Secret Serendipity Seven with Nikki Sheehan

Today on the blog, I'm pleased to welcome the rather amazing author, Nikki Sheehan. Nikki's latest novel, Swan Boy, is published this week with One World Publications. Nikki is here to give us seven secrets about her book and her writing. 

• The main character Johnny was originally a girl. I wrote the first few chapters with a female MC and then something didn’t feel quite right. So I changed her name to Rowan, which can be used for either gender, and carried on until I was sure that he was a he!

• The whole book was written in the first person until a few months before publication. My editor Sarah Odedina suggested changing it to third and I was really scared and thought that I’d have the perspective swinging around all over the place. But I trusted her, and did it (and no, you can’t just search on “I” and replace with “he”, and yes it took Aaaaages) I was really pleased with the result because it allowed me to really explore the other characters. So pleased actually that my next book is also in third person

• I don’t know what I”m going to write usually, and I never know what I’ve written until I read it through afterwards. Sometimes I’m quite surprised at what I find, and not always in a good way.

• I was working on another book, one about a tiny cult in Devon, and had almost finished when the idea for Swan Boy came to me. I tried to ignore it but in the end it got so persistent that I could feel a pressure in my chest, so I gave in and wrote Swan Boy.

• The first draft took seven weeks. The rewrites took over a year.

• I lived in Turkey when I was younger and I had a boyfriend with the same white streak in his hair as Johnny. He, as far as I know, had no strange swan encounters

• I love ballet and did it from age four to sixteen but I wasn’t very good. At every exam I took I got progressively worse marks. But I didn’t care, I loved it anyway, and I reckon that’s the point.

Summary

When Johnny moves house and starts a new school he has to deal with a bully who can't leave him alone. But help comes from an unexpected and surprising source and Johnny's growing power soon puts him in a very special place.

A chance encounter with a swan sparks a series of events that result in Johnny playing the lead in a school ballet. His teacher wants him to live the role, and when feathers start sprouting on his chest, Johnny begins to understand his true potential. But will he be strong or brave enough to beat his bullies, take care of his brother, support his mother and find a place for himself among all the chaos that is prevailing in his life

To find out more about Nikki Sheehan:

Twitter / Website

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

Day 5 - Debuts 2016 - Olivia Levez

Day 5 already of the Debuts of 2016! Where is the time flying to? I am really enjoying hearing about the hopes and fears of our forthcoming debuts. Today I am pleased to welcome Olivia Levez as one of our featured authors of 2016.

Olivia's book The Island is published in March by One World Publications. 

***

What did you do when you found out you were going to be published?

I was at school, teaching 11YMI or 9XJU or 8YLE, all the while secretly listening for my phone buzzing from the drawer where I keep controlled assessments. My agent Clare was due to text me about book offers after an exciting day visiting publishers in London. Impossible to concentrate on Of Mice and Men or Macbeth or poetry analysis or learning objectives or success criteria or differentiation or where the heck I’d put the carrier bag containing that class’s exercise books. ‘Miss’ did her best, and kept darting back to her drawer if the class was one of those that could be trusted to get on without someone kicking off or falling off their chair accidentally-on-purpose. 

My TA kept whispering, ‘have you heard yet?’ and other teachers I rarely spoke to kept coming up to me: ‘Have you heard yet?’

‘No,’ I kept saying. ‘Not yet.’ All the time in the back of my mind wondering if the offer/advance would be significant enough to a) pay my mortgage off and b) get George Clarke from Amazing Spaces to come and build me a writing shed at the bottom of my garden.

My phone buzzed.

A text from Clare.

Okay, so I wasn’t going to be getting George in to build me a treehouse/gypsy caravan/hobbit hole any time soon, but here it was: a Real. Live. Offer.

And then another. And another. Three from which to choose!

This is where an agent comes in. Clare held out and negotiated to get me a little more money, and set a deadline for the final offers to come in. Definitely not skills I possess.

My own children listened very nicely when I told them, and showed polite interest. After all, I’d had near misses with being published before, so it was more of a, ‘so, is it actually real this time, Mum?’ response. My friends at a theatre visit that evening bought me surprise prosecco when I told them, and I did feel fairly starry until a friend who arrived late thought I must be celebrating being pregnant!

And then a wonderful weekend in London, having lunch with Clare whilst we decided which publisher to go with, and I stayed with my husband in a hotel opposite Fortnum and Mason, looking all over London and rereading the letters and offers. 

A text from Sarah Odedina, looking forward to working with me.

And so it began.

How has your life changed since getting a book deal?

Mostly, life stays the same: it’s still you, alone at your laptop, tapping away.

Life continues as before. Work. Home. Writing. Work. Home. Writing.

But there are occasional lovely perks: meeting bloggers at my publishers, Oneworld, in their gorgeous Georgian townhouse offices on Bloomsbury Street. (Even the word Bloomsbury always seems wonderfully literary and evocative.) Being given the opportunity to talk about my book to fellow book addicts, and listening to Sarah Odedina pitch my book so thoughtfully and skilfully, and thinking, there’s someone I am really glad is on my side. Lunch with Sarah O, discussing book Two, full of ideas and passion and enthusiasm. ‘This is my favourite part of working in publishing,’ she told me, stabbing at her egg with her fork.

Increased Twitter action, when proofs are sent out, when the cover is revealed. An exciting photo from Frankfurt, seeing an enormous poster of my book placed next to other Oneworld books: Behavioural Economics Saved my Dog and the Booker Prize winner, A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James.

And in between, lots of hard work: the many layers that build a book - restructuring, more restructuring, line edits, copy edits, proof reading, more proof reading. And publicity stuff: writing press releases, blog posts for bloggers (thank you, Vivienne), Words and Pictures magazine, message in a bottle to go with early proofs, author videos, more visits to Oneworld offices to meet journos…

I have realised that copy edits give me nausea if I stare at them too long (I think I am actually allergic to them.) So every two hours, my little dog, Basil, is taken on yet another walk, much to his delight (he really likes copy edits).

The other thing that has changed is what to answer to that favourite question of hairdressers: what job do you do? Which to choose: teacher or writer? It still feels incredibly pretentious to say, ‘Oh, I’m an author.’ The reaction is always the same. Students (politely impressed): ‘So will you be really rich then, Miss?’ Others: ‘Are they going to make a film of it?’ and ‘Will you give me a (free) signed copy?’

But mostly, life goes on as before. The buzz of reaching your ‘ultimate goal’ of being published soon settles into another goal of actually selling books. 

And so it continues.

What is your biggest fear about publication? 

I always thought standing in front of thirty students and having an Ofsted inspector walk in with a clipboard and settle herself down in your classroom was pretty fearful, but there are more subtle horrors associated with being an author. Here’s my current list:

Bad reviews. Being tempted to obsessively trawl the internet, comparing myself with other authors. Not selling any books. Getting brain freeze with second book. School visits. (Even though I’ve been a teacher for twenty years, talking to pupils about your own book instead of other people’s is like ripping your heart and guts out and leaving them out in the sun for birds to peck.) Assembled rows of sardonic eyes, coolly appraising, then stifling a yawn and nudging friends. Nobody coming to my launch party. Pressing ‘send’ and then finding a glaring error. Being too pushy. Not being pushy enough. Being invisible. Not being liked.

But the worst fear of all is doing nothing about your dreams. Statis. Stagnation. Creative vortex. Stultification. Death without creation. The worst fear, in the words of T S Eliot, is ‘to measure out your life with coffee spoons.’

How to combat fear 

‘Always do what you’re afraid to do.’ I copied this motto from the wonderful book, We Were Liars, by E. Lockhart. I have a signed poster of it on my classroom wall, and it’s a great maxim for life. 

Richard Branson: ‘If someone offers you an amazing opportunity and you’re not sure you can do it, say yes and learn how to do it later.’ Another great maxim. 

Read Quiet, by Susan Cain. Feel the power of thoughtfulness, observation, listening skills, empathy, persistence, planning, patience. Lose the label ‘shy’ and reinvent yourself as a Quiet. Nearly all writers are secret Quiets. Even the ones who entertain children effortlessly, whilst dressed up as pirates, space crusaders, sea dwellers. Find your niche. Take Candy Gourlay’s advice and ‘be shiny’. 

Advice: Survival tips for pre-published writers 

Always act like an author. At SCBWI, you are not unpublished, you are prepublished. There is a difference. It’s all in the mindset. How do you act like an author? Have authorly habits. Write 1000 words a day, like Stephen King, or keep a dream diary like Will Self, or start a crit group (you only need one other person to make it successful, but 5 is ideal). If you are a teacher, start a writing club and give assemblies to ‘sell’ it to students, cunningly weaving in your own journey so far. Teachers, you are lucky; you are surrounded by your demographic. 

Keep all those rejection letters. Print them out and put on a nail (and later, a spike - see Stephen King again) because you will need those to refer to when you are rich and famous. To fail is part of every learning journey. Share your failures with kids at schools and with crit friends. Learn from feedback. If you get a personal response in an agent rejection, give yourself an air-punch. 

Remember that the slushpile is not a lottery. Despite its slithering layers that are 14000 high (or something), 70 % (I’m just making up figures here) will be from writers who are not SCBWI members/are not part of a crit group/are trying their luck/can’t write/wrong genre/age group/haven’t read the submission guidelines properly/are mad. 

Most people claim they want to write a novel. But only 5% actually do this. So, by being in that 5%, you have already proved yourself to have authorly skills of persistence, tenacity, resilience, stamina, patience, ambition, drive, willpower, and being completely anti-social for sustained periods. 

Keep going. Get beaten down. Pick yourself up. Keep going. And repeat. There is no time limit. You have all of your life. Be patient. Keep going. It will happen. 

Have you seen the book cover, and how did it make you feel?

Nathan Burton, who designed The Island’s book jacket, used to work with Sarah O at Bloomsbury, and he did the iconic cover of Holes by Louis Sacher - the one with the lizard and the blue sky and the desert. He’s also designed covers for Patricia Highsmith’s novels, which is very exciting, as I adore her Ripley books.

Sarah O showed me the jacket, and it was a really strange feeling, looking at another person’s vision and concept of your book. A sort of out of body experience. It has a fresh, naïve style and I think will really stand out on the shelves. It reminds me of contemporary YA books like Jandy Nelson’s I Give You the Sun or Non Pratt’s Trouble or Annabel Pitcher’s Ketchup Clouds.

Everyone was adamant about it not having a girl’s photograph on the cover, to keep a more abstract feel. I like the simplicity of it, the artist’s mark-making and pared back style. The loneliness experienced by my castaway character, Fran, is represented by the scribbled-in mountains, and the framing of the island itself.

The only thing we changed was the figure of the girl, to make her more edgy, and Sarah managed to add a little dog on the spine, which is adorable. My own Jack Russell, Basil, agreed to model for this drawing, so I sent some photos of him (he’s seriously photogenic.) Oh, and I have a name with lots of Ls and Vs, which weren’t very clear in cursive script, so I asked if they could be separated a little, and changed to a darker colour, to make my name stand out. What a diva!

My real little dog, and constant writing companion, Basil.

***

Thank you Olivia for a most encouraging post. Good luck with your debut year. 

Nest by Esther Ehrlich

I should have taken the shortcut home from my bird-watching spot at the salt marsh, because then I wouldn't have to walk past Joey Morell, whipping rocks against the telephone pole in front of his house as the sun goes down. I try to sneak around him, pushing so hard against the scrub oaks on our side of the road that the branches, scratch my bare legs, but he sees me. 

Published in July by Rock The Boat, an imprint from One World Publications. 

Pages - 326

Summary 

In 1972 home is a cozy nest on Cape Cod for eleven-year-old Naomi “Chirp” Orenstein, her older sister, Rachel; her psychiatrist father; and her dancer mother. But then Chirp’s mom develops symptoms of a serious disease, and everything changes.

Chirp finds comfort in watching her beloved wild birds. She also finds a true friend in Joey, the mysterious boy who lives across the street. Together they create their own private world and come up with the perfect plan: Escape. Adventure. Discovery.

******
Chirp is one of the most endearing  characters I've come across in a long time. She jumps right into your arms from the very first page and hugs you tightly until you have to unwillingly, let  her go at the end of the book. Her voice is so authentic, you find yourself caught up in her long and breathless sentences, as she desperately tries to tell you everything at once.  The book is peppered with bird references from Chirp's extensive knowledge, which only adds to her wonderful character. If this had been made into a film a few years ago, Dakota Fanning would have won the role hands down. 

This book filled me with different emotions. The story has a strong New England feel to it, making my inner travel bug, eager to visit places like Cape Cod and Boston.  The seventies are brought vividly back to life, making me long for  those hazy endless summer days of childhood. The musical references throughout the book sent me straight to Google and Youtube, just so that I could hear the songs again.

The book is beautifully written and the language is so descriptive that you don't even realise it, you just absorb the whole setting, recreating it in your mind. 

This isn't an easy book to read. Chirp has a lot to deal with. More than any eleven year old should ever have to cope with. And at times she is angry and you can't blame her at all for her reactions. 

This book is more than just Chirp's story. A much bigger picture can be viewed, giving you a real sense of how one illness can affect the whole family. Often children are the forgotten ones when a parent is seriously ill. Adults feel they are protecting them, by giving them limited information about the situation, when often this just makes things worse.  Children will search for answers elsewhere and often get the wrong idea. Surely it is better to tell the child the truth from the beginning, rather than allow their imaginations to make it worse.

This really is a stunning debut and ideal for any child dealing with bereavement.