We are having a...

This is a very short post to wish you a Happy Christmas and to let you know the latest news on the Baby.

The only writing going on this week is last minute Christmas cards and seemingly endless shopping lists. Re-writes of A Good Death will continue in the New Year, when the other major job will be turning the smallest room, currently a study, into the baby’s room.

What colour will it be? On Tuesday we went for our twenty week scan. It was incredible to see the chambers of the baby’s heart and all the tiny bones in its hands and feet. The sonographer pointed happily to a few dark circles, which we were assured were its kidneys and liver. She measured the baby’s tiny thigh bones, checked its face and the size of its head and finally she pointed out three blurry white lines, which mean that we are having…a girl!

Thank you for following the progress of our little daughter so far. I hope you have a very Happy Christmas and I look forward to updating you on the Book and the Baby in the New Year!

The next Harry Potter?

When people learn that I am writing a book for children, their most common response is to ask whether it will be the next Harry Potter. The answer is ‘no’. Wild Rose is a historical novel about a girl who is taken from her father and their secret life in the forest and thrown into the Elizabethan court, where she must learn her true identity before it kills her. Wild Rose features no magical children, though the role of the ravens of the Tower is certainly mysterious.

It would be great to be able to say that ‘yes’, Wild Rose will be as successful another Harry Potter, but that is both unlikely and impossible to predict. It’s hard to imagine another Harry Potter and I think most people I have talked to about it, outside of English teachers and school librarians, would be able to name many other successful children’s books.

On the other hand, there are no such expectations of the baby. When they learn that I’m pregnant, people don’t ask: Will it be the next Winston Churchill? Although the baby is eagerly anticipated, it is free to arrive in its own time and its own unique form. Having said that, the big question of the moment is whether it will be a boy or a girl. Some of David’s family are convinced it’s a girl but we have no inkling either way.

At our twenty week scan on Tuesday we will discover whether it is Small (a boy) or Mini (a girl). It’s very exciting as we’ll both be equally happy with a boy or a girl. But it’s a big step at the same time. It will make the idea of having a real baby of our own much more real than it does at the moment. It will lead to discussions of names and the development of our relationship with our unknown child.  

What we can say for certain is that it will not be the next Harry Potter.

Waiting, anticipating

We’re making our way steadily through advent – the season of waiting and anticipating Christmas. We decorated our Christmas tree yesterday, have started wrapping presents and (to the horror of my mum) put up lights in the tree outside our house. I love this time of year and although my pregnant feet are aching, I love all the preparations.

Advent is particularly special this year because we’re anticipating the birth of our baby. Of course, we’re thinking about the day the baby is born, but only rarely as it still seems a bit unreal. There are many steps along the way that we’re looking forward to though: the next being our twenty week scan. In another ten days we will be able to see our baby again and find out whether it is a boy or a girl. Time does strange things while you’re waiting and it feels like it has been a couple of weeks until our scan for weeks and weeks now. It seemed close last week, but with more than a week to go it feels like the day is stretching away from us.

However, like Christmas, we know that the day will come. And though we don’t know for certain when the baby will be born, we know that we won’t still be waiting in June. In this way, the Book and the Baby differ.

Wild Rose has gone through its first round of submissions to publishers. The date for response has come and gone with three rejections and no offers. The rejections have been complimentary and encouraging, but they are rejections nonetheless. Eve White will send the manuscript out on another round in the New Year when I hope that some New Year optimism will encourage someone to make me an offer. Waiting for these responses is not as enjoyable as waiting for Christmas or for the baby. There is no guarantee that they will come or that they will include an offer to publish.

Advent is a happy time because the day of Jesus’ birth will come, as will the day of our baby’s birth. If only the arrival of an offer was as certain.  

An obsession with growth

As I write I am preoccupied by the word count. As a teacher I was often asked by students how many pages they should write. My stock response was that what mattered was the quality of what they wrote, rather than the quantity. I didn’t add that the less they wrote the less time it would take for me to mark. But the word count does matter for a book. A long book costs more to produce and might represent lower profits for a publisher; but if a book is too short and looks too thin on the shelf, it doesn’t seem like good value to a reader. And those are just the commercial considerations.

I spent six months re-writing my first book, Wild Rose, and shrinking it from about 90,000 words to less than 50,000 so that it would be appropriate for the 10+ age group. Losing words was not as difficult as I thought it would be and I was left with a much stronger manuscript. This time round, A Good Death is already on the smaller end of the scale for an adult book, so in re-writing I need to be careful to replace any words I lose.

The word count tool is a changeable friend. I seem to write for hours and it tells me I have only written a couple of hundred words. But at the end of a quick twenty minute session before supper it tells me I’ve written a thousand.  

Every week I check my baby book to see how big the baby is – this week it is about twelve centimetres. From what I have read, it will grow another centimetre every week. Like the word count, it seems to grow incredibly slowly, but in relative terms it’s remarkable. When I think that in its first weeks it was only millimetres long - that it came from something microscopic, I can only be amazed.

There’s no cure for my obsession with growth. I will continue to check the word count and measure the baby’s size against a ruler. I can try to speed up the growth of the book, but the baby will grow in its own good time. 

A book and baby novice

Perhaps by the end of the pregnancy I will begin to feel that I am not quite such a novice, but at the moment that’s very much what I am. I went to a midwife’s appointment earlier in the week, my second after a bewildering ‘booking’ appointment eight weeks ago at the stage when we still couldn’t quite believe I was pregnant. I look and feel a lot more pregnant than I did then; I’ve purchased books, signed up to websites and almost been cast as Mary in a nativity play. So I went to this appointment feeling much more prepared.  

However, it is still very evident that this is my first pregnancy. I have been battling a stinking cold this week and when I mentioned it to the midwife she patiently reassured me, in her best ‘first time pregnancy’ voice, that it wouldn’t affect the baby in any way. Next, she asked if I had a urine sample with me and, turning her back to me, would I take my top off. She was a little surprised when she turned back with the testing kit to see that I’d taken my jumper off. ‘The top of the sample pot,’ she explained.

To a professional, having a baby is not new or unknown, as it is for me. The midwife had already listened to several other babies’ heartbeats that day (incidentally, she said mine was the best – it’s not too early for parental smugness.) I am learning the rules and practices of an entirely new world, which she inhabits every working day.

Writing a book has been a similar experience. When I first started writing in 2008, I knew very little about what it took to get a book published and I have had to ask some very obvious questions of patient professionals along the way. These days I am beginning to do things I know a little about: re-writes for A Good Death are a little easier having done them for Wild Rose, planning for A New World will be more effective having written two books already. However, while I have learnt a lot, I am still very much a novice. Going through the process of submission for Wild Rose is another experience I’m having for the first time and I’m very grateful for the guidance of my agent, who has done it all before.

As a book and baby novice, it’s great to know the professionals know what they’re doing.  

There's no re-writing a baby



After feedback from my agent, I’m starting re-writes for A Good Death. It’s a daunting task. I’m discarding some chapters completely and changing the focus of others to make the final section more effective. Getting rid of what is not working is a cathartic process and the changes are necessary to get it closer to being published. There is no guarantee of getting it completely right this time and my experience of re-writing and editing Wild Rose tells me that there will be more changes to make in the future. This is certainly not the easiest or most enjoyable aspects of the writing process, but it is one of the most satisfying.

The second half of A Good Death: one chapter per Post-it



The gradual development of the book could be compared to the slow formation of the baby, but this is one way the book and the baby differ. There are no re-writes with a baby. Our baby’s genetic material is fixed. In fact, the egg that led to our baby was made before I was even born. As much as I might hope that the baby inherits David’s strong teeth and my eyesight, we have no control over what the baby will be like. On the simplest level, it will still be weeks before we learn if it is a boy or a girl.

Not being able to re-write your baby is a good thing, of course. We will accept and love our baby for who they will be. But quite apart from that, if we could make changes to our baby before it was born, I couldn’t cope with the responsibility of deciding what they would be like. How could I know what they would need or what would make them happiest in life? And how could David and I, who can’t agree what colour of sofa covering would look best, agree what our child should be like?

While I do re-writes for the book, I’m glad that the baby is developing secretly and with minimal input from us.





Empty chapters waiting for a decision



Good news has to last

Wild Rose is out on submission, which means that editors at ten different publishers are reading it and deciding if it is something they would like to publish. A Good Death was also submitted to my agent last week, having just been completed. Reading manuscripts takes a long time and both publishers and agents have piles of them to get through. So, I was astonished and delighted to hear good news for both books after only a few days. Eve White emailed to tell me that she had bumped into someone at one of the publishing houses who had read Wild Rose and really enjoyed it. And Eve also told me that she had read A Good Death and loved it.

Having positive feedback and so quickly was very encouraging. But I have had to learn not to live by feedback alone. In my former life as a secondary school teacher, feedback was instant and almost constant. I taught around three hundred students each week and from their responses, body language and the looks on their faces I could judge how the lessons were going. Writing a book, on the other hand, involves long periods without any feedback: positive or negative. At times like this, I need to get on with the chapter I’m working on, or the research I’m doing and try not to check my emails obsessively.  

In a similar way, at this stage of pregnancy weeks go by without any sense of what is happening with the baby. At the moment, I can’t see it, hear it or feel it. Having felt sick for nine weeks, I’m feeling better; I can just about do my teeth, cook and smell our washing powder without becoming nauseous. Feeling better is great, but there’s less going on to tell me that I’m pregnant. In another two weeks my midwife might listen to the baby’s heartbeat and it will be another four weeks after that before we get to see the baby again in another scan. In the meantime, I have to be patient and trust that everything is going well.

Getting good news, as I did this week, is exciting, but I have to make it last.

More hen than human

One of the most reassuring things we were told at our twelve week scan was that there was only one baby. Twins are very special, but for my first go at motherhood I know one will be challenge enough.

In this way, trying to become a published author is more like being a hen than a human. Even if we were to be having twins, they would be born at the same time and be at the same stage of development. A hen, on the other hand, lays a clutch of eggs at intervals and works on keeping them all warm while she waits for them to hatch.

I have a clutch of three at the moment. I heard yesterday that my first novel for children, Wild Rose has been submitted to publishers by my agent, Eve White. Today, I finished proof-reading the first draft of my novel for adults, A Good Death, the story of the revenge a woman takes when her husband fakes his own death. And on Monday I will get to work on my second book for children, New World. All the while, new ideas are developing and join the list of books I want to write.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the beginning stages of the writing process with New World. Editing and proof-reading have a certain satisfaction. But for me there is nothing like writing the story for the first time. However, I know that there will be more work to do on Wild Rose and A Good Death in the future.

For now, I am grateful to be working on just one book and that there’ll only be one baby this time.

There is a long way to go

The first pictures of our baby look decidedly human, which is comforting. When we went for our twelve week scan the other day, we could see a heart beating, a little face, two legs and two arms waving.

But there is still a long way to go. Our baby is still only six centimetres long and though it looks somewhat like a little baby, it has a lot of growing to do. Hopefully, the rest of its body will one day be in proportion to its forehead, for example.

In a similar way, I made it to the end of my first novel, Wild Rose, in July 2010. It was 90,000 words long and aimed at the young adult market. Having submitted it to three literary agents with varying degrees of success, I started working informally with Shelley Instone
at the Eve White Literary Agency in November 2010. Shelley recommended that I edit the manuscript significantly to aim it at a younger age group and therefore to be no longer than 50,000 words.

The first time I saw the manuscript finished and printed off, it looked somewhat like a book. But there was a good deal of refinement to be done. The manuscript needed to be reduced - a bit like a sauce - so that it retained the essence of the story in a much more concentrated form.

Even this week, almost a year later, I have been making changes to two sentences in two separate chapters and if a publisher is found there will be more adjustments to make.

So while the book shrinks the baby grows. But for both, from the form they take at first, there is a long way to go.

You work away in secret for ages

I don’t know many people who advertised the fact that they were trying to get pregnant. Perhaps so as not to be off putting at mealtimes, or not to raise grandparents’ already hyperactive hopes, my husband and I only told a few people that we were ‘trying’, mainly because they assumed that we already were. Squeamish as I am, I’d rather present a pregnancy as a fait accompli than discuss the process with anyone. Not only would it be embarrassing, but the pressure to succeed would be that much greater.

In a similar way, the only person who knew I was writing a book was my husband, David. The idea for Wild Rose came up over an anniversary dinner at AJ's On The Creek, Chincoteague Island, VA. I bought a notebook the next day and started writing. That was in 2008. I worked on the book at weekends and during holidays from my job as a secondary school teacher. For a long time I didn’t tell anyone that I was writing a book. As with trying to have a baby, if nothing came of it I wanted to deal with the disappointment myself. I was also happy to work away alone, enjoying the process and not thinking too much about where it would lead.

Common wisdom suggests that you shouldn’t tell people that you’re pregnant until you reach the twelve week stage, the chance of miscarriage is reduced and you have had a scan to check (for the first time, alarmingly) that you really are pregnant and that everything is alright. Reaching the twelve week mark was a great relief and I was excited about being able to tell people. In a similar way, though I found out I’d been signed by Eve White Literary Agency the same week I found out I was pregnant, it took me some time to tell people. I wanted to make sure that it was official and I had photographic evidence on her website before I announced it proudly on Facebook.

So, now that both secrets are out, I hope to be able to share some of my experiences of the Book and the Baby with you here.

Welcome

Welcome to my blog. I’ve heard authors say that writing a book and getting it published is like having a baby. As I’m having my first baby and hoping to get my first book published too, I’m going to test the theory. I’m currently twelve weeks pregnant and my first children’s novel Wild Rose is shortly to be submitted to publishers by my agent, Eve White. I hope you enjoy following the progress of both.