers was no idyllic hammock-swaying, palm-shadowed island dream, but a brutal struggle for survival.

Mine would be too, I decided. I was going to make Fran Stanton suffer.

However, it was very difficult, writing with a cast of only one.

Intense. And, unless my character went mad, which she does, a little, being marooned on a desert island, how did I get her to talk? I solved this problem by adding flashbacks, but also giving her a little companion in the shape of the pilot’s dog, who gets washed up with her.

Inspiration? My constant and stalwart writing companion, Basil.

Basil on the beach (with something rather horrible on his neck)Finally, I was inspired by yet another book, this one suggested by my brother. In his hauntingly brilliant Dirt Music,Tim Winton’s protagonist goes walkabout, travelling through the wilderness of North Australia, in search of the famed Coronation Island. Storm-beaten and maddened by isolation, he survives by fishing and foraging. 

Brilliant. Beautiful. Sublime: Tim Winton’s Dirt Music

I’m a sucker for lyrical language, and Winton is a master of sublimely beautiful prose. He has the knack of blending words and landscape together until they become one. I would be happy if I achieved even a tiny bit of this in The Island. 

The Island by Olivia Levez is published by One World Publications on the 3rd of March.

Summary

Frances is alone on a small island in the middle of the Indian Ocean. She has to find water and food. She has to survive. And when she is there she also thinks about the past. The things that she did before. The things that made her a monster. Nothing is easy. Survival is hard and so is being honest about the past. Frances is a survivor however, and with the help of the only other crash survivor, she sees that the future is worth fighting for.

To find out more about Olivia Levez:

Twitter / Website

Inspire Me with Tamsyn Murray - UKMG Extravaganza

To help celebrate the UKMG Extravanganza, which is happening this Saturday in Nottingham Central Library, I am pleased to welcome Middle Grade author, Tamsyn Murray onto the blog, to tell us what inspired her to write her forthcoming book, Completely Cassidy: Drama Queen.

I think I've always been a show-off. Right from when I was four years old and won third place in a beauty contest, which meant I got to wear a lovely satin cloak and sit on a decorated float with all my fellow beauties. And then I found out I could sing and played the Angel Gabriel in the school Nativity when I was nine and my love affair with showing off really began. Since then, I've done lots of singing and acting and I'm a member of an amateur dramatics society. So it was only a matter of time before I wrote a book about being on stage.

In Completely Cassidy: Drama Queen, which is officially out in January, Cassidy decides that acting could be her THING. Along with her BFFs, Molly and Shenice, she enrols at a summer holiday drama academy to put on a production of Bugsy Malone. Anyone who has read the previous Completely Cassidy books will have an inkling of what happens next - disaster is never far away where Cassidy is concerned.

I plundered all my embarrassing stage-related memories to write the book. There was the time I was alone on stage, about to sing a big solo in Kiss Me Kate, and I realised I could not remember a single word of the song. There've been many times when I've had to kiss men who were not my husband (I've actually had five stage husbands and several boyfriends) and sit on swings that were determined to tip me off. In one show, a friend got her high-heeled shoe stuck in a crack on the stage mid-song and I had to kneel down and pull it out without being too obvious. Thankfully, I don't really suffer from performance nerves these days (although I am always terrified during auditions) but I remember when I did and my knees shook so hard that they bumped together. So all of my performing experience has gone into Drama Queen (along with a few friends!) to make Cassidy's adventures on stage as authentic as possible. It's definitely her most dramatic adventure so far.

So I'll be the one at UKMG Extravaganza showing off a bit. You really won't be able to miss me!

Summary

Cassidy can't wait to enrol at Dance and Drama Academy summer school! She's always dreamed of discovering her hidden talent - could she be a star in the making? But with auditions looming, Cassidy is gripped by stage fright. As big brother, Liam, keeps reminding her, she does have a knack for embarrassing herself. What if Cassidy's stage debut turns out to be an all-singing, all-dancing disaster?

To find out more about Tamsin Murray:

Website / Twitter

Inspire Me with Andy Mulligan

To celebrate the publication of Liquidator, I am pleased to welcome the author, Andy Mulligan onto the blog, to talk about what inspired him to write this book.

Books pop up out of the day-to-day cut and thrust of meeting, talking and laughing. The one I’m working on right now was inspired by a ten year-old boy who was telling me about his pet dog. “I think he wants to be a cat, really,” he said - and the surrealism of that locked onto me. My school series, Ribblestrop, emerged when I was walking past a ruined stately-home in Cornwall. It was for sale and my companion said, “Come on, Andy - let’s buy it. We’ll call it a school, and you can be the headmaster.” LIQUIDATOR, however - and it’s out this month - started off as a joke.

The joke surrounded the concept of work-experience, which every child does and is all too often a predictable disappointment. The child usually looks forward to it. Perhaps he or she has secured a placement at a hospital, and is hoping to be useful, active, creative and essential. Alas, when I was a teacher the kids would invariably come back to school having experienced only that sad stranglehold of health and safety concerns - they hadn’t been allowed to do anything. “I made the coffee on the first day, but then they said I might burn myself, and they weren’t insured…”

I always hoped that one day, a would-be teenage surgeon would come rushing back to class, shouting “It was great! I opened a rib-cage! The midwife was late - I delivered the baby!” It never happened in life, so that was the gag I’ve put into fiction: seven children set off on their work-experience week, and each child is launched into the most amazing experience. It’s a thrill, of course - I love a good page-turning adventure where the heroes dice with death - and I wanted a good villain. Good villains aren’t easy to come by, because people don’t tend to walk around rubbing their hands thinking, “What bad thing can I do today?” Villains are all too often people who have convinced themselves they have no choices, and have been told for too long that their behavior is acceptable. In LIQUIDATOR the villain is a drinks company that wants to do what all too many companies do: maximize profit at the expense of anything noble, decent, moral or right - (sorry, Volkwagon, if you’re reading this). The company I’ve created doesn’t make cars, though. It’s spent millions circumventing health legislation to create a highly addictive kids’ energy drink. They’ve trialed it on poor children in Africa - one of whom is dying, slowly and painfully as a result - and now they’re ready to flood the market. Our heroes discover this, and have to pit their wits against rich, powerful, deadly people.

I like to think it’s exciting, frightening and funny. It took a long time to write - two and half years, in all - because the plot is wildly complicated, and to weave in that many characters is a kind of choreography that takes a lot of thought. It’s not an ISSUES book - I’m never inspired by the challenge of ‘raising an issue’, though people often assume that is a motivation. I’m inspired by characters, and the sheer thrill of telling a good story. When I was at school I was enthralled by a tale well told, and I don’t find it easy to analyse how our imaginations and emotions commit to something we know to be invented. I saw ‘Jurassic World’ last month, which is two hours long. For me, it was two hours of wonder…I screamed, I cried, I had my hands over my eyes - I was there in the Perspex pod as the monster tried to prize it open. The storyteller can’t be cynical: he has to believe that his audience is ready to go on that journey, and feel. I suppose that is the most inspiring thought of all: that as you sit at the laptop, tapping out the sentences, you’re conjuring something that will be more real - for a short time - than reality.

Liquidator by Andy Mulligan was published by David Fickling Books on the 1st October 2015

Summary

LIQUIDATOR! The brand-new, delicious and wildly popular energy drink. "For those who wanna win!" The company that makes it is set to earn a fortune, with its global launch climaxing at an international rock concert that will SHAKE the planet. The only problem?An innocent child is dying. Meet Vicky and her class-mates - their work experience is about to spin totally out of control as they uncover a secret that could change the world. And put them all in mortal danger ...From the award-winning author of TRASH comes an action-packed thriller full of danger, hilarity and - above all - friendship.

To find out more about Andy Mulligan:

Website 

Inspire Me with Aoife Walsh

I am pleased to welcome Aoife Walsh onto the blog today to discuss what inspired her to write about Too Close To Home, her second novel.

I don’t have to look too far to figure out my inspiration for Too Close To Home. It’s about a girl called Minny and her complicated, demanding family. Minny is truculent about her extra responsibilities: elder children in big families have always felt that way. My dad was the fifth of seven kids and his older sisters had to help bring him up (although I should disclose that those four women went on to have twenty-five children between them, so they can’t have been that disillusioned).

The thing is, sometimes in families where everybody is stretched just to manage the day to day, a child - of any age - can get sidelined. Perhaps the child that’s most likely to happen to is the one that everyone thinks is okay.

Minny isn’t, actually, the oldest in the family. Her sister Aisling is almost two years her senior - and only one school year up. By an astonishing coincidence, my two eldest have a similar gap (though they’re much younger), and, like Aisling, my eldest son is autistic. So is my youngest, as a matter of fact, though I didn’t know it when I started writing this book. My daughter is not.

Too Close To Home isn’t, obviously, about the mother of the family. Nor is it directly about Aisling. I should say outright that I absolutely agree with people who feel that there need to be more books with autistic MAIN characters, preferably written by autistic authors. 

This book, however, was always going to be about Minny, the middle child with all the pressures of the eldest. Autism is only one of the issues in Minny’s life - she’s trying to carve out an identity against a background of estranged fathers, half-sibling babies, religious scruples, elderly sex, self-obsessed friends, insensitive teachers, a boy she might fancy and a minor class struggle. 

But, to me, the relationship between Aisling and Minny is the heart of the book. And I think I wrote it mostly because I know I expect a lot of my daughter. Some evenings all she hears from me is: ‘Don’t snap at your brother like that, he gets that at school all day. Don’t ignore him even if he is telling you a fact you’ve heard seventy times before and weren’t remotely interested in the first time. Can’t you just sit in a room with him for a while, you know you’re his best friend, don’t you? Fair doesn’t mean everybody getting the same, it means everybody getting what they need…’

So this book started life as a way of paying some attention to my daughter. To my son too, and to the way they are with each other. His relationship with her, rocky though it sometimes is, is one of the most positive things in his life - and in hers, too. I guess the book is a love letter to that relationship. It’s also a way for me to tell her, I do know you have it rough sometimes. I know it’s hard to love somebody whose life is difficult, even when you’re an adult, let alone when you’re fourteen like Minny or ten like you. A lot of our family life is not set up for you. I may not always give you the positive attention you deserve, and there are times you get negative attention you don’t deserve. But I do think about you, and worry about you, and admire you and love you and even, sometimes, appreciate you.

Too Close to Home is published by Andersen Press and is available to buy now.

Summary

Meet Minny: her life is a complicated whirlwind of unbearable PE lessons, annoying friends and impossible-to-live-with siblings. Minny is desperate for some space in a house spilling over with family and hangers-on. She has to contend with her autistic sister Aisling's school bullies, whilst trying to keep her self-absorbed BFF Penny happy, and look normal in front of new boy Franklin. And on top of this, now Dad has announced that he’s returning to London - with his new girlfriend. 

Secrets, lies and home truths will out, frying pans will be burnt, and arguments will flare up in a story full of humour, honesty and minor household emergencies.

To find out more about Aoife Walsh:

Twitter

Inspire Me with Sarah Naughton

Today, I am happy to welcome debut author Sarah Naughton onto the blog, to discuss what inspired her to write her historical teen book, The Hanged Man Rises.

Living in the country is pretty boring once you get past the age of nine.  Especially for a girl with zero interest in sport or other outdoor activities.  

With nothing better to do me and my friend Ellen would go on interminable walks down country lanes and on these walks, when the conversation ran out about Andrew Stowford (the only boy in the village not intimately-related to everyone else), we played a game called What If.  I probably don’t need to explain this game.  It went along the lines of: what if your best friend’s boyfriend told you he loved you: would you tell your best friend?  Or, what if your mum and Andrew Stowford were trapped in a burning building and you only had time to save one?

I’ve been playing it ever since.

Lots of things trigger the questions: documentaries, conversations, news stories.  What if that asteroid that just missed earth actually hit us?  What if they found fossilised human bones in a dinosaur’s stomach?  

I’m sure it’s where most writers begin.

The medical advances in the 18th century, particularly in anatomy, probably inspired Mary Shelley to write Frankenstein.  Genetic engineering provided the chilling but wholly believable premise for Kazuo Ishiguro’s ‘Never Let Me Go’.  A planet running out of resources: Independence Day, reality TV gone mad: The Hunger Games.

Ok, I suppose I should admit that I’m a big fan of dystopian fiction.  But it works equally well with other genres: what if you lived in Elizabethan/Roman/Neolithic times?  What if a man got killed in a completely sealed room?  What if a billionaire sheik disguised as a doctor came to work at the hospital of a pretty young nurse?

They’re all good starting points (apart from possibly the billionaire sheik doctor in disguise).  Where you take them is the hard part.  There’s a dusty old folder lurking in the depths of my computer containing a stack of these premises which I haven’t managed to turn into stories.  I’ll go back to them one day.  What if the sheik met the dinosaur on the way to the hospital and the pretty nurse had to clone him using the DNA from a scrap of his half-digested flesh? (now that’s an idea…)

Though it didn’t feel like it when I was a kid, having an active imagination is a far more exciting and rewarding skill than being a hot shot at BMX stunts (unless you’re Andrew Stowford, in which case it’s just the Best Thing Ever).

So if you want to write, just be curious.  Ask yourself questions.  Chances are lots of people will have asked themselves the same questions before and written brilliant books exploring the answers, but one day you’ll hit upon something no-one has asked yet.  But you’d better be quick - what if I get there first?

The Hanged Man by Sarah Naughton is published on the 28th February by Simon and Schuster.

To find out more about Sarah:

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Inspire Me with Jane Casey

To celebrate the forthcoming publication of How To Fall, the new crime novel for young adults, I am pleased to welcome Jane Casey onto the blog to tell us what inspired her to write this novel.

 

I usually write crime novels for adults - I’m just finishing my fifth - but I have an enduring love for YA fiction. I started out as a children’s books editor (not a bad Plan B for a writer, it has to be said) and I was lucky enough to work with great authors such as Meg Cabot and Alyson Noel on some amazing books. The idea to write a YA novel came around the time I should have been writing my second crime novel. I’ve never been able to resist a good story, either as a reader or a writer, and I got hopelessly sidetracked. That book didn’t quite make it to being finished - maybe I’ll get around to it one day. It led, however, to a very lovely editor at Random House Children’s Books suggesting I might write a crime novel for teens, which in turn became How To Fall.

How To Fall is mainly a mystery but also a love story. My heroine, Jess Tennant, is a new arrival in the sunny seaside town of Port Sentinel - but the town has a dark heart and many secrets to uncover. I wrote Jess as an alternative to the fainting heroines that were Bella Swan’s legacy in YA fiction and she’s pretty feisty. She has a lot in common with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, being blonde, opinionated and easily underestimated. Like Buffy, she’s addicted to wisecracks even when she should keep her mouth shut. Like Buffy, she has a strong moral sense. Like Buffy, she can’t help falling for what might be the worst possible guy for her. If you’ve never watched Buffy, seasons 1, 2 and 3 are pretty much essential viewing, despite the rubbish CGI when they were making each episode for about $12.50. There has never been a better TV show. About vampires and teenagers, anyway.

A few years ago I got completely addicted to One Tree Hill, despite the fact that it was preposterous. I don’t even like basketball. I do like evil fathers who pull strings to get their own way, and One Tree Hill had a great one of those. Also, cute boys. 

And speaking of which, Grant Gustin. I’ve often been asked who would play a particular character if they made films of my books. If How to Fall was ever filmed, I wouldn’t get a say in who played Jess or any of the other characters, and it takes approximately one million years to get a film made so he would be too old (and American), but when I imagine Will, he’s built along the lines of Grant Gustin. To find this image I had to look at literally hundreds of pictures of him. Had to. For ages. I won’t judge you if you find you have to do the same.

Don’t ask me why, but I am currently obsessed with owls. They, and their reproductive habits, play a major part* in How to Fall. This one was an eBay purchase and sits on my desk. The picture does not feature my desk, which was too untidy to be a backdrop but has altogether fewer fruit bowls on it.

*all right, a minor part

In many ways I haven’t grown out of my teenage taste in music. Give me an angsty pop song about heartbreak and I am happy. It’s not cool and I don’t care. I edge towards credibility with my love for Feist, Gemma Hayes and Martha Wainwright, but to be honest it’s Taylor Swift, One Direction and Take That all the way when I’m writing. I highly recommend the overwrought yodelling of Avril Lavigne, especially ‘Keep Holding On’. It’s a karaoke classic. 

Art is a big element in How to Fall and I couldn’t resist including a particularly lovely painting that hangs in the National Gallery of Ireland in Dublin. It was voted Ireland’s most popular painting recently, and you can see why. Called ‘The Meeting on the Turret Stairs’, painted by Frederick William Burton in 1864, it shows the final parting of Hellelil from her bodyguard, Hildebrand, and it’s a beauty. Hellelil, as a name, has been slow to catch on. I may try to revive it by giving it to a character. Then again, I may not.

Finally, Dirty Dancing, a film that really deserved a better title. I remember when it came out first (though I was FAR too young to go and see it in the cinema) and being fascinated by the poster - Jennifer Grey being lifted out of the water by Patrick Swayze. Like How to Fall it tells the story of a girl who learns to love and take risks and believes in doing the right thing, no matter what it costs her. I’ve seen the film so many times I think it’s woven into my DNA and every love story I write probably owes something to it. Sometimes falling in love is just the start of your problems, not the happy-ever-after ending you might expect - and that’s the kind of story I like to tell.

 Thanks for a fabulous post Jane!

How To Fall by Jane Casey will be published on the January 31st by Corgi.

To find out more about Jane:

 Author Place: http://authorsplace.co.uk/jane-casey/

Twitter: @janecaseyauthor