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.