Sarah Alderson's Blog: Writing and all the bits in between - Posts Tagged "simon-schuster"

Let me prefix this by saying I’m sorry. If you’re reading this and you are a writer (as in someone, published or unpublished who writes creatively), then you will probably read this and hate me. You might hate me loads, you might just hate me a tiny bit, but I think you will definitely hate me to some degree. Because I would hate me. And I like to think I’m generous and compassionate though not quite the light being that living in Bali should have made me by now.

You see, I never imagined being a writer. I didn’t staple paper together when I was 6 and write stories about fairies that lived at the bottom of the garden, I didn’t wile away time as a teenager writing angsty novels about loving and losing. Ok, I wrote some really, really awful poetry for a while which I think my ex boyfriend still has and hopefully won’t put on ebay when I’m famous. When I was about 10 I was asked to write a story about an invention – any invention that we could think of – and the page stayed blank. When I was 18 my English teacher told me not to bother applying to read English at university.

I did write other things despite these early warnings to take up maths instead; diaries, newsletters, amusing emails to friends, love letters (sent and unsent) an early blog at the start of the century, countless essays about the Renaissance, the resistance and neo realist cinema, and then once I started work I wrote millions of words of wildly creative nonsense in the form of funding reports and applications to government for large amounts of money.

I honed my creative writing on the battlefield of the British voluntary sector. And I won a lot. Anyway, the point is I never really aspired to be a writer, other than that vague notion in the back of my head to one day write a book which I think I shared with 99% of the population. Just one of those things I thought would be cool to do but which I would probably never get around to.

Then in 2009 I got sick of working and sick of living in London and my husband John and I decided that we’d pack up our lives and head off around the world with our then 3 year old daughter in tow to find a new place to live. (That trip and our new life in Bali is documented at www.canwelivehere.com). About the time we were planning our route I started having panic attacks about what I’d do for money when we settled somewhere else. I was swimming one day and I thought to myself, right, gotta earn some money, or I’m screwed, so now, who’s rich? Richard Branson, but he’s a workaholic, oooh Stephanie Meyer, she ‘s rich and all for writing about vampires with angsty faces and quiffy hair, right I’m going to write a book.

And that, really is the first part of my story.

By the time I’d swum twenty lengths I had the kernel of a story idea. Every time I got stuck I’d think ‘what if…’ and so the story expanded and evolved. Having said that I always felt like the story already existed and that I was just tapping into it and writing it down. I’ll detail my writing process in another blog post later.

I started writing Hunting Lila in June. I wrote it naively, I wrote without really knowing what I was doing as is obvious by the final wordcount of my first draft (117,000 words – I had no clue that first novesl in YA should run 60-80K max – didn’t even think to google it). I finished it in November and started editing it. Then I began sending out letters to agents in London whose names I’d culled from the Writers’ and Artists’ Handbook.

I was good at writing letters – that was something I’d honed through long practice in the work place. I sent out my submissions and then I headed off with a backpack to India. Most people find themselves in India, and I was no exception, in India I realised that I wanted to be a writer, that writing was no longer just a means to an end but something that I couldn’t imagine not doing, it was my passion. I’d have daydreams where I had to choose what limbs to lose and I’d make pacts with myself that I’d be fine if I had an accident so long as I was left with my head and my right arm. If I lost my right arm I decided and could no longer write I would just want to die.

I hit the beach in Goa and started writing again – this time the sequel to Hunting Lila. I didn’t have a book deal, I didn’t have an agent but I had this story and these characters of Lila and Alex who I couldn’t let go. They haunted me. I felt like I was betraying them in some way just leaving them hanging, their story only partly told. They would actually talk away in my head, whole conversations with me as the eavesdropper and then I’d just write it down. It was an awesome way to write a book – feet buried in the sand, looking out over the Arabian sea.

Whilst I was there, I received replies from the agents I’d posted to. I had sent 12 letters. I received 9 rejections, 3 of which claimed to really like it but had no room on their lists, and I received 2 requests to read the entire manuscript.

I emailed the full manuscript through to these two agents in utter terror. At the point of getting an agent I could suddenly see the glint of light through the trees and with it came this sense that I would die if it came to nothing. (see melodrama in every aspect of my life, not just my writing). If you’ve ever got to this stage in writing you’ll appreciate how hellish the waiting is. Those points where I’ve been waiting – for an agent to get back to me, for a publisher to respond – have been the most stressful and godawful but also most exciting moments of my life, like being in the throes of labour but not knowing if the child you’re giving birth to is going to be born with a head or without one.

Anyway, both agents came back almost instantly to ask to represent me and I found myself in the amazing position of being able to choose my agent. I spoke to writer friends and asked them what I should ask and I scoured the net. Both were highly reputable, well established with excellent track records. Both were very excited about the book. It was an easy choice for me to make in the end after I spoke with both – I chose the person I got on with the most and who had clearly read the book more than once, knew it very well, and who loved the characters as much as I did.

So I signed with Amanda at Luigi Bonomi Associates in London (who last year won Literary Agency of the Year) and have had an amazing year working with her now. Having someone to whom I can dump creative ideas on and who knows the publishing world enough to tell me what to run with and what to ditch is more brilliant than I could have guessed. I will do a fuller blog post on literary agents later.

I spent about 2 months editing my mammoth manuscript down to 85,000 words and then after several more read throughs by Amanda we thought it was ready to send out. Amanda handles the publishers. My job was to wait. And finish work on the sequel.

She sent it to the top 11 publishers in the UK – Penguin, Hodder, Simon & Schuster, Harper, Orion etc – and then we waited for three weeks. And then another two weeks. And I got a lot of rejections that made me feel like puking. It came very close with publishers whose names I could barely whisper and only then in reverential awe. It’s an almost impossible thing to get my head around still – that editors at these publishing houses read my manuscript.

In July last year I received an offer from Simon & Schuster for Hunting Lila and its sequel.

It was a good offer, especially in this day and age, for a debut author. It wouldn’t have been enough to let me give up my day job in London (though maybe go part time) but it’s enough to live well on in Bali. We celebrated a lot. I think I may have cried.

In August we were on the final leg of our journey, a road trip of California. We were staying in a beautiful house in Montecito with friends and one day I started writing a new story. This time a stand alone novel. I’ve since found that after every book I need a 6 week break, at the end of which time I’m leaping to get back in front of a computer, almost feverish and manic with the need to write. So I started this new book and it came to me very quickly, needing very little rewriting. I had it finished by October and sent it to Amanda. She loved it but wasn’t sure that Simon & Schuster having taken such a big leap of faith on a two book deal with me already would buy a third book when the first two hadn’t yet been published.

But they did. I think I woke every person in our village in Bali, screaming about that one at 6am.

It’s February 2011 now. I’ve just finished final edits of Hunting Lila with my editor at Simon & Schuster. It goes to print next month and Hunting Lila will be released in the UK this August. The sequel will come out sometime in 2012 whilst the third book, still untitled, is due for release by Simon Pulse (S&S’s paranormal imprint) in January 2012.

I write this and then I read it back and I think bloody hell, was that the easiest ride to the top ever?

It’s true right? You hate me. Just a little bit. But hopefully if you're an aspiring writer you can also draw inspiration.

Good luck on your own journey and I hope you enjoy my books.

S

A couple of weeks ago I was sent the first proof of the cover for Hunting Lila.

My immediate reaction was to leap squealing from my seat. I loved it. I loved the sense of action and excitement conveyed, because the book is no mistakes a thriller – a paranormal thriller – but a thriller all the same, with murder, intrigue, plotting and enormous sexual tension to boot.

I wasn’t so sure about the shoes though at first – and as a friend on facebook pointed out – she’s not going to be able to run very far from the truth in them heels. The cover is actually a scene from the book – the crux scene where Lila discovers something awful about herself and the people she loves – and has to suddenly flee. And she is wearing a blue dress – I based the dress on a blue silk Balenciaga dress I wore at my wedding – that’s spot on.

But the shoes? She actually discards the shoes – Lila hates heels. She can’t walk in them. When she runs, she runs barefoot (she’s not much of a planner). So I talked to my editor about ditching the shoes – possibly having them lie on the floor by the door but they decided to go ahead with her wearing them because of the connotations of red (the colour of all things paranormal – think Twilight) and high heels screaming sexiness.

And at the end of the day who am I to get my knickers in a twist over shoes? The cover looks great– it’s garnering fantastic responses on the web and most importantly of all it has my name in large font across it. Something I never thought in my wildest imaginings I'd ever see(let’s out another squeal of excitement and passes out).

and no, to the person who asked, they're not my legs.

FATE

I have a book coming out in January 2012 called Fated. Here’s the blurb.


What happens when you discover you aren't who you thought you were? And that the person you love is the person who will betray you? If your fate is already determined, can you fight it?

When Evie Tremain discovers that she’s the last in a long line of Demon slayers and that she’s being hunted by an elite band of assassins –Shapeshifters, Vampires and Mixen demons amongst them – she knows she can’t run. They’ll find her wherever she goes. Instead she must learn to stand and fight.

But when the half-human, half-Shadow Warrior Lucas Gray - is sent to spy on Evie and then ordered to kill her before she can fulfil a dangerous prophecy, their fates become inextricably linked. The war that has raged for one thousand years between humans and demons is about to reach a devastating and inevitable conclusion. Either one or both of them will die before this war ends.

If your life becomes bound to another’s, what will it take to sever it?



Following the Bologna book fair I had a quick chat with my editor at Simon & Schuster who told me that paranormal is on the way out, dystopia very much on trend at the moment thanks to the fantastic popularity of The Hunger Games and the eagerly anticipated Divergent which I can’t wait to read. Though what’s going to be next year’s trend is anyone’s guess.

The thing is, Fated is very much a paranormal romance and I was asking her whether she thought it therefore worth my while writing the sequels that I had planned. Her advice was probably not. And she’s probably right, given that I have no contract for them and she works in publishing so has a much better idea of what will sell and what won’t. But she did say, and for this I’m hugely grateful, that if they had to be written then they had to be written.

And I felt like these books had to be written.

With Hunting Lila the characters got into my head so much that they’d have whole conversations with each other. It got so I couldn’t ignore them and needed to write the second book in the series or check myself into an asylum and start receiving treatment for the voices in my head. I needed to let their story finish.

With Fated it’s been similar. When I finished writing that book I couldn’t stop imagining what happened to my characters next. So I mulled and I ummed and I arred. Should I work on the other ideas I had? Should I leap into Dystopia before that craze died too? Or should I follow my heart?

I was still unsure of which direction to go when I bumped into a friend of mine here in Bali. He used to work as a head of something very impressive for a big video games company. We discovered a mutual love of Buffy and all things vampire the first time we met and since then most of our conversations revolve around films and ipod apps.

Anyway I explained to him my dilemma about what to write next and he told me a little story.

When he was working in the gaming industry he had an idea for a baseball game but everyone said, ‘you can’t make that game, there have been dozens of baseball games, they never sell well.’

But he went ahead and did it anyway. They made it so well that it became the biggest selling baseball game of all time.


So write that book, he said.


So I did. And then I wrote the third book. And when I’m done I’m going to write the fourth book too.

Part way through writing the second book I realised that the theme was about trusting your instincts. I don’t think there’s any better advice for living or writing.


Hunting Lila

The best thing about being an author, aside from the stupendousness of knowing that my ‘job’ requires me to plug myself into my imagination on a daily basis, stare vacantly into space, check out hot models on the internet and watch Buffy and Gossip Girl for um, research purposes, is obviously, the free books.

A year ago I met my editor and the team at Simon & Schuster for the very first time. I went with my agent to their office in London and the second I walked through the door my legs almost went from under me. Shaking hands, trembling stomach as butterflies started flurrying, it was like love at first sight.

I suddenly knew how Charlie felt when he stepped inside Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. The place was literally held up by books, stacked on every surface, piled high, reaching to the ceiling, making the room as glossy and shiny as a L’Oreal hair advert. My mouth went dry.

Then I was ushered into a corner office. More books. And oh, look bottles of pink champagne! What an amazing job, I thought, why had I gone into the charity sector? What on earth had I been thinking? Why hadn’t I gone into publishing? Free books, champagne for breakfast….I almost dropped to my knees and begged them for a job right there and then, doing anything, scrubbing the floors, photocopying, dusting the shelves.

Then I realised that the champagne was for me. It was a mind-blowing moment. I didn’t need a job sweeping their floors. I had somehow managed to write my way into the best job ever. Pink champagne, free books and no scrubbing required.

And then some nice person saw me hungrily eying the bookshelves and invited me to help myself to whatever I wanted. Seriously. For one second I thought it was a trick, and that if I did, I'd swell to the size of a small planet and short men in dungarees would come and roll me out of there.

Then, once I'd realised they weren't kidding I almost told them to forgo the advance and just pay me in books.

Every few weeks a shoebox sized parcel arrives in my far flung outpost in Indonesia. I rip into it with glee. So far, my highlights of the year (all courtesy of Simon & Schuster)...

Amy & Roger's Epic Detour
Perfect chemistry
Milo & the restart button
She's so dead to us
Unwind
Rot & Ruin


Amy & Roger's Epic DetourPerfect ChemistryMilo and the Restart ButtonShe's So Dead to Us

Things are getting a bit mental.
In roughly two weeks Hunting Lila gets released in the UK.
To celebrate I've done two things: Bought myself a Vivienne Westwood dress (oh yes) and some shoes I can't actually walk in AND listed a giveaway of two signed copies of Hunting Lila. They're sitting right by me now on the bed, along with the pile of books I pilfered from Simon & Schuster last week.

You can enter the competition here
Goodreads Giveaway

I've also been distracted from my edits of Fated and the ludicrously hot Lucas, by the interviews I've been doing for my blog tour. They've been so much fun.

The blog tour starts on August 1st but in the meantime Simon & Schuster made me reveal myself here.

Revealeda>

I had to take photographic proof



I’m right there on the table next to Stephenie Meyer and beneath the fantastic Divergent.

If the camera panned upwards you’d see my grinning like a loon. I’m on the table NEXT TO STEPHENIE MEYER.

My book.

Is on the table next to BREAKING DAWN.
And did I mention DIVERGENT?

If you’d have told me this a year ago I would have laughed in your face at how ridiculous you were being. But look people – there it is. In Waterstones no less.

I signed my first copies in store (Brighton Waterstones). The staff in Waterstones were brilliant and invited me back to do a reading or signing. (The girl who works there looks just like Keira Knightley.)

I am still grinning like a loon. It’s particularly funny because Stephenie Meyer was the reason I started writing in the first place. I loved Twilight and then when I was struggling to think of something to do to make some money I thought, ‘I know I’ll write a book! Stephenie Meyer’s a gazillionaire and all for writing about vampires. How hard can it be?’

Turns out, very hard, but look, I still made it.

I feel like this story should be in the fairy tale section of Waterstones.

The full interview can be found at the wonderful Brodie's amazing blog Eleusinian Mysteries of reading


Lila, it's been an emotionally rocky road since uncovering your abilities. But if you were given the choice of any superpower - which would you pick?

L: Demos has a superpower. I would love to be able to stop Jack from thinking. Period. The world could use less of Jack thinking. Removing certain emotions he's feeling right now about this (indicating her and Alex) would be helpful too.

Also Suki's power (reading minds). That would have been useful around the time I was falling down some stairs. It would have changed everything - I wouldn't have needed to hack Jack's computer for a start. I would have known about Rachel, I would have known straight up what Jack and Alex were covering up.

A: Not covering up - just protecting you from.

L: Same difference.

Alex gives Lila a look.

L: See that look? That one right there? The kind of inscrutable face he's pulling where you have no idea what's going on in his head? Do you know how difficult that is to deal with? Yeah, I repeat, it's annoying that I'm not a mind-reader.

A: Well if I had Demos's power I might have been able to stop you running away all the time. That's an annoying habit you have.

Alex, it's nice to see some bromance in YA - if you and Jack could do any outrageous crazy-ass 'guy' thing, would would you love to do?

(SPOILER)
A: You think it gets any crazier than tracking Psys and trying to contain them? We've done some stuff in our time, especially in training. They were dropping us half-way up mountains and out in the desert - with no supplies or weapons or maps. Just us on our own fighting off pretend bad guys and trying to make it back to the base in one piece.

There was also the time I had to break Jack out of a Mexican jail cell but let's not go there. It's classified.

Any embarassing childhood stories about each other? Spill the beans!

A: I'm not going to embarrass her. Though there was that time when you -

L: Stop right there. Not fair. Oh god. I did so many embarrassing things. Do we have to go there?

A: No. We don't have to go there.

L: I hid a teddy bear in his bag on Valentine's Day. I drew a card and then stuffed it all in his back pack when he wasn't looking.

A: Yeah. I pretended I didn't know it was from you.

L: You were at our house. Who else would have left it in there? Jack? In my defence I was six.

A: You were cute. Back then.

Lila pulls a face.

A: There was also the time she climbed the tree in the back yard and swung upside down trying to copy Jack.

L: (laughing) I can't believe you brought that up. I can't believe you even remember that.

A: She forgot to put on any underwear. Jack fell off the branch and landed on his head he was laughing so hard.

L: I was seven! Pause.

Well I caught you and Jack reading Playboy that one time.

A: Jack was reading it. You know me better than that.

L: Yeah, can we move on to Jack. I have plenty of Jack material. I could write a whole book on Jack.

Do either of you have a celebrity crush?

A: She used to have a poster of the Jonas brothers on her wall.

L: You haven't seen me since I was fourteen. Times have changed.

A: So who are you into now?

L: (looking down) Nobody. And seriously, if you keep pushing the Jonas brothers story I really will be crushing on nobody. And anyway, what about you and your Keira Knightley obsession?

A: (shrugging) It's the accent. The british thing - it does it for me every time. Lila's sounding more British these days. I like it.

Boxers or briefs, Alex? We're dying to know!
A: Boxers.

L: But he is a commando you know.

...

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Hunting Lila